I’m suggesting to you that you spend $12 at the American Medical Association (AMA) website to read, and download, an OFFICIAL AMA COMMENTARY, and an absolutely SHOCKING article BASHING the quackbusters. In fact, the word “bashing” is an UNDERSTATEMENT. The AMA couldn’t have made it’s OFFICIAL position on the quackbuster’s attack on AltMed any clearer.
Opinion by Consumer Advocate Tim Bolen
The Quackbusters would like to give us the impression that they represent American mainstream medical thinking, when in fact they do not…
If anyone, in their publications, and commentaries, could claim to represent that mainstream medical viewpoint in the United States, it would certainly have to be the American Medical Association (AMA).
It looks to me that the AMA doesn’t like the “quackbuster’s“ tactics one bit, and has clearly said so in published commentary. You can go read their five page article (if you pay the $12) titled “Battling Quackery – Attitudes About Micronutrient Supplementation in American Academic Medicine,” printed in the Archives of Internal Medicine, yourself, first, but here is the conclusion of their commentary. Words you’ll never read on quackwatch.com…
“There are only three important questions when evaluating a treatment. Does it work? What are the adverse effects? How much does it cost? Ideally, the treatment or the guild to which the proponents of the treatment belong should be irrelevant to the fundamental questions of efficacy, toxicity, and cost.”
The article’s authors, James Goodwin MD, and Michael Tangum MD, compared the assault on AltMed to the attack by the Catholic Church against Galileo, because Galileo had the temerity to take his findings, and his message, to the masses by writing his work in Italian instead of the Latin. Latin was the language of the official learned. AltMed, worldwide, has bypassed the process of arguing merits in the status quo, self-styled “scientific” elite community, and has taken it’s message to the people.
So, if this is the AMA’s position on the issue of “AltMed” then where does that put the “quackbusters,” or as I call them, the “quackpots?”
The dictionary defines “crackpot” as “a person who is eccentric, impractical, unrealistic, or insane…” To me, “quackbusters” fit that definition when they describe the world’s leading-edge health professionals as “quacks,” and leading-edge modalities as “quackery.”
And, the AMA agrees…
Stay tuned…
Tim Bolen – Consumer Advocate