How the Government Wastes Money on Medical Research
Channel: BioBalance Healthcast
Date: 29/08/2017

Read more at www.biobalancehealth.com

Years ago a United States Senator named William Proxmire from Delaware used to host an awards event he called the Golden Fleece Award. It was an award he gave to the Federal government agency that he felt had done the most wasteful and unnecessary project or study since the last awards were given. Government agencies hated to receive the award because it identified them for ridicule and chastised them for wasting taxpayer monies.

Dr. Maupin and Brett Newcomb often talk about studies that seem to be wastes of citizens hard earned money. It is kind of like the radio show: Mr. Obvious. Money is dedicated to research and awarded to people who do medical research on topics that seem to be just common sense, while they ignore the harder questions that medical people want to investigate. Medical research is really written to help doctors practice with the best information, but why should it be done to prove what every doctor knows?   For instance why do we spend research money on the question,  “Do people who go on diets to lose weight regain that weight when they go off their diet?”   Every doctor in America knows the answer to that! So do dieticians, nutritionists, psychologists, and even ordinary people. That is only one example of wasted money, that citizens pay in taxes.

We are frustrated because there seems to be so many wasteful and unnecessary government expenditures supporting programs or research ideas that to us do not make common sense and appear totally unnecessary. We admit we don’t know about most of the government waste, but we do want to bring attention to the waste that is spent on “Mr. Obvious’s type research” documenting well known medical truisms. 

In this weeks healthcast, we identify a list of ten proposals that we think should be employed to reduce or eliminate this wastefulness. Some of our ideas involve replacing existing government research programs that simply add no value with new and effective social and medical programs. We also talk about changes that we think can be made in the existing laws, as well as the changes we can make in how we conduct our lives as individuals (changes that the government really has no control over, we must do ourselves). We believe that these changes make sense and that if they are implemented, Americans will be healthier and our government will waste less of the peoples money on spurious research!