Oiling The Cogs Of Cognitive Dissonance II

BBC listening provides me with a lot of material lately.

First, let me say that there are two uses for the term "holistic". The first definition simply means considering the whole. If we are discussing medicine - which we will be momentarily - the most benign version has the doctor considering interactions of medications, how diuretics might aggravate a patient's tendency to form kidney stones and the like. In that sense, holistic anything is wise practice and a clear boon. But the second definition is a popular one that involves a raft of New Age nonsense about auras, spiritual healing, crystals, copper bracelets, herbalism and the like. It is largely hype, sympathetic magic and con-artistry giving a bad name to those who would practice the first type of holism.

Let me also note that I have some qualms about lumping herbalism in with the other scams. As the existence of Taxol, to cite just one famous instance, proves chemicals naturally synthesized by plants can have beneficial effects on human diseases. Plants from lowly molds (e.g. penicillin) to trees (e.g. Taxol) have provided us with some effective treatments for human disease. That said, however, it give no pass to all the extremist herbalist nonsense put forward by con men looking to separate the gullible and the desperate from their cash. I saw this foolishness first hand some years ago. A very dear friend suddenly collapsed one day. She had a particularly aggressive and nasty cancer. Her doctors told her that this cancer was inevitably fatal. She might live 6 to 12 months longer, sometimes people survived a bit longer. Someone in her circle convinced her that a macrobiotic diet was the answer to surviving longer so she rejected conventional treatments with chemotherapy and radiation. The disease ran its course and she was dead in 11 months. The macrobiotic nonsense did nothing for her. It was a placebo. It neither hastened not slowed her cancer's progress. It was simply worthless though a macrobiotic counselor and "holistic health practitioner" made some substantial cash by peddling their worthless trash and nonsense.

What brings this subject up is a recent report by the BBC that the British National Health Service is considering discontinuing payment to holistic medicine con men in a money saving move. A double blind study found no effect of any kind on any medical condition studied by holistic practitioners' efforts.

The radio report brought together a person involved in the study for Britain's National Health Service  and a holistic practitioner from Germany. What struck me immediately was the German holistic practitioner's insistence that his form of medicine must be valid because it has a more than 200 year history. He also insisted that "school" medicine has a bad track record because 200 years ago it promoted treatments that have since been discredited. Both statements are independently verifiable and true. What he did not say is that the quackery of times past in large part involved exactly the quackery he practices today.

A dear friend of mine has an adult daughter who has a "practice" in Southern California, an area that's almost a cliche for its eager adoption of all manner of quackery and lunatic nonsense. His daughter is a very sweet woman. She styles herself, however, as a spiritual healer and is currently making a nice living by charging clients $150 per hour for "healing" them over the phone. It is flat out quackery that persists because the one positive thing that anyone can say about this con is that no one is poisoned as frequently happened in centuries past. The hurt is simply the extraction of cash from someone stupid enough to pay for foolishness that he or she believe has more than a placebo effect.

But back to our German con man/holistic healer. I would suggest that he cannot argue that his form of medicine is effective and valid because it has been practiced continuously since the 18th or 19th Centuries and in the next breath argue that "school" medicine is less effective and valid because medical practices of the 18th or 19th Centuries were unenlightened and have been shown to be quackery. The fact is that the very practices which modern medicine from Harvey and Pasteur onward have relegated to the dustbin are the practices that our German practitioner, my friend's daughter and others like them who are either dishonest or delusional perpetuate today.

I can't applaud the British National Health Service loudly enough for their decision to call a con a con and stop wasting scarce health care cash and resources on garbage. But don't look for that to happen in the United States. Two decades ago some very well connected con men bought Robert Dole, senator from Archer, Daniels Midland, as their front man in removing many of the restrictions the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had on these snake oil remedies. In the guise of speeding drugs to the market we limited the review functions of the Food and Drug Administration. Much as Phil Gramm shilled for rapacious bankers to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 giving us the multiple banking frauds whose destructive consequences continue to ripple through the world economy, so Dole shilled for Big Pharma (you didn't think he became a viagra spokesman because he was so sexy, did you?) in pulling the teeth from FDA regulations and attacking then FDA Administrator, David Kessler.

Thanks to Dole, the FDA can report that scams like "energy" drinks, cosmetics that can cause permanent damage while effecting unnecessary and minimal changes and snake oil "breathing" remedies are ineffective but can't remove them from the market until and unless they kill people. Thanks to Dole and his corporate sponsors we now have "pro-biotics", the current manifestation of the American fixation on laxatives, that correct the problems that the processed foods with which those corporations stuff us by stuffing us with the bacteria removed from the processed foods. In short, we have less protection from scams, more crap on the market and waste more money on it both in tax dollars and out-of-pocket.

With a reform of the American health care system now enacted into law, we need to take a long, hard look at the British National Health report and start shutting down some of these scams if for no other reason than to control our health care costs. The first step in the process of putting an end to the "holistic" nonsense is to stop assuming that simply because a practice has been going on for hundreds of years it has any validity whatever.

Most Basic Responsibilities: Neo-Fascists with no concept of irony.

Yesterday America's most visible embarrassment, Dubya, the putative president, signed a continuing resolution to keep Federal departments funded. He used his weekly radio address to accuse the Congress of "failing to fulfill its most basic responsibility". This comes hot on the heels of his photo opportunity in support of the ill-conceived and vastly under-funded "No Child Left Behind Act" in which he informed those gathered to celebrate education that "Childrens do learn." It also follows by a week or so Dubya's outrage at the MoveOn "General Betrayus" advertisement.

In order to be one of the current crop of neo-fascists who style themselves as "Conservatives" one must have no shame and no sense of irony. The Republicans who were appalled at the MoveOn ad most vociferously were not terribly disturbed by the farrago of John McCain's black baby at the time of South Carolina's 2000 Republican Primary. They actively participated in an advertisement in 2004 that morphed decorated Vietnam Veteran Max Cleland into Osama bin Laden and actively supported or, at least never condemned, the Swift Boat Veterans scurrilous attack on John Kerry. And subsequently they have been utterly silent as their favorite drug addict, Rush Limbaugh, has attacked John Murtha. No shame and no sense of irony.

Dubya has to have no sense of irony or else he couldn't get through any given day. And, like his father and grandfather before him, he has no sense of shame. That gene has been bred out of the Bush family for a number of generations and carefully kept from creeping in through marriage.

But the accusation that Congress or anyone has failed in their most basic responsibilities has a special stench coming from Dubya's mouth. You see, on the same day that Dubya was castigating Congress - meaning Democrats - for being unable to pass vital legislation in the face of Republican opposition and his own veto threats the Topps Meat company was notifying the public that tons of hamburger from its plant were tainted with e. coli bacteria and unsafe to eat. What has that to do with failing to fulfill basic responsibilities, you ask? Well the Food and Drug Administration is an Executive Branch agency that oversees the purity of the things that go into our bodies. Leaving aside the issues of lax testing of drugs for the moment, during the last 26 years we have had an ever increasing number of instances of contaminated food. During that same 26 years under Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, the Republican Congresses of 1995 through 2006 and Dubya the FDA has had an ever shrinking budget. Sure we can throw away a trillion or two dollars on a unjustified war that has no foreseeable ending but meat inspectors...they're one example of "big government" and "unnecessary regulation" and "interference in the private sector". Surely meat inspectors aren't necessary since the food industry can adequately police itself, right?

No.

A century ago we had an unregulated meat packing industry that Upton Sinclair exposed in The Jungle. The wholesale violation of sanitary conditions was such an outrage that that notable lefty and closet communist, Theodore Roosevelt, with the support of a Republican Congress passed legislation to regulate an industry that was killing and sickening U. S. citizens at an alarming rate. But that was a century ago. Surely the blind pursuit of profit and negligence couldn't let it happen again!

Topps Meat is not "the canary in the coal mine". It is the latest example of a system that has been intentionally dismantled by ideologues no less criminally deluded than the Soviet planners who killed millions through forced collectivization in the 1920s and 1930s. It is of a piece with the appallingly inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina that more than 2 years later has not properly housed thousands of families. It is of a piece with sending men into battle without proper equipment. It is of a piece with sitting in a Florida classroom inactive while fanatical ideologues flew airliners into buildings. It is of a piece with all of the Republican's other failures to fulfill their most basic responsibilities to protect the people of this nation. It is also of a piece with the actions of this group of neo-fascist ideologues in violating their oaths to "protect and defend the Constitution of these United States" by suspending habeus corpus, spying on American citizens without cause or warrant and other extra-legal measures.

Dubya hasn't any right to outrage over anyone's advertising and certainly hasn't any right to accuse anyone or any institution of failing to live up to their responsibilities. Without either a sense of shame or a sense of irony he will continue to to make such statements. Those of us ashamed of his shamelessness and understanding of the irony in his statements can only hope that enough of the electorate will understand and also be ashamed so that we can have a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress to begin undoing the damage.