From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4@msn.com)
Date: Sat Mar 30 2002 - 06:39:50 PST
----- Original Message -----
From: What's New
Sent: Friday, March 29, 2002 3:37 PM
To: ljk4@msn.com
Subject: What's New for Mar 29, 2002
WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 29 Mar 02 Washington, DC
1. ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE: THE CLINTON COMMISSION'S CATCH-22.
Created by Bill Clinton two years ago, the White House Commission
on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy has delivered a
massive final report (WN 8 Mar 02), but there's a catch. What
the Commissioners want is respect: they want to be licensed by
the state and reimbursed by health-insurance plans; they want to
see CAM courses at prestigious medical schools and programs to
educate the public. In short, they want CAM to be treated just
like real medicine. Good plan! Under it's new director, Stephen
Straus, the NIH Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine
has already begun doing just what the Commissioners call for:
applying the same standards to CAM that are routinely required of
medical research. In 1998, the New England Journal of Medicine
pointed out the catch-22: "There cannot be two kinds of medicine,
conventional and alternative. There is only medicine that has
been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that
works and medicine that may or may not work." In other words, if
some CAM treatment survived rigorous testing, it would no longer
be CAM, it would simply be medicine. So, is CAM making the
transition? Uh, no. The most popular CAM therapies survived for
centuries simply because they were never subjected to randomized,
double-blind trials. It is certainly possible that important
medical advances will emerge from the gaggle of CAM therapies,
but so far, under rigorous testing, not one has been demonstrated
to be efficacious, while several herbal supplements appear to be
dangerous. "'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' Yossarian
observed. 'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed."
2. ALTERNATIVE PUBLISHING: COMMUNICATING SCIENCE BY FULL-PAGE AD.
Scientists going through the March 17 Sunday New York Times were
startled to find a paper titled "The Collapse of the Big Bang and
the Gaseous Sun," by Pierre-Marie Robitaille, published as a full
page ad. A professor in Radiology at Ohio State, Robitaille had
built the first 8 Tesla MRI. But this paper/ad was outside his
field, cost a bundle (about $125 thousand) and didn't have a
clear target audience the public couldn't read it, but neither
was it in the mathematical language of physics. On the other
hand, Robitalle didn't have to put up with peer review and he had
full control over timing. The timing raised eyebrows. Ohio is
in the midst of a heated debate over a move to put Intelligent
Design on an equal footing with Darwinism in the classroom (WN 15
Feb 02). ID is the fallback position of the creationists, who
hate the Big Bang as much as they hate Darwin. Their strategy
has been to portray the Big Bang as a divisive issue, with a
powerful science establishment seeking to suppress dissenting
viewpoints. Robitaille, who did not return our calls, seems to
cast himself in the role of a lonely defender of truth who must
spend a year's salary to get his side of the story out.
THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the
University or the American Physical Society, but they should be.
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