Thumb contributor and blogger Tara Smith interviewd on UTI.
Despite the lip service paid to making this country “safer” in the aftermath of 9/11, the measures put in place show that protection of our health has become almost exclusively a political issue, and the science is again being ignored.
RBH
What a terrific interview. Thanks for sharing it.
Check this out:
Faith Based NASA
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/s[…];oref=slogin
Huh?
Check it out over at AtBC:
http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bi[…]?act=SF;f=14
Yes, the large number of uninsured Americans DOES represent a national security threat.
Think it through. Seed 45 million Americans with a pandemic flu. That’s a lot of people.…a lot of people who are gonna need care. With that many people, you really don’t think the national economy ISN’T going to grind to a halt as we deal with their illness?
And as the illnesses spreads and develops, there’s going to be a paralysis of decision making, I guaruntee it. There’s going to be a precious day AT LEAST debating what we are going to do with people who can’t pay for their health care (if they haven’t already flooded the emergency rooms of local hospitals), and in that time, we’ve lost any chance of keeping a handle on the spread. Meanwhile, the underinsured and uninsured keep circulating, spreading the illnesses (which could have been headed off if there was a more widespread network to handle them).
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Bah, preview! preview!
Anyhoo, as I mentioned in the interview, our best line of defense against outbreaks–which includes purposeful ones, such as the release of a bioterrorism agent–is good surveillance. With ~15% of our population lacking access to basic health care, they’re essentially invisible from a surveillance standpoint until they check into an emergency room with serious illness. This can set us back immensely, and time is of the essence when dealing with these kind of outbreaks. It’s always best to catch it when it’s a local event so that appropriate measures can be taken to *prevent* its spread–it’s much harder to play catch-up after it’s already all over the place. Having so many people that aren’t routinely seen by a medical professional places us all at greater risk of infectious disease.
this is a test post I’ve been blocked from posting here, unsure why
the answer must be that i can post from my stationary computer but not my laptop. this is beyond my small brain to figure out.
Pro,
Were you aware of this.
People without insurance tend to not go to primary care and wait until they are acute (if at all) and/or go to the emergency rooms where physicians are frequently over-loaded with not only their legitimate emergency cases. They also frequently don’t get immunized for non-school-admission immunization purposes because they can’t afford it, and even when the medical care is free (which is limited) they’re just used to “doing without.”
Essentially, they represent an relatively untreated reservoir of disease here in America. If we actually went at it with a brain, we could substantially reduce a LOT of disease transmission by having universal health care.
What amazes me, quite frankly, is all of these people who are in wild denial of very obvious basic facts having NO plan at all for when things happen.
Though, on the upside, now we can blame ID for the bird flu, AIDS, and people not having health care.
An interesting and enjoyable interview Tara.
Even though my educational background is not in biology I usually have rough idea of what real biologists are talking about when they give lectures or talks eg. yourself or Dr. Miller recently. The strange thing is, I usually haven’t a clue what creationist biologists are saying as seem to make everything sound so complicated !
Like your mum, I to have an incurable disease Tara (I suffer from Ulcerative Colitis) and have had to rely on medical science for something akin to a normal life style (the symptoms of the disease are very debilitating). After some very severe drug treatment I eventually opted for surgery and I now feel reasonably well.
I also flirted with alternative medicine’s for a while, in desperation I think (homeopathy), but this proved to be useless and a total waste of time and money. All I can say is thank goodness we don’t need private health insurance in this country (yet). I reckon if I lived in the US I would be insurable.
The thing that frightens me about creation science is that since they are so far out of date in other scientific fields eg. their geology (ie flood geology) is over 150 years out of date, creationist astronomy is completely off (the earth was created before the sun, denying recent discoveries like the kuiper belt etc.) what happens when we get to Biology and in particular medical science. As someone who has had to rely on this for a normal lifestyle it scares me to think that they could one day get their way and turn this back 150 years as well !
And as the current administration in the US seems intent to attempt to continue to cut back on public health funding, we may find that this number grows over the next few years rather than shrinks.
CNN has this article today: http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02[…]p/index.html
Moses–
Very well put–you said it more clearly and succintly than I.
Peter,
Sorry to hear about your illness. While I don’t know about pushing biology and medicine back 150 years, there certainly is a lot of resistance to advancing it (for example, the stem cell issue). And as I mentioned in the article, there are several prominent IDists who also deny that HIV causes AIDS–and their objections to that, if extended to every infectious agent, would essentially kill the entire germ theory of disease. It’s ridiculous.
Greg H,
Yep. This is why those of us in public health scoff when Bush says he’s made us “safer.” Cutting funding for health isn’t a good trade-off for an increased military budget, as our health is a huge part of our “homeland security.” I discussed that in this post over on Aetiology: Public health, defense, what will *really* make us safer.
It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? I want to know how someone so under qualified was appointed to make those kind of decisions, and, more importantly, why this administration believes they have the right to censor and/or edit anything from the scientific community. Scientists are driven by the search for truth, and they shouldn’t be hampered by politicians whose only purpose is religion-driven agenda. Can you imagine the BBC making these kinds of edits? No, neither can I. In a decade or two we’ll wonder why the U.S. isn’t leading the way in science and technology anymore. But what else could these policies lead to? - blocking of the immigration of scientists and students into the country, general dumbing down of the population through the editing of science, constant battle against science through frivolous lawsuit.
In a decade or two?
Regarding the retardation of scientific spending in this country, I would argue there are already several fields (biology being one) where the US is already no longer a leader.
To me, this may be one of those “over the waterfall” sort of issues. Which is to say, we’re already off the drop by the time we notice the problem, and by then, it’s too late to do anything about it. Tara’s concerns about a major pandemic illustrate that - in our current situation, by the time we realize something is very wrong, it’s too late to do anything to stop it.
Why does the USA have no equivalent to the UK’s NHS? Is there a good reason?
To sum it up in manner to try not to cause offence: Politics and culture. Here in the UK we underwent various changes through the 19th and early 20th centuries that the USA didnt, or in other words the countries took different trajectories, from what was a different starting point anyway. Thus, the USA was not open to the idea of an NHS the way the UK was after WW2.
In my original post I meant to say I would be un-insurable. Since health insurance is surely like all other forms of insurance i.e. the number of claims a person makes will affect his/her premiums. I reckon if I lived in the US mine would be sky-high.
Stephen: I think the reason why the U.S. (or other countries eg the Europeans have social insurance) does not have an NHS is due to tax reasons. Like some people in this country, no-one wants to pay for it. There seems to be a bigger resistance in the US to paying tax than in the UK (remember the comments of George Bush senior”Read my lips,no new taxes”) and how they eventually came back to haunt him.
I remember a number of years back seeing a documentary about the limited facilities available to people who for some reason or another did not have health insurance (some disabled people or the very poor for example), and I was quite shocked.16hrs. waiting to be seen in A&E ! I always feel that private health insurance is fine if you are well but if you take ill the premiums will surely rise.
The NHS might not be perfect but at least it’s free at the point of delivery !
I like the idea of the NHS. I do not mind paying for it. But I do wish it targeted slightly differently.
Personally I would prefer that it treated people with illnesses as number 1 priority, things such as cosmetic/lifestyle surgery should be rare on the NHS.
What I mean is that breast enhancements or reductions (example) should take second place to people with an illness.
It’s communistic.
Only slightly off-topic:
A study published in Health Affairs in 2005 showed that half of all personal bankruptcies in the U.S. involved medical bills. Many of these people had health insurance at the time their health problems developed, but either they weren’t fully covered, or else they lost their insurance (or at least their employer-subsidized premiums) when they got too sick or too badly injured to work.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/he[…]_bankruptcy/
For a couple of years, my husband and I paid our health insurance costs “out of pocket”. As reasonably healthy adults in our forties, the two of us paid about US $3300 a year for the most basic coverage possible – no prescriptions, a large co-pay for routine visits, etc. I like to joke that we finally got our money’s worth in early 2003, when I developed a nasty chronic-pain problem that required two surgeries, one of them major. We still had significant out-of-pocket costs, especially since (a.) one anesthesiology practice in the Kalamazoo, MI area, where we were living at the time, has a virtual monopoly over the local hospitals and (b.) that practice didn’t have any previous arrangement with our insurance provider. Incidentally, the proprietor of that practice is a local M.D. who is also a prominent “pro-life” member of the state legislature.
We were able to weather that one, although recovering from surgery put my job prospects on prolonged hold. For people in low-paying jobs with little or no insurance or sick leave, things are a lot more difficult. They have to drag themselves in to work, whether healthy, hurt, or sick. And when they have to go to work with contagious illnesses – well, we’re back where we started a few posts back.
I hope they at least try to infect the boss.
Hi Tara,
I enjoyed much of your interview, and I couldn’t agree with you more about the need to plug the health insurance gap. But I was disappointed by the parochial outlook you displayed towards alternative medicine in this interview. I think people who are serious about either science or the public health need to dig a little deeper.
For instance, the Spanish Flu pandemic occurred during a period when homeopathy was still widely practiced. In the wake of the epidemic, the American Institute of Homeopathy published the results of a study of death rates in homeopathic hospitals and their conventional counterparts. They found that 24,000 conventionally treated patients had a death rate of 28.2%, while 26,000 patients with homeopathy had a death rate of 1.05%. (Cited in “Bird Flu Threat,” Homeopathy Today December 2005, p. 30)
Anyone is welcome to dub these results post hoc, ergo propter hoc, but at what expense to the people who could be saved by homeopathic treatment if an outbreak of bird flu erupts in the near future?
To continue with the example of homeopathy, as just one branch of alternative medicine: there are people who are seriously investigating its efficacy and its effectiveness, for instance at the program in integrative medicine at the University of Arizona. Research like this is desperately under funded.
Yet the people who carry out this kind of research – and indeed, homeopaths in general – are under attack in ways that are all too eerily reminiscent of the attacks on evolution, whether it’s the argument from incredulity (“This couldn’t possibly work!”), flawed studies (even appearing in journals that should know better, such as Lancet 2005;366:726-732, dissected in J Altern Complement Med, 2005;11:751-785], or outright ignorance (for example, the notion that homeopathy is primarily based on highly diluted solutions, rather than the principal that like cures like). How can medical science advance in a climate that so closely resembles the miasma of creationist attacks on evolution?
Finally, I am puzzled by your remarks about the death of Christine Maggiore’s daughter. If this is anything but straight-up post hoc, ergo propter hoc thinking, I’d appreciate it if you could tell me why. In any case, the next time you see fit to disparage alternative medicine, I hope you’ll do so with enough depth and rigor to contribute to meaningful debate.
Regards, Richard Pfeiffer
In my previous post, I naturally meant to say:
“They found that 24,000 conventionally treated patients had a death rate of 28.2%, while 26,000 patients treated with homeopathy had a death rate of 1.05%.”
Richard
You arent disputing that homeopathic solutions are usually extremely dilute solutions are you? Whether or not you start with treating like with like, the current scientific view is that dilution to 30C for example, will result in no active molecules in the liquid. Thus there is no effect beyond the placebo effect.
As for the Spanish flu, you would have to give us a link to the actual paper/ evidence, so we can critique it properly.
Moreover, an article on the BBC news website http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4183916.stm ends with this comment from a spokeswoman from the society of homeopaths:
So I am afraid that if you cant test it that way, how can you say it is any better than anything else?
Oh, puh-leeeze.
Julie Stahlhut wrote:
To understand why conservative, or neo-cons now, currently in charge of our government don’t do much to help correct such situations you’ll need to read some of their books and start understanding how they think.
On another message board some freeper showed up and told us to read, “The Vision of the Anointed” by Thomas Sowell to understand the Liberal mindset. We should read it to understand how freepers might see the so called Liberal mindset. It’s like studying ID to prove it’s not science.
The Amazon page is here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/04[…]amp;n=283155
It’s over a decade old with what looks like a dead horse used as an ironic strawman argument. It’s ironic for fundy Christian right-wingers to accuse others of feeling “anointed” and holier than thou. Even fundies use religious terminology as a put down.
It might be a good idea for the more politically active bloggers to read that book and others like it if only exploit the irony of its phrases and demonstrate that you are not ignorant of the conservative viewpoint. (I’ll have to wait a week or two for my interlibrary loan to show up, so I haven’t read it yet.) However, it seems a lot of the old conservative criticism of liberal policies, like welfare and health care, has become a double edged sword that now cuts neo-con policies in different ways.
I just thought it was interesting that there was a clear physiological indication of a difference between the active substance and the placebo.
I doubt if the people administering the substances could have given a signal, since it was a double-blind, randomized, parallel-group, placebo-controlled trial. Here’s the abstract from the Rheumatology web site:
Dr. Roy isn’t here to speak for himself, but as I pointed out, he is one of the founders of modern materials science, with many awards in the field. I think it’s safe to say he’s got an idea or two of how to conduct research in this area. He probably wouldn’t put his reputation on the line, otherwise.
I’m sorry, but I didn’t catch where you got your doctorate in materials science.
And where are you conducting your research currently?
If you’re a colleague of Dr. Roy and are so certain, perhaps you should contact him personally and save a fellow scientist the potential for embarassment!
There’s no question that looks can be deceiving!
The link you provided is a pretty superficial and misled discussion of the Lancet article I have mentioned. It fails to point out the several obvious flaws in the methodology of that meta-study.
Here is a quote from the Iris Bell article I have mentioned. It points to several areas that are problematic– to say the least. Note that she is using allopathy as a synonym for conventional medicine:
The first point is pretty damning: the paper doesn’t live up to normal reporting standards, yet is not only published, but paraded as “The end of homeopathy.”
The second point is also important, and Bell gives an example of how similar design flaws could be used to come to erroneous conclusions about a conventional drug:
I’m sorry, but I missed a few questions from guthrie that are worth addressing…
There is a difference (that even conventional researchers are starting to value) between what happens in a normal RCT, with fairly straightforward patients and what you can observe in real clinical settings where you have factors like drug interactions and so on. The normal RCTs are said in medical parlance to measure “internal validity,” or efficacy, but not the “external ecological validity,” or effectiveness that is measured by clinical studies. As Bell points out:
And then…
Note that these results are relatively recent. Note also that the AMA, which was founded in 1845 promarily to combat the influence of homeopathy, came into being at a time when the conventional medical treatments were primarily things like arsenic, opiates, and bleeding. They also forbade surgeons from having any contact with homeopaths if they wanted to stay in the AMA, which is one of the main reasons surgery is currently aligned with conventional medical doctors (although there are other reasons for that, as well).
It was only with the advent of the germ theory and modern microbiology, biochemistry, etc., that conventional medicine started being what you could really call scientific. So again, most homeopaths don’t see why these “johnny-come-latelies,” as it were, should be regulating medicine that has been working very well for a couple of centuries.
Well, they did have competition from the regular doctors! One thing to note is that hospital records from the epidemics of the 19th century, when homeopathy started to become popular, show considerably lower death rates for homeopathic patients than for those treated by conventional means.
Appeal to authority?
OOhh, nice snarkiness here. I will now need to read up on prof Roy, I notice he is now emeritus, meaning that he is retired and therefore free to make a fool of himself. (See JAD et al for the methodology)
Just to get a mention, I have an MSc in ceramic and metallic materials from a fairly good UK university.
Now, Roy- I note that his publications list: http://www.rustumroy.com/images/Bib[…]chnical.html
has nothing on water memory, even though that appears to be what he is talking about. So I think we can safely assume he has as little practical evidence for it as I have. It is also worth noting that his publications in general are, outside his scienctific field of exellence (Which I cannot deny) are foccused on holistic healing, spirituality and marrying religion and technology.
The point being, there is nothing stopping someone doing good science, yet being completely wrong in an area outside that science.
I note also that he apparently supports such ideas as: “Roy insisted that Qigong, (Chinese psychic-energy medicine) can increase the pH of water and shift its Raman spectrum.” http://www.ntskeptics.org/2001/2001[…]uary2001.htm
Which should be pathetically easy to demonstrate to sceptics. I wonder why it hasnt been on the news yet?
That’s why I changed my mind about Mr. Pfeiffer being a quack. He is a committed True BelieverTM. And true believers are far and away much harder to change. Quacks just slink away when you shine the light day on them, after all they are only in it for a buck, take Kevin Trudeau, but true believers never give up.
OK. You and your Dr. Rustum are comparing epitaxy to “shake and dilute”? Epitaxy is solid state chemistry(?)physics(?) (it’s in that fuzzy, grey area between them). Water is the very epitome of a liquid. You know. Amorphous. Without structure. I’m fairly certain you are smart enough not to be claiming the molecular structure of the H2O is being changed. So that leaves the arrangement of the molecules with respect to each other. The thermodynamic heat content of the water alone would be enough to obliterate any claimed imprinting of structure. Do you know what water with structure is called? It’s called ICE.
And epitaxy is done under precisely controlled, highly selective, specific conditions. Probably clean room conditions. Are you seriously equating epitaxy to “shake and dilute”? The only place in my little town I know of to get homeopathic remedies is at one of the handful of natural food co-op stores(I’m sure there are more but I don’t know where they are). I’ve been to that one and I know they are not hiding a clean room in the back, let alone an industrial grade chemistry laboratory. I expect homeopathic remedies are being made under conditions that are little more than a step up from crystal meth labs in comparison. Please, try to disabuse me of that notion.
Sniffing the remedy? Good Grief Charlie Brown. The thermodynamic heat content of the individual molecules of a vapor is significantly greater than that of a liquid. There is absolutely no structure of any kind above the level of molecules in the gaseous state. That’s why it is used as the very epitome of disorder and chaos in entropy discussions. Oh and please don’t read some names at Wikipedia and claim that epitaxy is liquid and gas as well as solid state. Liquid phase epitaxy and vapor phase epitaxy produce solid results. They are methods, not products.
As far as Dr Rustum’s credentials go: It wouldn’t be the first time a scientist has tried to get a proposition to carry more weight than it was capable of. Or the first time a quack expropriated a proposition completely away from its legitimate field in order to support a predetermined agenda. Just look at William Dembski and the No Free Lunch theorems. Their originators have heartily decried their use by him in inappropriate ways.
Why don’t you go learn some science here. You’ll certainly come away with a better education than the one you have now.
Oh, and before you ask:
I am just a troll. In fact you would probably call me a professional looossseeerrr. But see how I can use lots of big fancy words too. Big fancy words aren’t just limited to professional scientists; losers use them as well. Especially quack losers are experts at using them. I’m sure you know the feeling.
I have more but I’m late for work.
Insincerely, Paul
No, the point I have been trying to make is that the people involved in this research know that they have to do this right if they want to establish once and for all whether homeopathy works, on the one hand, and if it does work, what the mechanism might be.
You’re the one who called Roy, what was the term, an eejit, without actually checking into this. I hope you don’t usually require a snappy comeback to motivate you to back up your statements :-)
Roy is apparently just getting started with his research into water, and I know he has one paper that has been submitted for publication, but I doubt you’ll find much about that specific topic at this point.
Finally, I can’t speak about Qi Gong, but Bell has a comment in her paper that mentions properties that have been determined about homeopathic remedies:
She cites three studies:
I hope anyone here who hasn’t already completely made their mind up on the subject, for whatever reason, will take advantage of the links I have provided to broaden their horizons on these subjects – who knows, maybe we don’t already know everything there is to know about the world! Maybe Horgan was wrong! Maybe science still has a lot to learn!
Isn’t he communing with Obi Wan on Tatooine?
Heres a new scientis article on the thermoluminecence.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3817
It says the solution was stirred, not succined, as I understand you are supposed to do with homeopathic solutions. Surely that means it was not homeopathy? Besides, follow up work published in:
L. Rey, Thermoluminescence of deuterated amorphous and crystalline ices, Radiation Phys. Chem. 72 (2005) 587-594.
Showed that the effect was due to trace amounts of material remaining due to poor mixing and impurities, adsoprtions being concentrated between ice crystals.
Anyway, other studies have found that slicate, sodium and carbonate ions can be absobed from the glassware and air with repeated shaking.
V. Elia and M. Niccoli, New physico-chemical properties of extremely diluted aqueous solutions, J. Therm. Anal. Calorim. 75 (2004) 815-836.
V. Elia, M. Marchese, M. Montanino, E. Napoli, M. Niccoli, L. Nonatelli and A. Ramaglia, Hydrohysteretic phenomena of “extremely diluted solutions” induced by mechanical treatments. A calorimetric and conductometric study at 25°C, J. Solution Chem. 34 (2005) 947-960.
Indeed, it seems that it is very hard to get properly pure water at all, and you can expect various effects when dilutions take place using dirty glassware, and water that is not pure enough and therefore still contains some ions.
Then the rheumatics study- it says 1 50000 potential solutions were used. Is that the 30C of real homeopathic remedies, or what? If its not, then they werent doing homeopathy.
What the Lancet study shows is that previous attempts to test homeopathy have been so poor that a very small percentage of the results are reliable enough to base conclusions on. I note as well that the larger to study, the worse the results for homeopathy, which is broadly similar to the Ganzfeld experiments carried out in various universities. The smaller the samples, the more skewed, but the more data they gathered, the more it trended towards neutral, i.e. it was a random process they were measuring. (The experiments were to test for ESP)
And as for snappy answers- Roy and yourself are the ones attacking conventional scientific knowledge, therefore its up to you to provide the extraordinary proof first, otherwise we will call you eejits.
Anyway, if Richard’s wrong, how do you explain Pygmies + Dwarfs ?!?!?!
As I mentioned above, tests of homeopathy per se would involved RCTs (double-blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled, etc.) testing for the clinical efficacy of particular homeopathic remedies that were correctly prescribed according to standard classical homeopathic practice.
Short of that, any studies that can begin to shed light on how ultra-diluted solutions created in various ways might differ from ordinary water are of great interest to people who are trying to understand the basic science underlying any practical efficacy that homeopathy might have.
This is why it’s difficult to conduct this kind of research. Imagine how hard things were for Rutherford and Cavendish, for example, straining the technology of their times!
I can only admire the determination of these people to overcome the current technical obstacles – whatever the ultimate outcome of their studies.
In this case, these dilutions were far greater than 30C, which is based on 1 100 solutions serially diluted and successed 30 times. (That is, diluted, successed, diluted, succussed, 30 times.)
These dilutions are called “LM” potencies and are far more diluted than the X (1 10), C (1 100) or M (1 1000) potencies. I can imagine the responses from some here at what I am about to say, but I’ll be frank and admit that I know homeopaths who have trouble accepting the validity of LM potencies.
Fair enough, I’ve been called worse in my day!
As I mentioned above, we have yet to see a body of well-designed studies that is sufficient to give a relatively definitive answer to the question of whether homeopathy is clinically effective.
As I also mentioned, the Lancet article’s authors picked 8 papers of the original 110 homeopathic and 6 papers of the original 110 conventional papers and didn’t specify which were used. This is not acceptable in conventional medical meta-studies.
In addition to that, most if not all of the papers that studied “homeopathy” would never have passed peer review by anyone familiar with what is really needed to test the clinical efficacy of classical homeopathy.
To say the very least, these facts impugn the integrity of the Lancet editorial board.
I mean, think about it for a minute: what are these people up to, publishing such clearly shoddy work and then trumpeting it as the End of Homeopathy?
If all homeopathy people are like you, you nuts are carbon copies of creationists.
I can’t tell you how deeply I appreciate your elevated contribution to the discourse, my dear sir…
Let’s get serious for a minute, Steve:
In the U.S. at least, a theocratic movement is on the rise, and ID is their stalking horse. There have been some recent victories, like the Dover one, but the overall trend is still both grim and scary.
The attacks on the science of global warming also give great concern to any of us who care about the future of our society – and of humanity as a whole.
The biggest weapon we have against the IDers is the integrity of our diligent pursuit of the truth.
It was one thing to let the kind of ignorance that passes for scientific dismissal of homeopathy go unchecked in “normal” times, but in today’s climate we have to be ruthless about our shortcomings and unwavering in our defense of the scientific method.
Whenever someone says that homeopathy can’t work because of the “irreducible simplicity” of water, who does that sound like?
When respected scientific journals publish flawed research and praise it to the skies, who does that sound like?
You can be Dumb and Dumber if you choose, but don’t say you’re doing it in the name of science!
I find that hysterically funny.
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