Pseudo-Science At The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post has more than its share of pseudo-science in posts on medicine. Rahul K. Parikh, a physician writing at Salon, looks at the pseudo-science passed off there and attributes it to Ariana Huffington’s personal beliefs.

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    Eclectic Radical says:

    I agree with the article, when it comes to the content of HuffPo regarding health ‘science.’ I generally skip anything including the word ‘health’ and not directly related to political questions on health care reform when it slips into the daily headline email.  I certainly ignore most of the ‘living’ section and the stuff posted there because a lot of it is just silly.
     
    However, the writer’s failure to understand that blogs (almost by definition) are places ‘to dump any opinion you might have and are willing to not get paid to write about’ forms a serious weakness in his article. I say this as a blogger myself. 🙂
     
    I can certainly understand why he would seek out specialized medical/sceince bloggers for ethical advice about scholarly blogging, but HuffPo is not a scholarly blog. It is a general blog that has allowed its content providers to post about anything else they might care about. Which means that one gets weird posts by people with weird ideas. Many of them choose to cover scholarly topics in a faux-scholarly manner, and this is certainly a weakness in some of the content.
     
    It’s worth noting that Arianna Huffington (as well as Bill Maher and a few other famous leftie pundits) are just crazy about the weirder side of alternative medicine and the ‘healthy diet.’ Maher is a PETA member whose scorn for the American diet is as great as his scorn for people who go to church. The author’s piece very accurately lists Huffington’s confused health ideas. Certainly one must critically review their opinions on such topics and, certainly, they should be a little more responsible and a little less ‘authoritarian’ about dispensing their views.
     
    Yet it’s also important to remember these people, despite being potentially dangerous and certainly worthy of criticism, are themselves victims of faux-medical con men. If more effort were made to deal with the con men themselves, the issue would be far less of an issue.
     

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