Randi’s $1M challenge to homeopathy

In 2009, James Randi declared that homeopathy qualified for his million dollar challenge. He said then

Homeopathy DOES NOT WORK. It's quackery, pure and simple. It's a farce, a fake, and flummery. Prove it works, and win the million dollars.
On Saturday, February 5th, he released a statement challenging the homeopathic manufacturers to submit to a double blind test and to the retail outlets to label the products for what they are - NOT MEDICINE! Erich posted a piece “Overdosing on homeopathic drugs” last May which has enough links for someone to see for themselves how absurd this concept is. By their philosophy, we should all be sick from some harmful strain of e. coli because at some point all water has been touched by such, and it will, of course retain that memory. Or does it only retain the memory of the “good” stuff? Go get ‘em, Mr. Randi!

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The Hellhound and HeLa: Recent American Historical Writing At Its Best

The last really good history I read was "Hellhound On His Trail, " which follows James Earl Ray's path from his childhood in Alton, Illinois through a violent intersection with the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and continues to follow Ray's trajectory with his quizzical recantations of his "life's purpose." With the same cool hand, Sides sketches the strengths and inadequacies of Dr. King's inner circle and paints larger atmospheric strokes with newspaper headlines on the increasing violence in response to desegregation and the influence of war in Vietnam on national sentiment about federal involvement in heretofore state affairs. By themselves, vignettes about Ray's lackluster career as a petty criminal, his stunted attempts at artistic grandeur and addiction to prostitutes would simply depress the reader. Here, the intentional failures and manipulations of Hoover's FBI and first-hand accounts of Ray's behavior appear like birds descending on a tragic town, flickering across the broader canvas creating momentum and dread. Awful as the true subject of this thriller may be, I found myself disappointed to reach the end.

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The health care “free market”

Many American conservatives argue that we need to step back and allow the "free market" continue to offer the most efficient health care system in the world. The facts on the ground starkly conflict with this way of thinking. The International Federation of Health Plans recently released its 2010 Comparative Price Report detailing medical costs per unit. The study starkly illustrates that health care costs are much higher in some countries than others. The average U.S. prices for procedures are the highest of those in the 12 countries surveyed for nearly all of the 14 common services and procedures.

For example, total hospital and physician costs for delivering a baby are $2,147 in Germany, $2,667 in Canada, and an average of $8,435 in the United States. The survey shows that the cost for a hospital stay is $1,679 in Spain, $7,707 in Canada, but these costs can range from an average of $14,427 to $45,902 in the United States. The survey also found that the cost of a widely prescribed drug like Nexium can range from $30 in the United Kingdom to $186, the average cost in the United States. In addition to providing comparative cost data across the countries, the survey provides information about the wide range of costs being charged in the United States for common services, procedures and drugs. One example from the survey is hip replacement surgery which cost $12,737 in the Netherlands, but ranged from a low of $21,247 to a high of $75,369 in the United States. Five percent of U.S. prices are higher than $75,369. The differential between unit prices was greatest for surgery, according to the survey data. One of the highest differentials was for cataract surgery hospital and physician costs. The range for cataract surgery ran from $1,667 in Spain to an average of $14,764 in the United States.

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