A little reported story went by last week in my province of British Columbia. It seems that our government will now be providing financial assistance to families with an income of under 28 thousand who wish to receive acupuncture treatments. For whatever reason, and I suspect it's political, the government of BC is saying that acupuncture is a legitimate medical treatment, and as such should be covered under our health plan.
As you can imagine, this is something I have a huge issues with. First and most importantly in my opinion, this is wasting money on bogus pseudoscience. Instead of using this money to do something like, oh I dunno, reducing the cost of prescription medication or hiring more doctors or nurses, taxpayer money is instead going to a treatment that is at best, dubious.
As far as I'm aware there are no credible studies that prove that acupuncture has any health benefit whatsoever, perhaps apart from being a method to help one relax. And as far as practitioners claims that it balances the energy in a persons body, aiding in the body's healing, well, I think we all know that is just plain old bullshit. All of the other claims of acupuncture, such as curing cancer and HIV/AIDS have been systematically debunked by medical science, leaving only the nebulous claim that it promotes overall healing.
Now if people want to waste their time and money on acupuncture, I have no problem with it. My beef here is that by paying for these treatments, the government of BC is tacitly saying that acupuncture is a legitimate treatment option. What I want to know is where is the medical opposition to this? Why have I not heard a peep out of the BC College of Physicians? Are there no patient advocate groups that see the dangers in this?
On top of all that, this decision by the government creates a dangerous precedent for the future. If acupuncture gets the government seal of approval, why not homeopathy? Hell, it has just as much legitimate medical research to back it up as acupuncture, that being none.
So I urge anyone reading this who is a resident of British Columbia to contact your MLA and voice your displeasure at this move by the government. We don't want to go down the same road Great Britain has, with the state wasting billions on pseudo scientific bullshit.
No comments:
Post a Comment