What he said in the beginning:

"There's only medicine or not medicine"

Alternative medicine is all a scam. If it works, it's medicine, if it doesn't it's crap. Some things are considered "alternative" medicine, such as massage therapy and acupuncture, which are indeed medicinal, but other stuff like homeopathy and putting crystals on your body is completely bogus. And chiropractic can only work on your joints, muscles and bones - if you postulate that cracking a back can cure your infected ear - or whatever it is the bullshitters are suing Simon Singh for disputing - you're just full of crap. You're either deliberately lying to get money out of desperate people or you're blatantly ignorant. Neither is very good for your case.

(I have a serious hair up my ass about "alternative medicine", like I do organized religion.)

wow, I'm pretty impressed that Bill stuck up for alternative medicine. I really expected him to go after it for the crazy crystal strokers it harbours like that repugnant tool penn Gilette and his mute gimp

^I think Bill is a fan of alternative medicine, because he really likes hemp. But that's just my observation.

>> ^gwiz665:
What he said in the beginning:
"There's only medicine or not medicine"


Guess what, big pharmas don't know WHY things things work in many cases.

Viagra was to be a blood pressure medicine which attracted much attention after the trials. Why...^^^.

Many pharmas do not know WHY their product do what they do, they just make sure they do NOT do other (harmful) things to patients.

lol I love David Cross.

Bill is funny, but his views on alt. med are wrong. When he states that treatments we've been using for 50 years haven't worked at all, he is dead wrong. Cancer is much too complicated to practically wipe out with a single solution, like polio or small-pox.even still, for white people the survival rates for cancer has gone from 39 percent in the 60's to 62 percent in 1998; this despite the cancer rates having increase (National Cancer Institute, Cancer Rates and Risks, 1998). I’m not sure where they are at now in 2009 but you can bet its better.

PS, they have been increasing for other races too, but for what ever reason, whites have increased the most.


I dont know if rotty is trying to point out another fallacy or if he is actually perpetuating it; surprise results in clinical trials does not mean "big pharmas (doesn’t) know WHY things work in many cases.". The end result might not be the same as the initial intent before and after the trials, but that’s how a lot of discoveries are made, and they might not have initially known the mechanism behind the end result, but they know the mechanisms by the time it is released on the market, that’s what the FDA requires by law of them. Teflon, microwaves, penicillin and Viagra where all accidental discoveries, but we obviously now know how they work and did know how they worked before they were released.

an interesting point; pharmaceutical companies need to know the mechanisms, risks, and effects of medicine before they release them ( via FDA, clinical trials and lab tests ) but alternative medicine companies ARE NOT REQUIRED TO TEST, PROVE OR UNDERSTAND THE MECHANISMS OR RESULTS THEY CLAIM OF THEIR PRODUCTS! simply because the legal classification of "alt. med".

gwiz, i don’t know if you heard this, but you may be pleased to know (since we are definitely on the same page on this), that acupuncture has been proven no more effective that a placebo; double blind studies have shown it doesn’t matter if you puncture the skin in the "appropriate places"(according to acupuncture techniques), if you puncture the skin in random places, or if you don’t puncture the skin at all (using "stage knife" needles that only look like they are puncturing); there is no difference! This means that the only benefits you get from acupuncture are merely placebo and not medically valid.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1897636,00.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19250001?ordinalpos=7&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDoc
Sum

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=1518#more-1518

Yeah, i have a serious hair up my ass when it comes to this too. Especially when you hear public figures like bill saying that current medicine is not working and that bullshit, unproven quackery; the reason is that some people will take that advice and drop effective treatments for the alternative ones, usually get ripped off and often end up dying.

check this site out to see what i mean

http://whatstheharm.net/

The argument that medicine exhibits some bias toward treatments that are patentable and thus financially rewarding to develop seems reasonable. For example, drugs are patentable, unlike herbs, but those kinds of reasonable arguments are undermined by all the associated supernaturalism and appeal to nature fallacies.

>> ^gwiz665:
^I think Bill is a fan of alternative medicine, because he really likes hemp. But that's just my observation.

I actually put hemp-ish medicinal use as soon-to-be-mainstream medicine. Especially with stuff like this:
http://www.videosift.com/video/Does-Hash-Oil-Cure-Parkinson-s-Symptoms-Shaking
The only barrier is a legal one, not a scientific one

I'm upvoting for the VS commentary and because of how wrong Bill Maher is in this video. I'm almost tempted to add this to *Lies (as in *Talks about *Lies), but I think *Conspiracy and *1sttube are both appropriate here.

Adding video to channels (1sttube, Conspiracy, Talks) - requested by EDD.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

I think Bill's point about big pharma looking to fix symptoms rather than cure diseases is dead on. I'm not a very alternative medicine type of person, but I do believe that people should be able to take whatever kind of curative that they feel works for them.

People dieing of cancer should also be able to shoot heroin with a blunt in their mouth and a coke straw up their nose if they so choose.

In other segments Bill's alluded to being one of the vaccine conspiracy theorists.

guymontage: an interesting point; pharmaceutical companies need to know the mechanisms, risks, and effects of medicine before they release them ( via FDA, clinical trials and lab tests )

While I agree, on the whole, with everything you said.. the fact that the FDA approves these medicines is not really saying much.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/health/policy/18fda.html?_r=1
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/01/09/fda.scientists/index.html
http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/abuses_of_science/summary-of-the-fda-scientist.html

the FDA is pretty damn corrupt.

>> ^direpickle:
In other segments Bill's alluded to being one of the vaccine conspiracy theorists.


perhaps with good reason. there's a lot of debate/controversy surrounding the vaccines.

His comment about abolishing the U.S. Senate is a wonderful idea. I've done some thinking about this and it seems to me that California's 36M+ and Wyoming's 600K< people should not have equal vote in any legislative body. Get rid of the Senate!

It's sad to see another scientifically illiterate "celebrity" make a fool of himself on national television. As Richard Dawkins said so well, "Alternative medicine is defined as that set of practices which cannot be tested, refuse to be tested, or consistently fail tests". Professor Dawkins goes further in discussing the shortfalls of alternative medicine in his brilliant foreword to the book SNAKE OIL AND OTHER PREOCCUPATIONS by John Diamond. Maher's comments suggests that he is unaware of the writings of Dawkins, Diamond, Singh and Ernst (Trick or Treatment) or Bausell (Snake Oil Science). Maybe it's time for him to read up on this important subject before he leads others astray.

>> ^EndAll:
perhaps with good reason. there's a lot of debate/controversy surrounding the vaccines.


Excuse me? There is just as much debate/controversy surrounding vaccines as there is surrounding Santa Claus - which is none, if we disregard arguments from children, ignorant or mentally handicapped people (sorry for adding you to this sorry bunch, mentally handicapped folks).

Here are a few points that solidify my argument, with a special (and simple) rebuttal to all the anti-vaccine conspiracy-theorists out there. EndAll, I can't believe you'd be one of them


* Pro-disease anti-vaxers want vaccines that are 100% safe. This is never going to happen, as all medicines carry some risk. However, the relative risk of injury from vaccines is significantly lower than the risk of injury from getting the disease naturally. For more information, see http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/6mishome.htm

* Reduced vaccination rates lead to higher incidents of infection. This has been illustrated in the U.K. following Wakefield’s bogus study, in Germany in 2006 (including two deaths in unvaccinated children – see http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/2/07-050187/en/index.html), in California (see http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm57e222a1.htm), in MN (where an unvaccinated child died from hemophilus influenza type b – see http://www.emaxhealth.com/1020/50/28863/minnesota-child-dies-lack-hib-meningitis-vaccination.html).

* Pro-disease anti-vaxers claim that “Big Pharma” makes lots of money from vaccines. If vaccination rates dropped, however, there would be an increase in preventable illnesses, many of which have high rates of complications resulting in hospitalization and expensive treatment. See the link about Germany above for information on costs associated with the measles outbreak there. The money to be made from the diseases far outweighs any money to be made from vaccines.

* Pro-disease anti-vaxers claim that better hygiene has led to a decrease in disease, rather than vaccines. However, many of the diseases prevented by vaccines are airborne, and are not greatly impacted by improved sanitation or hygiene.

* Pro-disease anti-vaxers claim that too many antigens (the parts that make the vaccines work) are given at once, ignoring that infants and children are exposed to thousands of antigens every day by touching things and putting their hands or the object in their mouth, through absorption or by inhaling.

* They claim that combination shots should be avoided, and that parents should break up the vaccinations into individual vaccines and spread them out. However, this increases the total number of shots received, as well as exposure to those various “toxins” they hate so much.

* There have been no well-controlled studies establishing a causal link between vaccines and autism.

* There have been numerous well-controlled studies sponsored and run by various people and organizations around the world that have shown no link between vaccines and autism.

via http://antiantivax.jottit.com/

EDD is right on with the vaccines; there is no debate.

well maybe there is some controversy amongst people who must partition their time evenly defending claims such as "Man never stepped on the Moon", "9-11 WAS an Inside Job", "The CIA let UFOs mutilate cows and abduct rednecks in exchange for cellphones, microchips and Playstation 3s" and other non-sense.

Oh let me see science based medicine, ya we can really depend on them to find a cure for cancer! They ask for donations and government money (it must add up to 100’s of Billions of dollars) to find a cure but they have not found a cure for a single disease in a half century not even Herpes let alone cancer, something is very wrong here. Cancer is epidemic 1 in 3 women and 1 in 2 men will have cancer in their life time. They say less people die from it and more survive. Ya, survival is a delightful way to live and it makes for a very good repeat cancer customer. If it wasn't such a tragedy for so many people it would be a colossal joke! Think about this, if every time you took your car to the mechanic and he told you "I can't cure the problem but it's treatable at a cost of $80 to $150 dollars a month for the life of your car." How long would it be before you would be bankrupt and he would be rich? Bill is a breath of fresh air in the one dementional thinking of modern medicine. Paul

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The duration of this video has been updated from unknown to 7:14 - length declared by ReverendTed.