Are you tired of health care nonsense being presented by the media in the name of “balance”? So is comedian Dara O’Brian, who ridicules the gullible and their peddlers so very well:
Ridiculing the media’s false sense of balance and alt-med
- Post author:Erich Vieth
- Post published:July 30, 2009
- Post category:Health / Medicine / Religion / snake oil
- Post comments:1 Comment
Erich Vieth
Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.
There is a knee jerk reaction to equate all alternative medicine with quackery. While the vast majority of alternative medicine is pure hokum, a some of it is not.
Quite often effective treatments that are not profitably enough to the pharmaceutical companies are relegated to the category of alternative medicine when the pharma industry come out with a new treatment involving a patented drug that addresses a problem which could be better treated with a sensible diet.
When O'Brien jokes that alternative medicine has been tested and the parts that worked became medicine , is only partially true, which makes it all more important that alternative medicine should be seriously studied. There are many simply remedies and treatments that are effective, but are in direct competition against the drug company interests.
There are also many alternative treatments that are useless. The best way to prove them useless is through objective scientific study.
We should look beyond the "alternative" and look at each treatment to see if there is any real science behind it.