TheMillerCircle.org

From its inception, the Huffington Post (HuffPo) has proven to be a popular blog and newsletter site, featuring innovative news stories and commentary, particularly on contemporary politics. And, the site tends to promote an agreeable, progressive agenda on most issues, with a strong anti-Bush push at a time when it was sorely needed. Having said all that, I subscribe but I don’t read it very much, just because it’s quite a bit lower on my preference scale when compared to other sites that I more routinely visit. And, when I do visit the HuffPo site, I don’t go very deep into the article array, but usually wind up there because of something that caught my eye in their headline.  Recently however, I ran across an article in Salon by Rahul K. Parikh that shocked me a bit to learn about some of the bizarre medical therapies and ideas about diseases that seem to appear quite regularly on HuffPo.  So, I went back again to their website and explored some of the medical and “wellness” entries and came away convinced that extraterrestrials had taken over their medical advice section and were propagating their own personal stories or biases as medical facts. I learned that, from its inception, HuffPo has been a repository for fringe health articles, often written by people with celebrity status who unvettedly vent their pet peeves on topical issues, which, in many cases, reflect a high degree of ignorance, while promoting medical quackery and pseudoscientific explanations for diseases and therapies. Something about celebrity status seems to give one a free pass on health credibility issues. Most of these articles either directly or indirectly reflect a mistrust of modern medicine. HuffPo has even tried to resurrect homeopathy; they seem to share with Oprah a tendency for promoting unproven claims for better health, while thumbing their noses at evidence-based medical explanations. Time and again, we get reminded of how trivial it is to assert a new cause of a disease and how difficult and time consuming it is to actually prove  a causative relationship for any disease. And, by bringing in celebrities, giving them space for their views, Oprah’s show and the HuffPo get better ratings and readership and help generate more profitable advertising. So, in the end, the medical travesties promoted by Oprah and HuffPo are all about ratings and selling advertising space. Capitalism is king!

Almost discounted out of hand in many of the HuffPo articles on health, is evidence-based science and medicine: for many articles, the assumption is that traditional medicine  got it all wrong, or is covering up the truth in a kind of CIA-like conspiracy, probably involving the drug companies. A common theme on HuffPo is that vaccination causes autism; an example of an article promoting this view (though by no means the only one) was written by comedian/actor Jim Carrey, wherein he promotes the now disproven relationship between vaccination and autism. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reviewed the issue of vaccinations (mostly the MMR vaccine for measles-mumps and rubella) and autism very thoroughly in 2001 and 2004, with a separate 2001 study on the vaccine carrier thimerosal; this work strongly endorsed prior conclusions that no causal relationship existed between vaccination or the carrier thimerosal and autism. Another good summary, in addition to the NAS publications, about the lack of a relationship between vaccination and autism can be found here. Nevertheless, all recommended children’s vaccines are now available in thimerosal-free delivery systems [thimerosal is an organic mercury compound that is metabolized to ethylmercury and thiosalicylate; it was used beginning in the 1930s to protect vaccines from bacterial infection, but,  largely because of consumer complaints, it was removed from all required children's vaccines]. In February of this year, the U.S. Court of Claims (the “people’s Court”) ruled on an autism case by stating: “The evidence is weak, contradictory and unpersuasive,” concluded Special Master Denise Vowell. “Sadly, the petitioners in this litigation have been the victims of bad science conducted to support litigation rather than to advance medical and scientific understanding” of autism. In addition to the courts, The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Institute of Medicine in the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) all agree that there is no demonstrable relationship between autism and vaccines. Does anyone believe that any or all of these organizations would form a conspiracy of obfuscation about vaccinations that would eventually have to come out if at all true? Vaccinations have been one of the great hallmarks of life-expectancy advancement throughout the world and if something is wrong with the procedure or its actions, these organizations would be the first to reveal it, not the last–it’s called evidence-based medicine and institutional self-survival.

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This year The Progressive magazine celebrates its 100 year anniversary. If you don’t know about this publication, it was started in 1909 by Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin and was originally called La Follette’s Weekly. La Follette was one of the luminary progressives of his era, as was his wife Belle Case La Follette.  After his death in 1929, the magazine became The  Progressive. To celebrate its 100th anniversary, a special conference was organized and held in Madison Wisconsin on May 1-2 of this year. I had another obligation so I couldn’t go, but my son Drew went and text messaged back information on some of the highlights. Robert Redford was the honorary chair of the celebration event and notables in attendance included Senator Russ Feingold, Rep Dennis Kucinich, Howard Zinn, Cindy Sheehan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Katrina vanden Heuvel, George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, Naomi Klein, Ruth Conniff, Amy Goodman and many others. If you know nothing about the publication, or the history of progressive politics in the United States, you can purchase the April edition of the magazine, which is a historic summary of the first 100 years, including excerpts from writers who contributed articles over the years (you may have to subscribe to the magazine to get the 100 year anniversary issue that came out in April).  La Follete’s writings are messages of clarity strong commitment and continuity of message. Every progressive you have ever heard of at one time or another contributed to the magazine and the article summaries in the centennial edition (April, 2009) give a quick sketch of some of the published material that appeared, organized year by year. It’s a fascinating view of our political history, albeit from a progressive point of view.

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Juan Cole has made a plea to insure that known liars and convicted felons should not be given space on broadcast news media for discussing political issues.  Democrats.com has taken him up on it and posted a listing of those that should not be allowed access time for discussing policies though the main media outlets.  It is a long list, and includes White House people that lied us into the war in Iraq, but it also includes those that have been convicted for perjury such as Bill Clinton. On the one hand, I can see the advantage of not treating many of these people as coequals for political issue discussions, but on the other, I wonder how much effort will be put in to indicting politicians on trumped up charges to render their visibility to zero. Yet, there is something pleasant about thinking that Karl Rove won’t be on Fox news anymore.  But, is Bill Clinton co-equal to Tom Delay? Hasn’t Bill Clinton’s political objectives been just the opposite to those of Carl Rove or Tom Delay?  This is one of those issues where you would hope that the news broadcast media would self-regulate and keep these people off the air waves through publicly accepted ethical standards, rather than apply some loose ratings criteria, which is what seems to be the rule they follow now. I would prefer to see the distinction made along the lines of those that have attempted to diminish our national interests vs those that have promoted them. Of course, I could be the decider! If so, we would see and hear from a lot fewer Bushie/neocon subhumans.

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