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Call me Tom. Come as you are, we're all just guys, y'know. (Sorry, too much Morning Coffee Notes).
Could Tom Morris demonstrate his evidence please?
The presence of promises over alternative medicine in the Greens manifesto shows that there is some political demand. The fact that the NHS is funding these therapies means that they have been able, thanks to political pressure, to overcome the guidelines which ordinary medicines goes through.
When it was proposed that the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital should be closed, so that the budget could be invested in the ordinary hospitals, there was a huge outcry about it. There is a political demand for this, despite the fact that there is no evidence homeopathy works beyond a lot of testimonials. The Lancet, in 1997, published a meta-analysis stating: "We found insufficient evidence... that homeopathy is clearly efficacious for any single clinical condition" (emphasis mine).
If you have a medicine developed in the labs of GlaxoSmithKline, we (quite rightly) demand that it goes through a procedure of clinical and scientific testing to ensure that it's both safe and efficient. But if we have someone kitted out in the Sacred Ways Of The Holy Orient, then the ordinary procedures of actually checking whether this shit works go out of the window. If you think tai chi or yoga or herbalism work, cool. But if it's to be funded from NHS coffers, we should demand that it conforms to the same kind of testing and safety procedures that ordinary (Western, scientific, women-hating, reductionist, "Newton's rape manual") medicine goes through.
Money $hot: So you can believe what you like, and take vitamin supplements 'til your piss turns orange, but secular humanism seems to me to be a warty outgrowth of Christianity and its determined faith that 'mankind' can be master of its own destiny, and your faith in science to the exclusion of all other narratives and stories we like to tell each other has not done so well for the planet this past century.
No, only cured smallpox, created a vaccine preventing millions from suffering from tuberculosis, created aeroplanes and landed on the moon. Not a great deal when you come to think of it. Do I exclude narratives and stories? Of course not. I watch movies, read novels, watch theatre productions, go to art galleries, study philosophy and comparative religion, take an interest in anthropology and history. But I still think that coffee enemas and prayer don't cure cancer, and that pretending they do is an insult both to human reason and to the unfortunate people who are suffering from serious medical conditions. |
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