The Stupid defending the Idiotic

I read a variety of news sources throughout the day and one of them is the Huffington Post. Their biggest problem from my perspective is their ridiculous peddling of bad medical advice through their woo woo bloggers. Number one on the idiot patrol is Deepak Chopra who weighs in over the Newsweek article slamming Oprah.

In his post, the standard alt medicine spin-control is in full spin-mode. Of course, Deepak says, the article didn't credit Oprah for all the real medical people she's had on the show, as if this excuses her showcasing dangerous anti-vax and alt-medicine nutjobs.

He opines about how the medical establishment has lost all their credibility with the public but doesn't show any evidence that that's the case or how it occurred. Frankly, curing polio, eradicating smallpox, mapping the human genome, creating artificial limbs, heart transplants, and new medicines to control diabetes, high cholesterol and AIDS gives them a hell of a lot of credibility in my eyes, but that's just me, I guess.

Then there's this nugget of wisdom.

The medical profession is burdened with a host of problems that Oprah addresses with more candor and force than the AMA. She promotes wellness and prevention, two areas that drastically need improvement. She brings up creative solutions to problems that medical science is baffled by, such as the healing response itself and the role of subjectivity in patient response. These are issues that few M.D.s are willing to explore, yet she has done so for decades.

WTF is he talking about? This is almost literally gibberish. But don't worry, because Deepak understands all.

Instead, we got a response from an oncologist in Canada repeating the establishment position: alternative treatments of cancer are bogus, subjectivity has no place in science, "soul talk" about illness is rubbish. This is exactly the kind of dismissive arrogance that drives millions of people away from conventional doctors. Every illness has a subjective component -- after all, to be sick is to change your moods and emotions, and severe illness causes one to examine primal issues like life and death and the meaning of existence. Do these subjective changes affect healing? Obviously they do, or we wouldn't have the placebo effect, which comes into play at least 30% of the time in illness.

Scientific medicine by and large ignores wellness, prevention, and alternative medicine in general. On a daily basis doctors don't deal in these things; few take courses in medical school centered on them.

Yep, there they go again. Big Pharma and Big Medicine with their "empirical data" nonsense. Don't they know that we are all mystical beings? Only by promoting "wellness" and treating all illness and injury with hugging will we ever be healthy. Why don't those mean doctors get it? They're seriously harshing our buzz!

There's more if you want to read it. It gives me a sour stomach, trying to swallow all that stupidity. Maybe I'll try a homeopathic remedy. Then I'll try something that actually works.