Pseudoscience and extraterrestrial medicine at the Huffington Post
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.
Share This
Print This Post
