Back in the Smokin’ Toads days of the early 90’s, I ran into a lot of hippies and characters at the Electric Studio that had plenty of entertaining and/or ridiculous conspiracies and such to talk about (I actually possess the entire xeroxed tract laying out the case that the Moon Shot was staged). One well-known Venice character was always obsessed with the latest health-fad of the day, and I remember hearing about the whole “high-dose vitamins cure cancer” con back then. Jefferey would corner a hapless stoner on the couch and go on and on about the researcher “from the Linus Pauling Institute” who had not only discovered that vitamins cure heart disease, but that they cured cancer better than chemotherapy. Of course, the “pharmaceutical companies” wanted to quash this information, but Matthias Rath was willing to sell you a bunch of life saving high-dose vitamins. I’m sure there was a high-colonic or a detox regimen in there somewhere too.
I never gave this stuff another thought until I read this newly released chapter from Ben Goldacre’s “Bad Science.” Besides the point that someone as vile as Rath is allowed into any kind of polite company, is the damage that the supposed “universal, God-given morals” that religious followers are always pointing to can actually do to real humans when it inserts itself between science and a cure. Rath is not pushing religion, of course, but the magical thinking that is at the core of his appeal is the same thinking that causes us to do this:
Development charities funded by US Christian groups refuse to engage with birth control, and any suggestion of abortion, even in countries where being in control of your own fertility could mean the difference between success and failure in life, is met with a cold, pious stare. These impractical moral principles are so deeply entrenched that Pepfar, the US Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, has insisted that every recipient of international aid money must sign a declaration expressly promising not to have any involvement with sex workers.
Sex workers are a major vector of AIDS transmission, and so are dirty needles – yet politians under the spell of magical thinkers who only want to condem and proscribe behaviour continue to insist that we not direct resources to combatting disease at these points. This is absurd.
The people in Goldacre’s article allow millions to waste away of AIDS, but at least we can understand the greed at the heart of their deception. Those who campaign against condoms or needle-exchanges, for instance, have no such excuse or motivation.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: morality, scams, science
