I’m making a very brief post today. I simply want to bring to your attention the attached essay by Dannagal Young published in the Opinion section of today’s edition of the New York Times. The writer recounts her personal experience as someone who out of desperation tried everything to cure the pernicious brain cancer that afflicted her husband, including misguided remedies. The latter were offered by those dismissive of scientific medicine and, not surprisingly, were totally ineffective. I suppose Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA initiatives to disparage vaccine therapies and defund important NIH and CDC research are driving or encouraging the public’s return to a time when superstitious practices were accepted ways to cure disease. To quote the writer:
“I see what MAHA is offering. It’s not really about making America healthy. It’s about giving people the illusion of agency in a complicated and scary world.“
Take the time to read the essay; it’s worth it, if only to provide a moment to pause and think about what is happening to our public understanding of science and its methodology.
This article is a cautionary tale, sorely needed today. It recalls to my mind a similar grasping for a magic cure for cancer back in the 1970s and ‘80s when people began touting treatment with Laetrile (some substance found in apricot or peach pits, if I remember correctly.) When it was debunked here in the USA, some people went out of country and began visiting a variety of charlatans in Mexico, who claimed they could cure cancer… and cheaply! No cure ever took place by using Laetrile, but the deaths of the patients did, i. e. cancer doesn’t give a sorcerer’s damn about religious rituals or conspiracy theories, it just keeps rolling along. Only continuous scientific and medical research—yes, some of it funded by Big Pharma (for those “in-a-perfect-world” types who feel they absolutely must point that out) but most of it depending on government funding—will solve the incredibly complex puzzles of the human body. Not by saying, “Abra Cadabra” or putting the tail of a newt under the patient’s pillow, but by slow, methodical application of scientific method. That the people of this nation appear to be sliding back into some form of pre-modern superstition (where science and medicine are reviled while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-science allies are allowed to destroy the bastions of the most advanced medical research on this planet) shows, to an astonishing degree, the colossal, cataclysmic ignorance in our public discourse and its elevation as our national standard for modern healthcare.
Richard L. Marrash 