… and damned if you don’t.
The Federal Government is taking heat for spending $2.5B in taxpayer money to fund research in to alternative therapies, only to find that they (surprise!) don’t work.
In a crappy economy where we all like to fingerpoint about who’s wasting whose money on what, it’s easy to to pooh-pooh spending on acupressure and echinacea. Â But the agencies that safeguard the nation’s health are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
If they don’t fund studies into herbal and alternate therapies, they are accused of being in bed with Big Pharma and not serving the national interest by exploring cheaper natural therapies.
But if they do, and they get negative results, they are accused of wasting taxpayer dollars AND being in bed with Big Pharma anyway.
In other words, if they find anything but glowing reports of utility, they are screwed.
God Bless the American Public and their love/hate relationship with science.
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Besides – just because something wasn’t arrived at by the scientific method doesn’t mean it can’t work. Remember digitalis and curare? You have to check that stuff.
Will
people just don’t understand the nature of research.
It blows my mind just how poor the public understanding of what we do really is. And by “we” I mean research institutions in general. No me specifically.