For a quiet winter's evening, I'd like to highlight a great piece of journalism by CBC's consumer investigative show Marketplace called "Cure or Con?" on homeopathy. Despite the obligatory Cavuto-mark in the title, the piece asks all the right questions and doesn't shy from objectively letting viewers know that homeopathy is sheer quackery without any empirical, rational or even theoretical basis for any effect beyond the placebo one.
I really love the "tip sheet" they posted for anyone considering using it:
1. Check with your doctor or medical professional before choosing homeopathic treatment for any serious condition.
2. Do not delay medical treatment for cancer or any other potentially fatal disease in favour of homeopathic therapies.
3. If you choose to use a homeopathic vaccination program, be aware that there is no strong scientific literature that suggests you or your child will be protected from serious diseases.
Highlights of the 22 min show include a group of skeptics doing the James Randi thing and consuming entire bottles of homeopathic sleeping pills, a mother who has "vaccinated" her child against polio and other serious diseases using homeopathic vaccines and of course a lab test of homeopathic pills showing them to be nothing but sugar. Homeopathy survives because most of us don't care, and the few people who believe in it lobby for it aggressively, but it's dangerous and people (especially children) die because they take sugar pills instead of real medicine. The homeopathic industry waged an online campaign to counter Marketplace for taking them on, so I'm happy to counter them and highlight solid journalism with worldwide relevance. Watch it here.
I used to laugh at stuff like this as a relic of a bygone era of unmoored irrationality, but clearly those days can return, if they ever really left. In an era of scam mortgages, scam credit cards, a scam stock-market I guess a scam-medicine industry is also to be expected.
This weekend, PBS will air the last new regular episode from journalist extrordinaire, Bill Moyers, in his show Bill Moyers Journal. It's hard to think of this except in terms like "tragedy" and "unmitigated disaster." Moyers has more than earned his retirement (semi retirement one hopes) but still I lament the withdrawal of a clarion, unabashed liberal voice from the discourse. I can't help but compare him to Justice Stevens, whose retirement will likely lead to a rightward shift on the court, so too it is nearly inevitable that Moyers' replacement at PBS will be at minimum unable and probably unwilling to provide the kind of clear commentary and relentless analysis Moyers has provided. No one else has the stature to take on the sacred cows of the DC elite discourse the way Moyers does.
Before I go further, please go set your PVR to record or jot a note somewhere to watch the program whenever it airs on your PBS affiliate. It would be a nice send off for the retiring warrior to get a decent spike in the ratings and kick start one last round of discussion as he has done so often with his many excellent programs.
I cannot hope to do Moyers' career justice (though Eric Alterman comes close in a well worth reading piece comparing Moyers favourably to Murrow, and this 3-part series on his role in founding the Peace Corps is amazing) so I would like to use the occasion to highlight the ongoing importance of public media in the modern era, and mourn the lack of support given it in America.
In the last diary, I outlined the ongoing collapse of journalism as we know it. My conclusion is that this is a public good, and a highly salutatory one (likely indispensable) for the kind of egalitarian and Just society we want. Since it evidently a market failure without a viable business model, government will need to provide it.
Fortunately, such institutions already exist. In America, PBS and NPR have survived (barely) a long era of government under leaders who really despise them. Now is the time to revive these institutions, and rebuild them for the 21st Century.
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