The Reith Lectures on Radio 4 are one of the last vestiges of a pre-dumbed down society. This years lectures by Professor Michael Sandel on a ‘New Citizenship’ started wondrously last Tuesday with Sandel making the important point that we inadvertently allowed a market economy to turn us into a market society. You read a transcript of the lecture here.
Sandel is brilliant, compassionate and funny but it was a reference to medicine that really caught my ear. Said the good professor of philosophy from Harvard:
” If you’ve ever seen the television commercials in America on the evening news, you could be forgiven for thinking that the greatest health crisis in the world is not malaria or river blindness or sleeping sickness, but a rampant epidemic of erectile dysfunction.”
Now here I must remind that the good professor of philosophy that erectile dysfunction (ED) is a life threatening problem that should not be treated lightly. In fact it threatens not only the future well being of man but man’s very existence on the planet. A pandemic of ED might seem like good news for sperm banks but we would be mistaken in putting any kind of trust in any type of bank in future.
In today’s lecture, Sandel, referred to Aristotle in looking at the way we value things. I think this is important in regarding the provision of homeopathy on the NHS.
Sandel:
“So this idea that there are certain proper ends or purposes to social practices, this idea suggests that to determine the right way of valuing things, we have to figure out the purpose, the end of the social practice in question. And this idea is an idea that goes all the way back to Aristotle. Let me give you a very brief summary of Aristotle’s theory of justice. Justice means giving people what they deserve.”
So do the substantial minority of people who want homeopathy, deserve to get it on the NHS? Obviously they do. But not according to commentators like medical professors Michael Baum, Edzard Ernst and David Coquhoun. These doctors in my opinion, are less interested in what the people deserve than in forcing you to accept that they know a lot better than you what is good for you. But as you might expect there is a difference in the way a professor of medicine views the world from how a professor of philosophy might do.
Two more Reith lectures to go on Tues: 23 and 30th June. Highly recommended.
Posted: 16.06.2009
Current Affairs Homeopathy
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Red Alert!
Half of the planet’s people are at risk of a new epidemic called ‘Cell Phone Elbow’ This is not a joke! We are talking about 3 billion people at risk of suffering from Cubital Tunnel Syndrome, the latest form of overuse injury which may be even worse than Blackberry Thumb.
This is how it works: [...]
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Posted: 04.06.09
Current Affairs Health Provocative Therapy
The third person to be visited by The Pieman can come as no surprise to anyone. It is fellow doctor, Prof. David Colquhoun, a man who won’t mind me saying has devoted huge amounts of time and effort to attempt to debunk various forms of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). His website, is as fine [...]
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Posted: 28.05.09
The Pie Man Strikes!
In a strangely incoherent article in The Mail yesterday, the journalist, Daniel Martin, epitomises the current confusion about alternative medicine that reigns in the UK and its NHS. This time it’s acupuncture that gets it in the neck - or perhaps in the back as the article speaks a lot about back pain.
Calling acupuncture (a [...]
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Posted: 26.05.09
Health
The Daily Telegraph, Front page 21.05.2009
Scanning through the front pages of the newspapers today, I came across something refreshing and extraordinary – a gorgeous picture of a duck’s head on the front page of The Daily Telegraph.
Now apparently this is all about the ‘revelation’ that an MP claimed expenses concerning a ‘duck [...]
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Posted: 21.05.09
Current Affairs Musings
In my last post I promised to give my view of why eminent physicians have grossly insulted practitioners of CAM by accusing them of lying to their patients.
For example:
Prof. David Colquhoun: Under the heading The Lying Dilemma “To maximise the benefit of alternative medicine, it is necessary to lie to the patient [...]
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Posted: 10.05.09
Homeopathy
Oh no! I thought I was the only one provoking smokers to quit by ordering them to Smoke More!
Of course this was in the context of a session of Provocative Therapy, where I always obtain specific permission to satirise, make absurd suggestions and advise people to do more of their aberrant behaviour. Only then do [...]
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Posted: 07.05.09
Provocative Therapy
Debate at Guy’s Hospital
Date: Tuesday 28 Apr 09
Time: 6pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, New Hunt’s House, Guy’s Hospital
Motion: ‘This house believes that complementary and alternative therapies do more harm than good.’
Here we go again… Another debate in which the motion aims to hammer complementary, alternative, holistic or integrated medicine into the ground. I reported on the [...]
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Posted: 26.04.09
Homeopathy
In my last post, I warned that anybody using ‘lack of evidence’ as a club with which to bash homeopathy or other well-established complementary medical approaches exclusively - will be visited by the Pie Man.
The Pie Man exists purely to bring closer to the attention of these critics that a mere 13% of commonly used [...]
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Posted: 05.04.09
Current Affairs Feature Articles Homeopathy The Pie Man Strikes!
Reith, Sandel, Morality, Society and Homeopathy
