Of course I know there are huge differences between building or maintaining technology and diagnosing and treating diseases. However, there is a parallel we could draw here. Just like the Mt. Sinai program is trying to belittle the value of basic sciences in medicine, there are lot of colleges trying to minimize how important it is to have a decent grasp of mathematics and theoretical understanding of how digital equipment works in their computer science programs. In fact, there are even IT and MIS curricula designed to give just a little exposure to actually writing code and emphasizing project management skills instead. In comp sci classes, you could always tell who were IT or MIS major by cheers of how they won’t have to take the next course, a course which would take computer science majors deeper into how to turn logical and mathematical concepts into a useful tool with ever more esoteric and abstract code. This is not to say that MIS or IT majors don’t have any place in the information systems industry, but they usually aren’t the ones doing the actual coding and architecture.

Likewise, it seems that the Mt. Sinai students in question are being pushed away from specialties which are dependent on an extensive scientific education. And that’s a bad thing. Your primary care physician is usually the first person you see when you need medical attention. Trying to turn this profession into MD Lite is bound to go badly because primary care physicians need to make the right initial diagnosis, or at least forward your case to the right specialist. Do you really want to trust this task to a doctor who had a few abbreviated science classes, isn’t completely sure how many of the treatments he or she prescribes work, and is more interested in what you think about the quality of medical care across societal strata than in explaining what ails you and how to treat it? How would you feel if you knew that the person who you’re essentially trusting with your health basically viewed much of the required science as just a nagging obstacle of getting into scrubs? That attitude would certainly bother me since for some reason, I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t be looking for creative ways to get around the fundamental skills and knowledge required by your profession.

I very rarely say this about anyone, but when it comes to Wakefield and his endless stream of lies in the press and to his supporters, I feel I have to. He’s not just a crank or a denialist, he’s also a terrible human being. We can look at J.B. Handley’s inane outbursts against doctors and scientists, or the anti-vaccinationists’ hate and fear of vaccines even in the face of volumes of clinical rebuttals, or even Jenny McCarthy’s dangerous ignorance, and find at least some element which redeems their efforts from a human perspective. They might be a thousand times wrong in selecting vaccines as the culprit for today’s pressing pediatric problems, but at least they actually do care about kids. Wakefield and greedy, thoughtless quacks like him are just doing it for the money. Here are some numbers to consider. For his work in trying to find some sort of justification for a lawyer who wanted to sue vaccine makers, Wakefield was paid over £439,000 in fees and expenses. Add to this the application for £55,000 in research grants, and his own version of the MMR vaccine for which he had a patent. Now isn’t it a little suspicious that someone with his own version of an MMR vaccine which could’ve made him millions writes a study trying to paint the existing shot as autism in a syringe for a lawyer itching to sue pharmaceutical companies for billions, then doesn’t mention any of this when submitting his work?

And that’s far from all for Andy. When he moved to Texas and opened a clinic bilking parents for quack autism cures to the tune of thousands of dollars and torturing kids with pseudoscientific procedures, he was paid as much as $270,000 a year. Now, he’s also finishing a book about his supposed martyrdom, speaking at anti- vaccination activists’ rallies, and will most certainly be using his public disgrace as a doctor in the UK to drive his speaking fees way, way up. By the standards of the anti-vaccination movement, which thinks that having a cousin who had an interview with a pharmaceutical company invalidates anything you say about vaccines due to a conflict of interest, Andy’s greed should earn him nothing but permanent scorn. Of course Big Pharma are no angels and they do manipulate medical studies to suit their needs, but, ironically enough, while the anti- vaxers at Age of Autism skewer pharmaceutical companies for tainting science in the name of profit, they just can’t even bring themselves to consider that Wakefield did the exact same thing. Andy doesn’t care about the damage he causes and how many kids will suffer because of him, his cronies, and opportunistic quacks. His primary concern is his bank account, and as long as he takes care of his needs, he’s happy, even if he has to manufacture his results and conduct a study invalid and unethical at every conceivable level for it.

This is why in his latest media appearance, he blatantly lied about supposed under-the-table payouts for kids who developed autism after vaccinations (only a single, very complex case like this actually exists), and that his work with the MMR vaccines was being reproduced. Though on the last point, he neglected to mention the little disclaimer that the only person who reproduced his research was working at Thoughtful House and had some very substantial financial incentives to reproduce them. Where’s AoA and other anti-vaxers to point out a major conflict of interest? Oh, right. We’re talking about their demigod, the man who can do no wrong while he lines his pockets with children’s misery and parents’ fears, playing the medical Luddites’ fear for his gain. For the anti-vax deity that is Wakefield to err would lead people to question the anti-vax mantras and they just can’t allow that to happen. And that’s what makes Wakefield’s actions so low and worthy of contempt. As long as he makes a sad face and cries a few crocodile tears, the money keeps coming in and should anyone try to tackle his attempts at manipulating science, there’s an army of devotees who know and care nothing about medical matters to rise to his defense. From celebrity bobbleheads, alt med woo meisters and snake oil salespeople, dimwitted political pundits, and incompetent reporters, they’ll fight for him to their last breath.

We could throw any judgment we want at Wakefield and it won’t matter. He already set loose his lie, built up a devoted cult, and got the martyr act down to an art. His followers couldn’t care less about reason or evidence; they function on raw emotion, primarily fear of authority, fear of medicine, and fear of disease. Wakefield gave them a convenient scapegoat which combines all the things these people hate into a one, neat package. The science of the matter is totally irrelevant to them, it’s just “one of The Man’s tools to bring them down.” Maybe a better way to counter them would be to keep exposing Wakefield for the lying, greedy fraud he is just to open a dialogue about the science at hand rather than trying to teach medicine to scared and angry zealots.

The funny thing is that the supposed health freedoms in question already exist. If you undergo surgery or have to endure an invasive diagnostic procedure, you have to sign a consent form agreeing to the treatment, saying that you’re satisfied with the explanation provided by your doctor. If you don’t understand something the doctor said, you can keep asking questions until you’re satisfied. And even if refusing a treatment will kill you, you still have the right to say no. So considering that you could already refuse pretty much anything doctors can offer in even the most dire situations, why exactly do you need rallies demanding the rights you already have? Maybe we should refer to the mission statement of the organizers?

We believe in the rights to life, liberty, and personal security for ourselves and our children. We demand the universal human rights standard of informed consent for all medical interventions. Compulsory vaccination cannot be legally and morally justified. We affirm the sanctity of personal space, the right to be left alone, and the freedom to make personal health care decisions guided by the professionals of our choosing.

Note the compulsory vaccination part, they sponsors and their keynote speaker. This has nothing to do with a demand for patients’ rights. It’s just an excuse to get together to bash medical science, and blame doctors for just about every evil in the world under an appeal for a say in personal medical matters, an ability they already have by law. And sure, people should have the right to make informed choices in their medical care and using the long arm of the law to force them to get vaccinated would be a very unproductive tactic. Vaccines should be taken on merit rather than because a government official told you to do it, even if the official is right that having all your shots would help keep diseases like mumps, measles and polio under control. Besides, think about how loud and vocal conspiracy theorists get even when vaccinations are optional, and consider how much they’ll have to talk about of vaccinations become compulsory. But that said, there’s a limit to how informed of a consent you could have when it comes to medicine. There’s a reason why it takes about 8 years of education and years of practice to become a doctor. Medicine is complicated stuff.

Now, while I can tell you the mechanics of an ablation and tell you when it’s done, I wouldn’t be able to review the doctors’ notes on my case and make an educated decision. At the end of the day, I have to trust that I’m in the hands of a professional who knows what she’s doing and that I got a realistic rundown of the risks I would face with and without the procedure. Anti-vaccine and alt med activists, however, have no such limitations and they choose to trust doctors who say what they want to hear rather than medical professionals who follow the scientific literature. When they talk about their right to decline vaccines or treatments, they’re talking about their distaste for doctors who don’t find their talking points convincing and counter them with actual science. They’d much rather be conned by those who would pander to them and their conspiracy theories to make a buck than have to accept that they’re wrong about something. It’s little wonder they idolize Andy Wakefield and the Glenn Beck of the alt med world, Mike Adams. Those two would never tell passionate supporters of pseudoscience that they’re wrong and jeopardize their image as Galileos persecuted by the evil establishment…

First and foremost, I have to ask what kind of government would allow corporations to send what amounts to a team of professional hit men to cut out people’s organs after they miss a few monthly payments. Yes, I know, that’s the whole point of the antihero-doing-something-morally-questionable-has-an-epiphany-and-fights-the- system tale, but those only work when the stories are either close to real events or seem highly plausible. The notion of legally killing people for not being able to pay their bills and recycling their used mechanical organs is just too excessive to meet that criterion. It’s one thing to explore the dark side of today’s societies with a film that’s already built on a fantastical or surreal premise. We can go along with that. But a setup we can imagine being outlawed in the blink of an eye is in the cinematic uncanny valley territory where films lose their potential punch. Instead of truly considering the implications of the world being presented to us, we just brush it off as a relatively typical action flick based on a classic storyline.

The second big problem that jumped out at me when looking at the film posters and the viral site promoting the artificial organs of The Union Corporation, the fictional stronghold of the movie’s villains, were the prices for the robotic hearts, livers, kidneys and eyes. A heart for $975,000? Kidneys at $1,048,000 a pair? A liver for some $756,000? Bionic arms starting at $375,000? Either people are being sold the very first prototypes that were custom built for them with handcrafted, never before used machinery, or natural donors are no longer an option for any patient. Even buying organs on a black market would cost less than a tenth of the eye-popping price tags to which we’re treated in Repo Men. True, having artificial organs that work as well as the real thing would mean there would be no need to wait for a suitable donor heart. Depending on the materials used for the machine, you could even minimize the risks of severe foreign-body rejection and with a new generation of power supplies for internal medical devices, they may even have a long working life. But for decades to come, they would be a bridge between lethal organ failure and finding a suitable donor.

Still, let’s stay with the idea of perfectly working artificial organs for just a moment since they are possible and there’s a lot of research and development happening in this field. However, the stratospheric prices of the film would mean that none of the resulting devices would ever be suitable for mass market use. In reality, with the application of economies of scale, we should expect the prices of mass produced artificial organs to drop to several tens of thousands of dollars. Today’s most expensive and sophisticated prototype of an artificial heart costs $192,000 while less ambitious devices run between $70,000 and $100,000 according to the numbers floating around news sites. The supposedly safe, efficient and effective artificial organs made by the thousand in vast industrial labs are bound to cost far less than that, just like computers today are a lot cheaper when the now ubiquitous technology was in its infancy. Yes, the implantation could still run into six digits, but since it’s covered by insurance companies, the patient would only be on the hook for a part of the bill, even in the worst case scenario. And come to think of it, wouldn’t insurance companies of the future also try to cover proven and reliable artificial organs, thus lowering the out of pocket costs even further?

So it seems that Repo Men managed to not only create a totally implausible set of laws for our future, but also made major mistakes when it comes to robotics, medicine, healthcare and business. It’s very difficult to take morality tales seriously when you know full well that everything happening as the story unfolds simply wouldn’t happen and a potentially terrifying allegory for what could happen if creditors are given far too much leeway to collect their debts is reduced to just another action flick based on a rather shaky premise.

Care to guess which route was chosen by J.B. Handley, an organic food biz financier with a very obvious and debilitating inferiority complex towards scientists and doctors? True to his typical classy ways, Handley went for the low blow, just as he did when Wired’s Amy Wallace wrote an honest piece about the medical Luddism he proudly espouses and its dangers. After trying to refute the facts cited in the article with quack studies that were financed by his organization, or groups affiliated with his ideologies, this self-appointed sentry against the evil forces of pharmaceutical companies went on to set up a graphic scenario in which Wallace gets date raped by vaccine expert Paul Offit, resulting in the article that sent him foaming at the mouth with rage. But then again, it seems that Handley’s temper is so microscopically short, any take on his efforts which doesn’t pat him on the head or dares to point out his total lack of critical thought or scientific knowledge will send him into a conniption and producing the kind of apoplectic howls you’d expect from a rabid banshee.

Just like every crank, Handley believes himself to be brilliant and that his skills in raising cash for a number of niche businesses can more than compensate for his lack of education in biology, medicine and immunology. During the first few months of this blog, I wrote about two studies which provided empirical evidence for what quite a few of us probably knew already. Bosses are often the people who talk the most confidently rather than those with the best set of skills, and they tend to grossly overestimate their performance by virtue of being in a position of power. In fact, 9 in 10 managers believe their abilities place them in the top 10% of their company’s highest achievers. To put this in other words, they talk a big game and eventually end up swallowing their own self-promotion, which leads them to acquire an over-bloated ego. Med school? Science class? Who needs all that? They’re managers of a company! And this is precisely what Handley says when given the chance…

I’m not intellectually intimidated by any of these jokers… I chose a different path and went into the business world. In the business world, having a degree from a great college or business school gets you your first job, and not much else… Brains and street-smarts win, not degrees, arrogance, or entitlement.

See that? He doesn’t need degrees or an actual education before going out and spouting off about how killer vaccines will give children autism. His mantra was that autism is a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning, and while he stands on the podium, rallying the masses with scaremongering and pseudoscience, he lacks the will and the knowledge to figure out that mercury poisoning is caused by methyl mercury that you find in fish or industrial waste, not the ethyl mercury which was used in the vaccine preservative thimerosal. Which was not used in childhood vaccines since 2000 and is clearly not at fault. Handley is arrogant enough to think that he’s exempt from knowing that there’s more than one type of mercury and it has different effects on the body, and yet he’s ranting about how he’s not afraid of all those elistist doctors and their fancy degrees.

On top of that, he’ll be more than happy to forward your potentially autistic child to a quack who uses kids as his guinea pigs on the parents’ dime with absolutely no accountability, no oversight and no skepticism on the part of the groups managed by Handley and his biomed woo crew. That’s right. The same people ready to rip into a doctor’s throat over half a statistically negligible quantity of a chemical that’s a total mystery to them and demand enormous studies on vaccine safety be done and re-done time and time again, won’t bat an eyelash on borderline medical child abuse and consider random anecdotes from people who have been lied to about their progeny’s condition from beginning to end, sufficient proof that their woo is more potent than real clinical medicine. Autistic children who just need help in learning how to communicate better and a careful eye from a concerned professional, become pawns in Handley’s publicity game.

Make no mistake, Age of Autism or Generation Rescue are publicity weapons to him. He truly wants to stick it to modern medicine. He wants the glory of saying that he’s right and everyone’s wrong. And the kids? They’re just being used as his trump card, whether he realizes it or not. Considering that he stealthily pulls bits where his hatred goes way too far off his blogs, there may still be a flash of sanity in his head once in while. But now, his beliefs about vaccines have become his religion, regardless of all the evidence to the contrary, and his organization won’t back down solely on principle. They could never possibly be the ones who have to eat crow. In their minds, either the doctors lose or the battle will continue until they do. There is no other option.

One of our favorite ways to think about cyborgs in the movies and on TV, is that of humans who became a bit more advanced than the rest of us. Sure their transformation was rough, but in the end, they’ve become what we’d call superhuman. While bones can break and muscles can tear, their mechanical enhancements allow them to run faster, punch harder, and lift weights that would ordinarily crush a human’s spine during a foolish lift attempt. How much science fiction has been written about military cyborgs and victims of horrific accidents who’s trauma is healed by the amazing powers they acquire in the process? The slight problem with all these stories is that the cyborgs of today and tomorrow won’t be much stronger than those of us without implants or mechanical limbs for the simple reason that their prosthetics are designed only to replace what they lost.

Give someone who lost both arms the most advanced mechanical substitutes and she’ll be able to control all her motions with the same ease as she controlled her natural body parts. But she’s not going to go enroll in a heavy lifting competition against a bulldozer because the rest of her body couldn’t handle the stress. To boost human strength to the levels we routinely see in movies, we need to either replace or drastically reinforce the entire musculoskeletal system. Otherwise, feats of superhuman agility and strength would do nearly as much damage to our hypothetical cyborgs as they would to us. And even if we do that, there will be major hurdles to overcome. Mechanical bones and muscle would have to be specially engineered to self-repair, just like their organic counterparts. Without being able to mend the accumulated wear and tear, they’d quickly start falling to pieces and having a maintenance program for your insides seems like a problematic proposition.

It’s far more likely that cyborg technology we’ll all use might be the currently theoretical nanobots which would help our immune system fight diseases like cancer, HIV and Alzheimer’s, concepts that don’t require us to get new limbs or drastic bodily modifications and would do far more to help our lives than mechanical body parts. Of course, those types of technology are still a very long way off and will require many more years of testing to be ready for prime time, but when they’re good to go, they would be the real cyborg revolution.

If you think this is some random passage stuffed in by a special interest group, you’d be only half right since it was crafted by Sen. Orrin Hatch and was supported by the late Ed Kennedy. Also trying to lend his credentials is the man who spectacularly fumbled his way out of a potential presidency, Sen. John Kerry. Why would Kerry and Edwards support a bill forcing insurers to cover faith healing? Because their home state is also the HQ of the so-called Christian Science movement which thinks that prayer can be just efficient as actual medicine so an already tax exempt organization collecting $20 to $40 per prayer session and impromptu Bible study would also get checks from insurance companies. And that’s on top of the fact that the IRS will already allow patients of their squad of faith healers to deduct their expenses as medical in nature. Oh and here’s the punchline…

“We are making the case for [faith treatment], believing there is a connection between healthcare and spirituality,” said Davis, who distributed 11,000 letters last week to Senate officials urging [for] support on the measure.

“We think this is an important aspect of the solution, when you are talking about not only keeping the cost down, but finding effective healthcare,” he said.

Fantastic! We’ll get to lower the costs of healthcare by strong-arming insurance companies into ignoring their guidelines and covering treatment methods that failed utterly against everything from the flu, to tuberculosis, to the Black Plague over the last 5,000 years. And then, when they have to pay for people getting real treatment in the next hospital room as well, guess who’s premiums they’ll raise? Yours. There’s a good reason insurers are loath to cover pseudoscientific and alt med woo unless they’re forced to by law. It doesn’t work and they end up paying for sick people turning themselves into medical experiments for quacks who don’t have a clue what they’re doing. In the end, they lose money and have to boost premiums to cover the added risk.

Also, pardon my dabbling in law here since I’m not an attorney (my education in law consists of AP Civics and an introductory course in college), but wouldn’t the federal government mandating faith healing run contrary to the Establishment Clause? The idea that prayer is as effective as medical treatment is purely a statement of faith and thus falls into the realm of religion. And according to the Constitution, lawmakers can’t make any law which gives a nod of approval to a religious institution. Unless of course they’re willing to unload a giant can of very nasty worms and let every faith healer, sleazy televangelist and profiteering witch doctor bill their patients’ insurance companies and raising our already out of control healthcare costs. Forget all that scaremongering about government death panels in the nation’s medical overhaul. I’d be far more scared of this and at the risk of sounding alarmist, I think you should be concerned as well.

I know, I know, the vast majority of anti-vaccine activists have nothing but good intentions and they’re doing it not because they want to endanger children, but because they’re sure that they’re protecting them from even bigger dangers than common childhood diseases. But you know the saying about good intentions. The road to hell is paved with them. And far from all the passionate anti-vaxers are doing it for the benefit of kids across the world. In fact, homeopaths are using the media generated panic over vaccine safety to drum up business, going on TV to question the safety of conventional medicine and touting the benefits of their sentient liquids, which unlike real medicine, don’t have evil compounds with big scary names.

It’s a disingenuous argument. Rather than compete with medical professionals on efficacy, the homeopaths talk about the lack of side-effects to their treatments. Which of course don’t really have side-effects since they don’t actually treat anything. For doctors, every medication is a balance between the potential danger and the anticipated benefit, backed by thorough, constantly ongoing studies. For homeopaths, some pseudoscientific forces are supposed to take care of the condition and they never bother to check whether the patient really did recover from something serious. A quick glance and the lack of complaints are enough to pronounce him or her cured, and present a sizeable bill for two atoms of flower powder in distilled water.

When a respected institution like SickKids gives grants to those who call themselves healers after neglecting all the hard work that has to come with that title, and keeps an open ear to outright quacks who ignore good science for the sake of personal satisfaction, they’re giving undue legitimacy to people who have the potential to harm the children in their care either by doing nothing to help them and calling it treatment, or applying an untested, potentially dangerous quack cure to their conditions. Even worse, they’re encouraging them to keep assailing real medicine and creating controversies rather than helping to solve problems. Let’s keep in mind that as much as the quacks may want to help, they also want to be seen as visionaries who had the guts to stand up to the Big, Bad Scientific Establishment who were vindicated by those with an open mind, i.e. those who agree with them and can throw around some serious weight in the medical world.

[ cartoon clip from a comic by Joseph Hewitt ]

As a skeptic who commented on alternative medicine in unflattering terms, I had plenty of people ask me what’s the harm in just letting people drink some water and make themselves feel better solely by the placebo effect. And this is a prime example of how such an approach to health is dangerous. Rather than go to a doctor with proven medicine, a patient will go to a quack with water or potpourri, feel better for a little bit and succumb to a disease that could’ve been easily treated by a real physician. Or as the WHO puts it:

Homeopathy does not protect people from, or treat, these diseases.

Those of us working with the most rural and impoverished people of the world already struggle to deliver the medical help that is needed. When homeopathy stands in place of effective treatment, lives are lost.

For the WHO which desperately tries to raise the millions of dollars necessary to keep medicine flowing into areas facing major outbreaks of malaria and TB, having patients refuse drugs and pass on their infections, as well as alarmingly effective disinformation from homeopaths and folk healers, is a major blow to their efforts. Even worse, going to a homeopath often tends to be much more socially accepted than going to a doctor in places which need the most help from actual, qualified doctors with real medicine.

Oh and here’s something else to think about. Homeopaths often use remedies diluted in vast amounts of water. In developing nations where they claim to offer cures for malaria, diarrhea and dysentery, access to clean water isn’t very reliable to put it mildly. So, um… what sorts of things you could be ingesting in those few drops you’ll be putting under your tongue once or twice a day?

… For that, I adore Jenny McCarthy. And even though our opinions on vaccinations differ, I love the way she speaks her mind because she is — as Cookie also says — “wickedly funny” and hardcore and very real.

Now it’s great that she speaks her mind so well, but when her public assaults a pivotal form of defense against childhood diseases are being glossed over just because she has a pretty face, we’ve got a problem. Being attractive isn’t a skill. It’s the result of a genetic lottery. Her passion and a steady stream of fawning doled out by celebrity reporters are no substitute for real scientific knowledge and rather than be raised on a pedestal and admired for her activism, she should be questioned and put up against someone who actually went to med school rather than a DIY doctor like herself…

We’re the generation of parents who are saying, ‘Listen to us. We are the bosses of our children.’ I want parents to realize that, and not get pushed around by doctors who say, ‘Oh that’s 100 percent safe.’

Just being a parent doesn’t magically bestow a decade of training and practice upon you. Doctors should and will listen to your concerns but when you form a very strong opinion about things you know very little about, all you’re doing is complicating the expert’s job and endangering yourself and your kids. I can understand an anti-establishment attitude, but not when it comes to talking out of your depth. Doctors can’t say that any medicine or vaccine is 100% safe. However there are plenty of quacks who rush to administer unproven, New Age “treatments” for autism and make a fortune at it, and I noticed that this boss of her child hasn’t made a peep about these questionable methods. In fact, she wrote a book with a doctor who peddles them for a living.

Though Grossman and Kurzweil respect science, their approach is necessarily improvisational. If a therapy has some scientific promise and little risk, they’ll try it. [...]

‘Life is not a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study,’ Grossman explains. ‘We don’t have that luxury. We are operating with incomplete information. The best we can do is experiment with ourselves.’

Yes, life may not be a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study. But clinical medicine is. Without control groups and an objective statistical analysis, there’s no way to tell whether an experimental treatment is really working. We know that placebo effects are powerful enough to make it seem as if distilled water from a homeopath is working as well as an antibiotic. However, when we start doing controlled studies, we see that the special water doesn’t do anything but make a person feel good while the antibiotic actually treats the condition. Experimenting on yourself is simply tinkering while you hope for a positive result.

So this is what you get for $6,000 per appointment with the singularitarians’ doctor of choice? A vial or injection of something that could hypothetically help you live just a little longer, with no study or research to back up that assertion? Isn’t that basically paying to become a guinea pig for doctor on the same quest as Medieval alchemists?

Although to be fair, one advice that Grossman will give his patients would be to try calorie restriction. And unlike hormone replacement and alkaline water, limiting your daily intake has been shown as an effective tactic to add years to your life under laboratory conditions. Like any other plausible life extension method, it’s been overhyped in pop culture and TV doctors have claimed that humans on an extremely low calorie diet could live into their 120s, which is rather questionable for a variety of reasons. However, it does work and if done properly, could give you as much as an extra decade.

Unfortunately, for 61 year old Kurzweil, a decade or two of extra life from peer reviewed and extensively studied techniques might not be enough to fulfill his wildest dreams of computer-aided immortality, which is why he’s in a hurry to do whatever he can to stave off death. Even if it’s paying thousands of dollars a week to be a test subject for a doctor who’s not sure what he’s doing.

It really doesn’t seem to matter that no one has seen the full and complete bill which may be voted on in Congress. In fact, those who oppose it are using this opportunity to grossly misinform the public and insist that should any change to the system pass, random bureaucrats will butt in between you and your doctor to decide the level of care you’ll receive based on their schedule of costs, even though there’s no blueprint for how the plan will actually work other than wild speculation and rumors coming from random pundits.

Now here’s the really funny part about this threat. This is exactly what we have now. It’s just that instead of a government official, we have a clerk from an insurance company decide whether we can get what our doctors prescribe us and our quality of care depends on who we work for or how much we’re willing to pay. Let me give you a routine, real life example of how insurance companies interfere to prevent your treatment from exceeding how much they’re willing to spend on covering you. Or in this case, me.

Friday of last week I went to my doctor because I’ve been having a little trouble with my allergies. He examined me and wrote a prescription for a well known medication with a slight stimulant. In theory, I should be able to go to the pharmacy, have them fill the script and allow my doctor’s treatment plan do its thing, right? Actually, no. When I went to pick up my prescribed pills, the pharmacy says that the insurance company won’t cover the prescription. Instead, they want me to receive another version of this medicine and buy the mild stimulant it contains over the counter. I’m of course free to pay $185 for each month’s supply and take what my doctor prescribed me but they won’t do their job and try to cover my medical expenses because this medication is not as cheap as they’d like it to be.

All right, not a big deal. Happens all the time. I just need them to call the doctor who’ll confirm that I really do need the medication he prescribed. A few days later, I come back to the pharmacy and find that while the insurance company did authorize the medication and the doctor confirmed that there was a real medical reason he recommended the medication he did and he’s not just scribbling random expensive brand names on his prescription pad for the hell of it, it will only cover $40. Why? There’s a deductable on my plan and before they’ll cover 80% of my medication as they say they will in their list of benefits, they want me to pay the whole deductible. If I want the medication that badly, I have to pony up $250 first. Or I could just comply with their wishes and get the pills they want me to take.

Now, I realize that you’re going to say. I need a better insurance plan. And that may be true. However, to get the kind of plans offered by mid-size and large businesses for their full time employees, I’d need to pay upwards of $600 a month. If you’re single and do a lot of freelance and independent work, that’s an awful lot of money to shell out. Without a spouse with a full time job and a good insurance plan, you’re likely to end up with relatively sporadic coverage that gouges you for up to 50% of every procedure’s cost until they get their deductible out of you. When you ask what you can do to counter the charges, you’re politely told that it would be much more beneficial for you to get on a group plan or get a much more expensive one.

Here’s the bottom line. If a doctor prescribes a medication based on his or her evaluation of your health concerns, you should get that medication without being gouged or blocked by an insurance company that doesn’t want to pay for something they think is too expensive. The only real way to get what you need without hassling with insurance companies and their immensely complex rules is to pay for it out of your own pocket. If you can afford to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on everything from prescriptions to tests, you can get some of the most advanced medical treatment any place you go. If you can’t, you’re stuck playing the insurance companies’ game.

I’ve been told by health insurance experts that I just need to know how to work around the system, how to appeal decisions and with who to stubbornly fight to get my way. My response is that this complexity is totally unnecessary. You should be able to get the treatment you need when you need it and the way your doctor recommends you get it. You shouldn’t have to outline plans to fight insurance company clerks who penalize you for being too expensive for their tastes. And quite honestly, if we have a major overhaul of healthcare in the United States, the last thing I’m afraid of is some random paper pusher making decisions about the level of care that will be covered when I go to the doctor. I’m already dealing with that, even when it comes to simple allergy medication prescribed to millions of people every year.

Seems that the message of the groups opposing healthcare reform is that when the paper pusher in question is from the government, you’re as good as dead. However, when he represents a company that makes more money by denying you a slightly more expensive but necessary medication and forces you to pay out of pocket for it, that’s magically a-ok through the miracle of the almighty “free market.”

During the swine flu outbreak earlier this year, I came across articles warning people about a non-existent vaccine for the new virus and subsequent hysteria from New World Order believers that swine flu was a bio-weapons test for an upcoming mass genocide. Icke’s rant is undated so it’s hard to say whether he was the original source for these stories, or just surfing the trend. However, an abbreviated version of it his paranoid diatribe did end up on the blog of the Australian Vaccination Network which, unlike its name replies, holds that vaccines are actually a deadly hazard and evil governments and pharma companies are covering up that fact so they can keep making money from vaccinations.

This conspiracy theory’s presence on the AVN blog raises a big question. Does Meryl Dorey, the group’s lead quack, actually believe this stuff sans aliens, or did she just post something unflattering about vaccines because it has “vaccines,” “fear” and “swine flu” in the title? Considering the content of her other entries, it seems pretty reasonable that she’s ready and willing to fall for it. And there might be new conspiracy theories gracing her blog in the near future. After the public debate stirred by the death of a four week old child who contracted whooping cough and her commentary on the case, Australian skeptics have finally heard all they could hear and launched a formal complaint against the AVN.

According to the complaint, since the AVN dispenses medical information, the organization must meet certain standards and criteria to do so. Spouting fear mongering, conspiracy laden pseudoscience isn’t exactly med school material so it’s a fair bet that the organization will get a black mark for endangering the public health with their paranoia. In her rebuttal, Dorey says that all they’re trying to do is “disseminate information about health issues” and that this legal action is a “symptom” of some sinister efforts to “impose” mandatory vaccinations on the entire nation. True to her conspiracy style, she hints that the actions to somehow muzzle AVN’s disinformation aren’t “coincidental” in the same sentence.

Here’s a quick note to Meryl. Informing people about health issues is giving medical advice and if you give bad information, you’re more than likely to hurt somebody. When I say that people should get vaccinated or that vaccines are 99% safe and effective, I’m saying exactly what trained medical experts say in scientific journals and to their patients on a daily basis. Those people know a lot more about this subject than someone who thinks that whooping cough can be treated with water and half an atom’s worth of diluted potpourri.

Oddly enough, once upon a time, before modern medicine, homeopathy actually produced results on par with the best treatment you could get because doctors back then didn’t yet know the basic mechanics of infections, diseases and contamination which doomed countless patients to a slow death and homeopaths didn’t make things worse by cutting into people or contaminating their tissues with bacteria-ridden tools. But today, when doctors can bring patients back from near death and give them a great chance for survival, homeopathy’s big claim to fame is gone. It’s no longer on par with medicine. It just doesn’t do anything, as per usual…

[ thanks to Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy for the clip ]

It hits all the high notes, casting all modern medication as poisons being peddled by clueless doctors, trying to appeal to our wholesome feelings about nature by asking why we don’t trust what it provides us and leaving us with the plea to be more open minded. Like most defense of alternative medicine, it’s emotional and more than a little misleading. By asking you to choose between “man-made poison” and what nature provides us in herbs, it sets up a classic false dichotomy. And in my case, I would take the so-called poison over some herb any day of the week. Why? Because I have no idea what all those earthy sounding mixtures actually contain or what exactly will happen when I ingest them. There’s no approval by the FDA, no study, no authority to which I could appeal for a review of what happens if I take it for a long period of time. With modern medication, I could at least try to get an idea of what it will do to my body. With herbs, there’s seldom such luck.

Another interesting little tidbit is that the most potent poisons we know of are found in nature. The bite of a big Sydney funnel web spider is fatal without swift medical attention. Komodo dragons have mouths filled with all sorts of horrifying bacteria that seeps into wounds left from their bites and leads to a very painful death. Some frogs are also about as safe to handle as a biological weapon. Predation on our planet created a biosphere in which horrifying toxins are frequently used weapons. And they’re all natural, reaching their current composition over millions of years. Oh and did I mention plants with poisonous leaves? To say that man-made medicine is poisonous but that we should trust something that nature provides because it’s nature, is to forget that most of our biosphere is actively engaged in killing for survival and if you don’t watch what you ingest, you might end up as yet another victim of natural selection.

Of course nature does offer a number of compounds that can be used to help us which is why, contrary to the dogma of herbal advocates, drug companies use quite a few natural extracts and by-products of venoms for a wide variety of medications. Those supposed “man-made poisons” are often based on what nature provides, so when an alternative medicine proponent ridicules modern pharmacology, he’s also unwittingly taking aim at the plants and animals which provide the base for its products. The very same plants and animals he later holds as superior to the experts who practice evidence-based medicine. Obviously, that proponent really isn’t familiar with the topic and relying on the wordplay to make a point because the science isn’t there to back up his claims and outrage at how anyone would be so foolish to believe that humans are smarter than nature in making remedies. Rather than do a quick search and find ongoing projects which scour nature to look for the new cancer cure or HIV treatment, he tries to tap into New Age sensibilities.

Interestingly enough, herbal medicine and many alternative treatment methods have a very long track record. Our ancestors used them for thousands of years and we can compare their life expectancy and the quality of their care to that of the modern world. After developing vaccines, antibiotics and solidifying the germ theory of disease, we’ve been able to subdue polio, mumps, rubella and measles, eradicate smallpox, drive down the previously terrifying infant mortality rate and double life expectancy. In less than a century, today’s principles of medicine were able to do what traditional remedies couldn’t since Neolithic times. Granted, at the time when homeopathy and modern incarnations of herbal remedies were invented, doctors still had a hard time getting a grip on why people got sick and how to treat most diseases. Going to the hospital back then was gambling with your life and people would embrace alternative treatments because they didn’t make things worse.

We’ve come a long way since then and the results are very clear if we look at the drastic improvements to our quality of life. Why should we wind back the clock to the days when diseases were thought to be evil spirits or black magic spells contaminating the body and the cure was a chi re-alignment followed by an aura polishing until the light from your chakras repelled any ghost in the vicinity?

Do you drink more than two liters of soft drinks a day? While that might sound like a lot, it’s actually a big gulp sized drink and a few cans here and there for a total of 67.6 fluid oz. And if you keep drinking that much cola or more long enough, you may increase your risk of hypokalemia, a muscle condition in which potassium levels in the bloodstream are diluted so much, vital muscle functions are affected.

The research, done by a trio of Greek medical experts, shows that consuming between 2 and 9 liters of soda on a regular basis interferes with the way our body retains potassium. Seems that a combination of glucose, fructose and caffeine contained in soft drinks may be to blame, although how is yet to be determined. Caffeine seems to be the worst offender according to previous studies on caffeine intoxication, but the effects and their severity may vary from person to person. So take note of how much soda you drink. You can always have too much of a good thing…

See: Tsimihodimos, V., et. al. (2009). Cola-induced hypokalaemia International Journal of Clinical Practice, 63 (6), 900-902 DOI: 10.1111/j.1742-1241.2009.02051.x

Insurance companies base their coverage on sets of guidelines that are created by physicians and reviewed for anything questionable or objectionable. Before the companies are willing to pick up their part of the tab for a new treatment, they want to know that it works, that it will improve the quality of life and that it makes sense. For them to do anything else is just gambling with their money and hence, they try to rely on evidence-based medicine as much as they possibly can. How can their guidelines track something as obscure as spiritual or holistic health? And why should they cover something that scientists and doctors are sure doesn’t work past the placebo effect? We’re talking about companies that will think twice about giving you a new kidney. Do any of the alternative medicine advocates really think the same companies will want to cover New Age medicine?

The same insurance companies have their own powerful lobbies and armies of political allies who can throw a lot more money and a lot more weight around Washington DC. Currently, alternative medicine proponents have only one serious supporter, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA). And while they might sway some congressmen and women with a passionate presentation or two, representatives of insurance companies will be ready to line up expert after expert who will truthfully tell them there’s no solid proof that alternative medicine is on par with conventional medical practices and that faith healing is a religious tenet rather than a valid practice that has any place in a hospital. Why then should the government ask insurance companies to cover these ideas? And what politician would want the negative press that would come with advocating something like this?

Ideas about curing cancers with vitamins and herbs are nothing new, but what’s novel about using alternative medicine to treat lymphoma in this case, is a religious justification for doing so. The First Amendment grants freedom of religion and when you’re ignoring a recognized religious group, you could technically be infringing on their right to express their beliefs and trigger all sorts of protests and countersuits.

This is why a court order to return Daniel to a hospital where he would be treated by modern medicine and get an immensely better shot at surviving his disease, may get messy and since he was raised into his mother’s religion, he’s already refused to obey such an order even if it’s issued which would nullify any good that could come from it. Would the judge really order the police to drag Daniel to the hospital, kicking and screaming? Is it really the best thing to do when your help will be seen as tyrannical meddling even when sound science and solid fact are firmly on your side? How far should we go to help those who need our help but don’t want if for a completely irrational reason?

Another big question to consider is whether Colleen Hauser would be liable for her child’s death by refusing modern treatment. Courts can, and do, hold parents liable for refusing to help their children get medical care, even when religion is involved. Appealing to the idea that vitamins, herbs and homeopathic cures were valid medicine might also fall on deaf ears. In Australia, a couple who treated their baby for eczema with standard homeopathic treatments and refused to seek conventional medical help when those treatments failed and their daughter died of repeated infections, was charged with gross criminal negligence. It doesn’t seem that a U.S. court would consider vitamins and herbs as a legitimate method of treating lymphoma, especially when medical experts say the treatments are doing nothing for the child, in much the same way the aforementioned Australian case has played out so far.

And again, there’s an issue of whether a court will draw a line in the sand and say that your firm beliefs aren’t valid when someone is about to be harmed by them and society will take over your duties. How far should we try going to help people who refuse to help themselves and those in their care?

A group of researchers took a very good representation of patients being treated for depression known as the STAR*D project, and tried to apply the criteria for enrolling into Stage III antidepressant trials to a sample of 2,855 of them. The result? Just 22.2% of these patients qualified to be in the trials while almost 8 in 10 had a number of additional health and mental problems which barred them from entering. Since the data on those sample patients was collected from 2001 to 2004, the study could also take a look how well those who were qualified for enrollment ultimately fared.

As you might expect, the response rate to the drug was good with 51.6% of the qualified groups saying it was having an effect and their depressions subsided faster, but they also suffered from a 34.4% rate of remission compared to a 24.7% rate for the group that would be rejected from clinical trials. Basically, they were easier cases that relapsed more often than patients with compounding factors like a longer family history of mental disorders, drug addiction or alcoholism. But the big problem is the fact that they weren’t a good representation of an average patient with a case of depression and the results would be rosier than they should’ve been and higher relapse rates which could’ve affected the treatment they would’ve received from a psychiatrist.

Before you start saying that drug companies were manipulating the population for marketing purposes, you’ll need to consider that all trials use homogenous groups of patients to minimize adverse side-effects in those with a multitude of conditions and what they’re really testing is how well the drug treats what it was supposed to treat. However, as we’ve seen above, the results might not work for a typical patient who has multiple health conditions that could alter the response to the drug being tested. And that’s why years after a drug was on the market, we might look back and say: “hey, this wasn’t nearly as good as advertised! what gives?” even though there was noting wrong or fraudulent about the trielson which the promises of efficacy were based.

So maybe Stage III trials should be based not on a homogenous population which has only a certain number of complicating factors, but on groups that accurately represent the patients with the condition the drugs were intended to treat for much more realistic efficacy data? Yes, the number of adverse side effects will rise and so will the complexity of the trials, but in the end, we’ll have better information about our medication. The authors of the study on antidepressant trials certainly seem to think so in their conclusions.

See: Wisniewski, S., et al (2009). Can Phase III Trial Results of Antidepressant Medications Be Generalized to Clinical Practice? American Journal of Psychiatry, 166 (5), 599-607 DOI: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.08071027