Doctors for the what now?

I onced blogged about the inane self-conceit of organisations that have the appelation of "Doctors for..." in the title. It was called "Strippers for industrialisation, and other types of stupid" and still garners alot of misdirected google traffic. (Suckers).

So far, along with my favourite lumps of ca-ca to kick over at Doctors for the Environment (nope, still won't link them), I have found Doctors for Native Forests (they have the ENTIRE text of Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax" on their site), Doctors for Global Health (which makes sense for a change), Clown Doctors for Kids (acceptable), Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (OK), Doctors for Human Rights (meh) and Doctors for Life (Eew. I'm not even going there...)

But wait, whats this? Enter: Doctors for a Sustainable Population. Somewhere in the back of my head I started hearing that music that always played when Darth Vader entered the room. Then I noticed that they used to be called "Medical Association for Planetary Survival" (Why would you change that?)

I'll also give you a dollar and a big sloppy kiss if you can guess who they list as their "associated organisations". Oh, alright, I'll tell you. Its Sustainable Population Australia and, yep, pucker up, Doctors for the Environment Australia.

Doctors for a Sustainable Population are, interestingly, not too worked up about climate change, but are pretty freaked by peak oil. Unfortunately, they think they are just the guys to solve the problem, only because they are doctors, they think what they need to do is implement:

sustainable population targets by family planning and population reduction in the most socially acceptable way.

First, define which is the most socially acceptable way to enforce a reduction in population? I would be interested to hear it. And why is this a doctor's job, anyway? They say:

DSP believes that doctors, a relatively large group trained in science, are the most likely to realise the danger to the future to us and our descendants, and to be effective in explaining this to society.

Wow, this type of thing could never get out of hand, could it?

Also, referring to doctors as trained in science is kind of cute, because I can tell you this for free: The degree I'm studying does NOT give any training in the key basis of the methodology that is science. We are being trained as technicians. Its vocational training of a fairly ad hoc nature. Scientific methodology is assumed knowledge because once upon a time it had already been acquired by this stage. These days, though, you can even get through a PhD without ever having to comes to terms with the P for Philosophy. As a second-generation scientist, I was somewhat appalled to discover that most of my peers actually confuse science with a belief system, and wouldn't notice an Aristotelian logical fallacy if it put on a fruity hat and did the macarena.

Why do these types of people immediately jump to the conclusion that we have to MAKE people have less children? Clearly they have never had a 10 pound incontinence-making device exit a sensitive area of their anatomy. Most of the evidence from the developed world would indicate that if you give women access to birth-control and the choice between buying shoes and having so many children their uteri fall out, they tend to go with 1.8 offspring* and the sexy, faux-leather strappy numbers that show off some toe-cleavage.**

* Yes, thats right. Australia's total fertility rate has been below replacement level since 1976, hence immigration. Even developed Catholic countries like Spain have very low fertility rates. Spain's is lower than Australia's at around 1.3. Italy's is around the same as Spain's, probably because of all those fabulous shoes.
** I actually loathe shoe-shopping. The whole retail industry seems to be full of terrible, ill fitting shoes, and the only ones I like either never have my size, or are only available in white (white!) or cost in excess of $300 (which should be illegal). I was merely trying to make a point. Insert favoured retail item of your choice. e.g. an education or a new set of Makita power drills.

Tofurkey of the week

I have met sputum samples I like better than some of the folks over at Doctors for the Environment Australia (abbreviation DEA, not to be confused with the more police-type DEA who have a history of harshing the mellow of people like the enviro doctors).

Apart from the stupid name (Rival to my own NGO that I think I will call DR GRRRL -"Doctor Girls for Rum Reggae Rollerskating and Lurv"), they have at other times pushed for:

* An end to democracy as a cure for climate change. No sh1t.

* Advocating to patients that they stop eating meat to curb climate change.

* Population control and the payment of a "climate tax" for having children outside of the allotted quota. (As if we aren't paying already...)

* And most offensive of all, repeatedly spamming my work in-box with requests to bake cakes or shave my head to prevent climate change. For the record, I have shaved my head before, and not to raise money OR awareness for any cause. It was one more thing I can add to the list of "questionable stuff I have done to try and impress men". What it did was impress my lesbian flatmate, but thats another story.

The DEA are by and large not the type of people who embody the traits one would normally associate with the noble profession of medicine. They flagrantly disregard the principle of primum non nocere (first do no harm) and generally violate the bounds of good taste.* Just ask yourself if these are the sort of people you would want to invite to a dinner party or stick their fingers up your bottom fossicking for cancer? Which is why it is with great delight that I can report that they are now at least somewhat implicated in the Greenpeace GM wheat whipper-snippering fiasco.

Turns out an open letter protestiing the GM wheat trials was circulated (mostly via Greenpeace) from a group of concerned scientists and doctors. The inference being that they provided weight, urgency and grounds to Greenpeace's recent illegal bout of lawn-care activism.

That is, until one of the key signatories, Professor Dave Schubert, realised what Greenpeace had done and quickly moved to denounce their actions and distance himself from the organisation. Two of the eight signatories were Australian medical doctors from our old friends over at Doctors for the Environment. "No comment", they explained, making them at least slightly smarter than Shane Rattenberry.

It has also been pointed out that the open letter is eerily similar to one circulated previously by Greenpeace, with some of the same co-signatories, which protested Golden Rice trials in 2009, and cites the same evidence for concern. After corresponding with Prof. Schubert, one GM pundit came to the conclusion that not only did this signatory not even know the stated reason for the proposed wheat trial in the first place, but also did not write the letter he "signed", nor knew who the co-signatories were. The reasonable assumption being that Greenpeace itself authored the letter, and not very well, if their cut-and-paste job are anything to go by. Read further here. Nice to know they are keeping up to date with the latest evidence base.


* Thinking further on this, they also defy the Declaration of Geneva, one of the more widespread medical oaths that most graduating medical school adhere to, wherein the medical graduate swears they "...will not permit considerations of...party politics...to intervene between my duty..."

Living proof that you can't legislate against stupidity....

Professor David Shearman has been at it again. When not busy doing secretarial things over at Doctors for the Environment, he can be found publishing books calling for the end of democracy as a solution to impending climate doom. Seriously, is this the guy you want to perform a rectal exam on you?
He also has his own website, the address of which is his own name with the designation .org. Cute. If you listen closely, you can almost feel the hysteria.
Anyway, he's managed to publish a poorly disguised propaganda piece / self-advertorial over at The Australian calling for the end of coal power due to its alleged deleterious health effects in first world nations. He doesn't actually cite anything, just some "studies" that apparently show that coal particulate is bad for you, but then gets confused between pollution in the form of particulate matter and "pollution" in the form of carbon dioxide that, yawn, will kill us all via climate (but forgets to mention the offshoot of bigger tomatoes). He does a particularly poor job of seperating out the sources and impact of coal pollution, and manages to generate a big cloud of poorly thought out hysteria. For example:

The health burden of coal in Australia is estimated conservatively at $2.6 billion a year. There are also economic losses due to land pollution and degradation and the open mining of good agricultural land in the face of the projected world food crisis.
The main health impact of coal is caused through climate change. The World Health Organisation ranks climate change as one of the greatest threats to public health.
Morbidity and mortality are increasing in the developing world as the effects of climate change take hold of the environment. As the world's fourth largest producer of hard coal and the world's biggest exporter, from which we garner $20bn each year, our contribution to this pollution is far greater than our culpability as the world's greatest domestic per capita producer of greenhouse emissions.

Etc. Etc.
Im not sure exactly what Dr. David lectured in to make him an emeritus professor of medicine, but I somehow think it wasn't epidemiology or public health, at least not in the conventional sense, and begs the question of why he is no longer a professor?
For starters, yes, coal fire particulate is definitely bad for you, but it is particularly bad for you if you are burning it in your loungeroom, which is what people without central, coal-powered (or nuclear) electricity plants do. A quick read through the WHO publication "The health effects of indoor air pollution in developing countries" may prove informative for him. If he doesn't have the time, or finds that reading about babies dying of pulmonary disease or women with premature cataracts makes him go soft, I could probably sum up the entire booklet with just one of their diagrams:

Oh, look. Electricity is better for you. Who'd have thunk it.
I would also hazard a guess that his emeritus status didn't stem from a career in health economics, either. To wit:

Renewable energy industries create more jobs than coalmining; they are generally safer and much healthier for workers and communities. They will offer sustainable economic development in an area where Australia already trails other developed nations. The federal government's proposed resource super-profits tax -- now recast and rebadged as the minerals resource rent tax -- will aid this transition.

Ha ha ha. Thats hysterical in the freaking funny sense. Just ask Spain or New Zealand how their green jobs and their ETS are working out for them.
Once upon a time we had religion for guys like this to feel bad about. Instead of worrying about saving the planet from a trace gas that is, frankly, the least of our worries right now, he would have been wearing a hair shirt in a cave somewhere. Unfortunately, if he gets his way, he'll have all of us doing just that.

Our medical nutters are scarier than your medical nutters...

I have a new contender for scariest, hysterical alarmist medical doctor ever:

Professor David Shearman, author ofThe climate change challenge and the failure of democracy. (He is touted as a professor, but the University of Adelaide website fails to have a bio or contact details for him that I can find. I'll keep trying.)

Just in case you thought you might have misconstrued where he was going with the title of this little piece of quality (that incidentally has a picture of....wait for it.....an iceberg on the front), he made it nice and clear in an opinion piece where he extolls the virtues of the Chinese government and makes it pretty clear he is no fan of "liberal democracy", as he puts it:

Cimate change, is democracy enough?

We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions. It is not that we do not tolerate such decisions in the very heart of our society, in wide range of enterprises from corporate empires to emergency and intensive care units. If we do not act urgently we may find we have chosen total liberty rather than life.

I told you this guy was scary. Way scarier than anything Al Gore was banging on about. I've actually lived in China, which is interesting for the fact that it manages to turn you off both unrestrained capitalism and communism, all at the same time. I also got used to the fact that you have to register your whereabouts with the local police, who can, and will visit you at odd hours to make sure you're not stealing state secrets or having sex with Chinese people.

The authoritarian nature of the Chinese government may seem attractive to environmentalists because they can choose to put a blanket ban on plastic bags virtually overnight, but they can also kick you out of your centuries old house to build a new highrise or MSG factory, flood your town, or accidentally give most of your village HIV.

Dr. Shearman also gets into bed with the wimmin (and not in a fun way) by suggesting that having children makes global warming worse, that we should cancel the baby-bonus (from my cold, dead hand David) and force people to pay a climate tax on their children.

Paying a fine when you have children, thats sounds familiar, where have I seen that before? Oh, thats right! China! The one child policy fines people (alot) for any subsequent children after baby number one. Interestingly, theres alot of multiple child Han families around in China these days. They're called rich people. How does breeding more snobs help the planet?

Not content with just advocating for a totalitarian state, he has also suggested that we should stop globing warming because we might get sued:

Professor David Shearman (and co.) reviewed the scientific evidence for the effects of global warming and analysed the legal basis of potential legal claims. They said the scientific evidence showing the "human signature" on global warming was as great as that linking cigarette smoking with cancer.

So far I'm hoping that the only people actually listening to this guy are our old buddies over at Doctors for the Environment, where he maintains a sporadic blog and, I suspect, had something to do with their Population Policy. (If you have a few minutes its quite a read, it manages to tie in everything from the war on terror to impending innundation of Pacific islands without really coming up with any clear goals. I came out of it with the general impression that they want current Australian citizens to stop having babies so we can bring in more unskilled refugee migrants, move to the bush, join hands and sing Kumbaya.)

If you feel like catching up with David, you can find him at the next DEA student meeting in Melbourne, where he will be a guest speaker.

"Well, of course we're going to throw poo at him!"

Well, spank me and call me a deluded, disinterested denier.

Ahhh, Doctors for the Environment Australia. Deludedly Eager Arses. Dickheads for Energy Abuse. However you choose to think of them, have struck again in the name of pulic health idiocy. This time, they have gone all Mad Men on us and decided that its the language of the climate change debate that is backwards, so since we are talking all arse-about-face, try this on for size:

Peter Tait, proud banner-waving member of DEA (The Australian no-fun-doctors, not the arm of US law-enforcement more commonly known as "narcs"), has decided that if we all just stopped dignifying the climate skeptic crowd with the term "skeptic", then the public would stop being so regrettably disinterested in crippling our economy fighting climate change. Instead, he proposes the following:

Deniers: believe that there is no climate change, or deny it is anthropogenic. (see distressed and doubt sowers)

Disinterested: don’t care one way or another.

Distressed: recognise climate change and some may be responding appropriately. Others if using psychological defence may appear as disinterested or deniers. They may need help to engage and act.

Doubt sowers: may or may not accept the reality of climate change but publicly deny its reality or effects in order to avoid or delay responses as they are protecting vested interests. Their action needs to be publicly named.

Deluded: accept the reality of climate change but argue that it will be beneficial, effects are overstated, action is too costly and the time is not right. They also need to be publicly named.

To which one droll, liberated and no-doubt devastatingly handsome commentator with the handle "Gederts Skerstens", replied with the following comment on the Croakey blog that published Tait's BS:

Man-made climate change is disappearing as a serious issue because those that support it are now revealed as falling into these unappealing categories:

THE HUMBLY OBEDIENT
A large group of very wise men were paid to assemble and tell the ignorant what to do. Lots of trailing letters after their names, lots of acronyms for all the groupings. Best do as they say. Stumble around muttering “Must-Save-Planet, Must-Save-Planet…”

GOERS WITH THE FLOW
The Green petition sheet circulating the dinner table gets signed because everyone else signed it.

AGENDA OPPORTUNISTS
The noisiest portion of the set. The science is irrelevant. Setting up disaster Aversion Mechanisms is the objective. An easy method to establish unelected, publicly funded,
autonomous clusters of Lefties to run pretty much any social engineering they want.

DELUDED APOCALYPTICS
The most easily dismissed. They believe The End Is Nigh and then some. And when the winters are the coldest on record and the sea level doesn’t rise at all, they go from revered prophets to clowns within two or three years.

It’s Over.

I'm a hippy and I vaccinate

There are alot of diseases out there that are distinctly un-freakin'-funny. One that is particularly not-cute is whooping cough. Australia has been weathering one of the worst whooping cough epidemics on record. Theres something like 24,000 cases now and counting.

Whooping cough epidemic reignites immunisation debate

It is the feeling amongst the profession (but you'll have to wait on the epidemiologists to back me up in a few months time when they inevitably publish on this) that the massive number of cases has been due to less than optimal vaccination of children.

Of the kids born in 2003, around 80% were fully immunised by the age of 5. Thats pretty crap.

Some of the hardest hit areas such as far north Queensland and northern New South Wales have some of the lowest immunisation rates in the country. There goes herd immunity out the window. (Whereby, if most people are immunised, you don't have a reservoir of disease in the community and so those who aren't or can't be immunised aren't exposed.)

Not every kid should be immunised, there are medically relevant reasons for this, thats why we depend on herd immunity to keep them safe.

I have many friends who didn't immunise their kids, and sorry to say this, but I wouldn't call many of them true conscientious objectors. If challenged they couldn't really give you a good reason why they chose not to vaccinate, beyond the fact that everyone's not vaccinating and it seemed like a good idea at the time. (I have two friends who have good reasons - one has a child who is anaphylactically allergic to everything and the paediatrician scared her by saying if they vaccinated they would have to a have a resusc team on standby, and the other had a son who went into convulsions after having the old (OLD!) whooping cough vaccine. This last friend had two subsequent babies and was too scared to have them vaccinated after the first bad experience. This is a real shame, because the old pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine was a live-attenuated vaccine and adverse reaction were more common with that (but still statistically low), and the vaccine used now has an exceedingly low rate of adverse reactions because its acellular. However, the other 20-odd un-vaccinated kids running around in my kids peer groups do not have such a good excuse. And, yes. They all got whooping cough.

Unfortunately, there are many people out there who will tell you how terrible immunisation is, how dangerous. Trust me, there are much worse things that can happen than your kid crying for 5 minutes.

When I had my first child, a family friend helpfully dropped off a bunch of information on why I shouldn't vaccinate. It was kind of akin to the misinformation being spouted by the Australian Vaccination Network, who should be tied up and beaten with a rubber hose just for co-opting that official sounding name, amongst other things. They are also freaking people out that not only will vaccinations do insidiously evil things to their children, but that the government is going to force compulsory vaccinations on them. Oh, puh-lease. If compulsory vaccinations were a viable option we wouldn't have the whooping cough epidemic, now would we?

(If only they knew that the government-medical complex is going to enforce compulsory vaccinations on them so they can secretly microchip them in the process, mwah ha ha ha - Ed.)

Anyway, all kidding aside. I just had a look at their no-vaccination blog, and they are also telling everyone that H1N1 was fine and dandy and a storm in a teacup. As someone who was completely floored with pig-pox, I'm choosing to take this entirely personally (it really was swine flu, too. I got swabbed and everything and now the infectious diseases lab keeps stalking me to take part in some study). I swear to freakin' god that if we had had the H1N1 outbreak in an era before modern pharmaceuticals and medical interventions, it might have been getting towards Spanish Flu badness. We put pregnant women on bypass in induced comas because they were so sick with it. BYPASS! Thats an order of sickness way above and beyond "go home and take two paracetamols".

Note to self - people to hate:

- Doctors for the environment.
- Matt Damon.

And now:

- The Australian Vaccination Network.

Turns out we DON'T have the looniest doctors...

In an earlier post I was concerned that our medical loonies are possibly scarier than other countries medical loonies, but it turns out I could be wrong. Phew, the relief! Our homegrown "Doctors for the Environment" who are normally the font of all things ethically questionable are at least a fringe dwelling crew mostly comprised of undergraduate medical students.
However in the UK, it looks like this non-sensical alarmism goes right to the top, and holy crap - they're organised! They also think that GPs and nurses should be educating their patients on how to prevent climate change.

The Climate and Health Council, a collaboration of worldwide health organisations including the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society of Medicine, thinks that:

offering patients advice on how to lower their carbon footprint can be just as easy and achievable as helping them to stop smoking or eat a healthier diet.

Because it's just so easy to get patients to stop smoking and eat better.

Other problems with this could be:

1. The evidence base being slightly lacking. Don't we practice Evidence Based Medicine or something these days? I should know, what with all those degrees in non-evidence based hippy goodness behind me. I know shoddy research when I see it, however I'm worried that your average alarmist doctor wouldn't know a confounding factor if it sat on their face and wiggled.

2. Advocating for people to "eat local" is just, well, dumb. What are you going to eat if you live in central London? Pidgeons?

3. Do you have any idea how long it would take to actually do this? GP's start charging for a long consultation after 5 minutes, and any longer than 10 and you'll have to come back next week. Im sure the NHS woud be stoked with having to pay for all of this.

4. If you had a spare 5 minutes with a patient and you had a choice between teaching them to offset their carbon emissions next time they drive to the shops or maybe educating them about optimal control of their diabetes, I would probably err on the side of getting their blood sugar down before their legs drop off. But I'm wierd like that.

Whatever happened to old whats-his-face?

I've been trying to find some medical students and / or doctors who have been brave enough to publically debunk AGW alarmism, on the basis that I am far too chicken shit of the institution-wide backlash that would ensue if I were to do so.

I know there are lots of us out there, skulking around the hallways and hiding in corners during conferences. But the hysterical mass mania of AGW alarmism has made "coming out" as a skeptic such a bad career move in medicine that whenever I have had a hushed conversation with another skeptic re: climate science, we have been twitchy that someone would suddenly rappell down from the ceiling, smack us one and have a tussle with us over our stethoscopes.

So far, my not so exhaustive research has managed to turn up a whole two who have publically made a stand. One was a Christian missionary / medical student who may or may not believe in intelligent design, but still managed to come up with some fairly telling arguments against "An Inconvenient Truth" and the other was an endocrine surgeon and medical researcher called Klaus-Martin Schulte.

This guy is really interesting, and provides a cautionary tale of why it's not advisable to challenge alarmists if your expecting anything approaching a normal academic response. He had seen Naomi Oreskes original essay (essay - not peer reviewed) published in Science claiming that a review of the literature showed a scientific consensus on global warming. (This was the paper that The Goracle used to claim that no scientist refutes anthropogenic global warming and that there is such a thing as a "Scientfic Consensus", thus successfully combining a moron with an oxymoron.)

Schulte had an extensive medical research background in endocrinology and decided that he would use Oreske's own search terms and the same database to verify her results and further them (since he could include dates after her original study). Trying to duplicate the results of a study is a fairly normal thing to do in science. The scientific method is meant to entail "reproducibility" as far as I remember.

Without overtly criticising Oreskes method or final figures, Schulte came up with different results, and even if you included "implicit" agreement (i.e. not overtly stated) with AGW then the figure only got to around 45% in agreement with AGW (Oreskes claimed 75%). She had also appeared to not include, or did not know about, several studies that rejected AGW in her count. (Schulte was far too professional to draw conclusions from this omission, but I'm not - cherry-picking is clearly not just confined to the Mann et al. "Hockey Stick" graph.)

He submitted his results to Science and was rejected (no big surprise if you're a battle weary cynic like me, but I would love to know the actual cited basis, given that it was a well conducted study seeking to reproduce and further the results of something they had previously published), he then submitted it to Energy and Environment and before they could publish it, some details were leaked onto the web.

Naturally, normal scientific climate skeptics were interested, but unfortunately so were the loony fringe skeptics (e.g. intelligent design, space alien conspiracy theorists. Hey, the alarmists have their own loony fringe too, just look at desmogblog sometime). So misrepresentations of the as-yet unpublished paper were all over the web like bird-shit on a shiny car. On the basis of this, Oreskes launched a venomous, public, ad hominen attack on the guy before anyone had even read the real deal.

Schulte then wrote up a really excellent and very professional rebuttal of her attack, and also contacted the Chancellor of the university to which Oreske is attached to demand an apology for her professional discourtesy given that she had not read his paper before publishing an attack on him. He noted that:

“In every draft of my paper, I was careful to make no comment of any kind on the accuracy or reliability of [Oreskes’] research, still less on whether she regarded anthropogenic ‘global warming’ as serious enough to be potentially catastrophic ... I confined myself to citing figures from her essay merely as a point of comparison.”

Beyond that, his paper has been largely ignored or expunged from the record. An Ovid: Medline search doesnt even turn up his article, although it turns up Oreskes original, non-peer reviewed piece of quasi-scientific el dodgo. I had to use the way-back machine to access his rebuttal of Oreske, as its been taken down, although her rather infantile attack on his research is available all over the web.

Eventually I tried putting the authors name and "law suit" into google and for reasons unknown this turned up a copy of his study over at the Heartland institute, which can be accessed as a full-text article.

His whole rationale for checking her claims was that he felt that too many of his patients were suffering undue anxiety from global warming claims, and he felt that the scientific viewpoint was being misrepresented. Dr. Schultes, I feel you buddy.

Strippers for Industrialisation and other types of stupid

Since my recent post on "sustainable vegetarians", I came across a related and poorly concealed opinion piece from Australian group Doctor's For The Environment. This is a bunch of folk who are going to keep me busy for awhile.

• First off, the name. I take one look at it and I have the overwhelming urge to start a group called "Medics for Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll" or something. Its kind of a redundant non-sequiter in Zen koan form. Makes about as much sense as "Fishermen for Breathing". ("Hey, I ike breathing. Do you like breathing? We'd better listen to these guys...")
• Secondly, they publish recommendations that doctors tell their patients to stop eating animals because of the "health dangers of red meat", as a way of curbing carbon emissions.

"As doctors we are in an influential position to educate our patients into healthy lifestyles and to implement preventative medicine in our clinics. To our advice on smoking, alcohol, exercise and drugs, we must surely add advice on meat. This is an issue that will have a significant impact on the health of the individual and at the same time the on health of the planet by reducing greenhouse emissions."

I tend to doze off a little in medical ethics and jurisprudence class, but I'm sure this violates primum non nocere, (first, do no harm) if not a hundred other medical ethical and legal guidelines.