good research. Wayne Jonas, MD, the former head of the OAM (now NCCAM) is a promoter of homeopathy, a 200 year old mystery treatment which has no known mechanism for what little action has been able to be attributed to it apart from anecdotes.
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The popular press, of course, treats it as a viable health care treatment. That alone serves to illustrate more the power of the media in reflecting the sorry state of the public’s understanding of basic science than it does the efficacy of homeopathy.
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The language of the executive order also accepts the value of CAM as a given,
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and leap frogs over questions of these actual efficacy and safety issues. “Reliable” information is in this case definitely in the eye of the believer. The establishment of the commission moves right on to the assumption that the government should play a part in providing delivery and “public access” to CAM, disseminating information, and in the education, training and licensing of CAM practitioners. The recommendations have the potential and intention to affect public policy and legislation, and, bottom line, third party reimbursements for the wide spectrum of alternative practitioners waiting for government recognition. Your tax money is targeted to pay for this.
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Whether it is the National Endowment for the Arts, local pork barrel projects, or metaphysical medicine, one needs to seriously consider why the US government sees fit to get involved in the promotion of what can be outright wacky ideas. But then, why are we surprised?
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One distinctive mark of alternative practices is that they make an end run around science and appeal to the public and the political process for validation. The standards of accountability and exposure to ongoing criticism and refinement or discard which undergird scientific process and discovery is absent in the world of alternative medicine. The political process is often governed by polls and popularity. Alas, supporting and utilizing the information of good science does not always please the constituency.
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The problem however takes on more perspective when one returns to examine the members of the Clinton Commission. The makeup of the commission is reflective of what has been happening to our health care system in the years since the radical sixties students who went to medical, law, and business schools grew up. The cultural forces of postmodernism and multiculturalism trample evidence and science with awe inspiring displays of charisma, chutzpah and intimidation.
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The WHCCAMP is chaired by James Gordon, MD, a psychiatrist based at Georgetown Medical School. Gordon is a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School in the 1960s when Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were experimenting with LSD. An evaluation of his wanderings through medicine would be worthy of a full article, but time and space limitations prevail.
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Briefly, after medical school he volunteered in the Haight-Asbury section of San
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