Supreme Church of the Corporate States of America

Monday's decision saw the so-called Supreme Court voted 5-4 in favor of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood to determine that corporations have religious rights.  In the most basal of responses, we would most likely see this as a problem of religious encroachment or the anti-science , but in practice, I'd put this down as an issue of corporate power and the corporatist state of the serving Supreme Court justices.  The thing is not just that corporations run things in accordance with their religious beliefs -- that happens quite often.  Hobby Lobby themselves does give a lot of money to religious charities.  Chick-Fil-A is closed on Sundays and religious holidays as well as printing Bible references on their containers.  There's nothing really problematic about that per se.  These sorts of actions, though, really operate on a scale of funds, when you get right down to it (i.e. what they do with their money).  What this decision really allows is for the religious beliefs of the owners of corporations to determine factors on the lives of their employees.  Now, you're not really dealing with the money alone, but with the lives of employees.

Why I say this is really a matter of corporate power is the fact that it rather blatantly ignores the religious beliefs of the employee and favors the rights of the employers.  In the case of Hobby Lobby, they qualify as what is known as a "tightly held" corporation, where a small group within the family owns at least 50% of the stock, which makes them the sole controlling interest.  In theory, this implies that company policy is theirs to decide and no one can override them, even if all other shareholders are against it.  But there are things corporations generally can't do regardless of how much they might like to.  Generally speaking, when we are dealing with issues of basic rights, the rights of one individual end where another individual's rights begin.  This is basically the inevitable flow of equal protection under the law.  One person's freedom of religion is all well and good, but they can't take their religion to the point of its destruction of another person's free exercise of their beliefs.  Herein lies the core problem with the idea of giving a corporation the privilege of religious exercise -- a corporation doesn't just consist of a single religious belief.  You will have employees who are of different beliefs and different views.  The Supreme Court's decision is basically saying that the rights of those who own the company are more important than the rights of the employees...  although in a sense, this is practically equivalent to saying that only the rights of the corporations can ever matter.

In search of Scientific Journalism

There are very few cases out there of science in the media which I can actually take as reliable.  Those of you out there who have read some of my earlier rants know how badly I wanted to eviscerate the fools who wrote about DCA and cancer treatment.  There is a general trend I find when it comes to science stories in the mainstream media.  They tend to be obscene scare stories, or stories of outrageous new breakthroughs.  Occasionally, you get something about strange occurrences or weird anomalies, but they are pretty silent entries on the back pages and nobody ever really remembers them.  The stuff that makes the front page are either stories that say how terrifying something is, or stories that say how amazingly wonderful something is.

Your iPhone could be giving you brain cancer!  But acai berry cures Alzheimer's!  The Large Hadron Collider will cause a black hole to form in the center of the Earth...  and they predict that it will happen on December 21, 2012.  Make sure to stock up on chocolate and red wine, because they will prevent all illnesses with their "essential" flavonols.  Don't you have a flavonol deficiency?  Well, it shouldn't bother you anyway, because every vaccine you take is full of poison!

It amazes me at times when you see a news program where someone will have a doctor interviewed, who has the benefit of decades of research, large-scale data, longitudinal studies, and scientific development on his side...  and then they will ensure that his time on air is shared with some horseshit peddling activist whose knowledge of medicine lies somewhere in the realm of a tapeworm's understanding of quantum mechanics...  or maybe even as poor as Michele Bachmann's grasp of anything that happens to actually be true.

The "Natural" Trap

This is one of those areas that I've been hearing a great deal lately, and I think there's no end to the degree to which I find this brand of mythology annoying.  It's particularly funny because just about everybody "knows" it to be true, and this most disappointingly includes those who have the background knowledge which indicates that they should know better.  It's the fallacy of believing that "natural" products are invariably better than "artificial" ones.  I wish I had a rope to tie people down to a desk and force them to read scientific papers and watch countless videos on biochemistry until they are stripped of this nonsense.

It's darn near impossible these days to find things that fall under the "health food" category that isn't labeled as "natural" on some part of the packaging.  Common supermarket products will be sure to tout their superiority on the basis of having "all-natural" ingredients.  It's well they do, right?  I mean, everybody knows that natural is always better than artificial... right?

Come now, you knew that was coming

I've Seen Stranger Objections.

I'm rather accustomed to hearing from people who object to my sentiments.  Hell, you can't be a vocal atheist, and not expect at least some people to hate your guts.  Idle threats come all the time, but it's been many years since I've seen a Molotov hurled in my general direction.  Most of them are pretty typical in making the most absurd assumptions, and it is quite easy to tear these people down.  If they find themselves shaken by the demonstrable absurdity of their beliefs, then that's a good thing.  You won't ever grow out of infantile ideas if you don't realize the necessity of it.

There are always a few that lead down the path of some sort of appeal to emotion, as if such trifling games could ever work on me.  Upon my railing on tradition in Indian classical music, one particular individual, who admitted he wasn't all that knowledgeable about music, took umbrage with my railing against tradition on a universal level.  And while the idea of someone being in favor of tradition itself is nothing new, this correspondence took a different form than I was used to.  He said that I should feel ashamed of the incredible hypocrisy I exhibit in associating myself in any way with India (or at least one of its cultural components) while at the same time diverging so far in opinion from the nation's greatest hero.

That hero he was referring to, was of course, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.  Just as a clarification to my readers in America, that is his actual name -- a lot of people, particularly in the U.S., think "Mahatma" (great soul) is his actual name rather than a nickname.

I'm a bit surprised that he came up in that context because Gandhiji's position on tradition is not one that often gets associated with his name.  We tend to remember the passive civil disobedience, the railing against caste formality, the attempts to reconcile Hindus and Muslims, etc.  Nobody remembers much more, because we like to paint our heroes only in the lights that glorify their positive achievements.  I don't think many people remember his attitude toward black Africans, whom he considered quite beneath humanity.  Similarly, Gandhiji's attitudes about tradition are not usually one of the topics one hears about when he comes up in discussion.  Nonetheless, the fellow is correct in his assessment that I disagree with the "nation's greatest hero" on the matter of tradition.  I'm not going to apologize for that or ever pretend that just because Gandhi said it, it's therefore worthy of respect.

If that makes me no longer a Desi in your eyes, then so be it.

You just know this will spur hatred of "Big Pharma"

Here's an interesting article I came across --
http://hubpages.com/hub/Scientists_cure_cancer__but_no_one_takes_notice

It's a very nice sentiment...  Somehow, the miracle cure for cancer has been found and now, no one need suffer chemo or radiation ever again!

Well, the problem is that this isn't really a very accurate picture.  First of all, the original studies on DCA started back in 2007, and it was very much in the lab-rat phase back then.  The study that the article is referencing is basically referring to one of the first major tests to be done on human tissue (which also wasn't that recent).  Tested on brain, lung, and breast tissue, and in every case showing a clean record of killing the cancer and leaving the healthy cells untouched.  How awesome is that?

Okay, well, there's one little oversight here.  The tests are being done on tissue cultures.  Yes, they're live cultures, but live cultures are not the same thing as patients.  I also find it interesting that the article only mentions tests that were successful, but not tests which weren't.  Did they simply not do tests on liver tissue, or bone marrow, or stomach cancer?  Either way, you can't escape the fact that patients have things like active immune systems, lymph networks, a nervous system, and a host of competing pathogens in their bodies, and all that can easily throw a spanner in the works.  Testing on live lab animals involved oral delivery by adding DCA to their drinking water.  This is probably fine for animals that small, but for humans, you might need more targeted delivery than that...  especially if we're talking about cancer that is more aggressive and/or has metastasized.  That technology exists, though, since we're already using it to localize the delivery of chemotherapy.  It could just as easily be used for DCA delivery.  So the research is definitely promising, but it's still a ways out.

The mistake a lot of people are going to make is derived from the fact that DCA is a drug that has been around for a long time, any existing patents on it have long expired, and it's therefore very difficult to make any money off of it.  They assume from that, that the pharmaceutical industry won't be interested in it because there's no money in it.  Especially not given the fact that most cancers are slow-acting through which people survive for several years, during which they'll be heavily medicated, and all that adds up to dollars.  Seriously, though, there's another point you're missing.  Because there are no patents on it, there is no need for researchers to rush the process of science.  Clinical trials on live patients are still yet to be done, and that's a necessary component before any drug goes to market.  We often see drugs rushed through testing on account of the need to protect their patent value and get the drug out on the market before the patents expire and somebody can sell a generic version of it, and that can have a big cost.  Without that pressure, the process of testing can be that much more thorough and the "medical establishment" people so fear can ensure that it is indeed safe and effective, and also how to maximize its efficacy.  I think that's worth not making a furor over it here and now.  The furor will exist within the confines of the medical community, but that will simply be the spark to spur on further research.

What I fear most, though, is that quacks out there are likely to jump on this, and take advantage of desperate people.  For those who are suffering through some form of cancer, especially terminally ill patients, the notion of some perfect miracle cure is something that will have some inexorable allure, and there hundreds, if not thousands of scam artists waiting to prey on those weak and suffering masses with unapproved and uncertain treatments.  This is evil, plain and simple, and the oversimplified articles with a headline that suggests cancer has been cured can open up avenues for repugnant quacks to do their quacking.  Where's Michael Specter when you need him?