From: geb@cs.pitt.edu (Gordon Banks)
Newsgroups: sci.med
Subject: Re: Starting an alternative medicine newsgroup
Date: 14 Oct 92 23:08:49 GMT
Reply-To: geb@cs.pitt.edu (Gordon Banks)
Organization: Univ. of Pittsburgh Computer Science

In article <1992Oct12.020611.15081@news.Hawaii.Edu> lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady) writes:
>
>Gordon, when people say that doing research on alternative approaches is
>a waste of money, I wish that you could tell them some of your horror
>stories.  Wouldn't it be worth something to be able to give your
>patients real information based on actual research to discredit these
>wrong-headed approaches, instead of offering mere opinion?
>
It would be wonderful, but these wackball ideas crop up faster than
anyone can disprove them.  We could easily spend the entire NIH
reseach budget doing studies that disprove quack cures for MS
such as the drilling out of all the amalgams.  But who would want
to do this research?  Who wants to say that their entire career
was spent proving that the quacks were wrong (only to find new
quacks cropping up faster than you beat them down, or the same
quacks coming out with new therapies faster than you can disprove
them)?  Just take the amalgam scam.  I know enough about MS and
enough about mercury poisoning and its effects on the brain
(grey matter not white for a start) that I don't have one iota
of faith in either of the claims that that woman on 60 minutes
that went from a wheelchair to dancing the day after her amalgams
were drilled out had MS or that MS is caused by mercury poisoning.
If I could get a large grant to take 100 MS patients and drill
out their amalgams and 100 where I left them in, and follow these
patients for several years, I could disprove the amalgam theory
definitively, while having all my colleagues laugh at me for
being such a stupe.  Yet, why not spend the money and the time
working on a *real* cure for MS.  We know quite a bit about
the disease and more about the immune system every day.  I
think there is a real possibilty that in the near future we could
come up with something that could perhaps "immunize" children
against getting MS in later life.  But not if we spend all our
money and all our time chasing after the quacks.  Do you see
now?  We can't let quacks set our research priorities.  We
have to do that according to our best scientific judgement as
to what needs to be done.  Goodness knows enough worthless research
gets done now without making it worse by spending tons of time
and money on disproving every notion anyone comes up with.
We are a community of scientists.  We act according to our best
judgement of what is likely to be productive.  If the alternative
medicine people want to adopt the scientific mode and do their
own research, let them.  Maybe they can even talk congress into
funding it.  It wouldn't surprise me.  But don't tell me I have
to waste my time on their irrational theories.


-- 
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Gordon Banks  N3JXP      | "I have given you an argument; I am not obliged
geb@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu   |  to supply you with an understanding." -S.Johnson
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Newsgroups: sci.med