The Huffington Post is crazy about your health

[SemiCharmedQuark]

The Huffington Post is one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on the Internet these days. It operates mostly as a news aggregation site (it has featured Salon stories) and throws open its doors to a wide range of bloggers, who cover everything from politics to entertainment. "When it comes to health and wellness issues, our goal is to provide a diverse forum for a reasoned discussion of issues of interest and importance to our readers," Arianna Huffington, the site's namesake founder, author, socialite and pundit, told me.

I would like to believe her. But when it comes to health and wellness, that diverse forum seems defined mostly by bloggers who are friends of Huffington or those who mirror her own advocacy of alternative medicine, described in her books and in many magazine profiles of her. Among others, the site has given a forum to Oprah Winfrey's women's health guru, Christiane Northrup, who believes women develop thyroid disease due to an inability to assert themselves; Deepak Chopra, who mashes up medicine and religion into self-help books and PBS infomercials; and countless others pitching cures that range from herbs to blood electrification to ozonated water to energy scans.

As a physician, I am not necessarily opposed to alternative health treatments. But I do want to be responsible and certain that what I prescribe to patients is safe and effective and not a waste of their time and money. A recent Associated Press investigation stated the federal government has spent $2.5 billion of our tax dollars to determine whether alternative health remedies -- including ones promoted on the Huffington Post -- work. It found next to none of them do. The site also regularly grants space to proponents of the thoroughly disproven conspiracy that childhood vaccines have caused autism. In short, the Huffington Post is hardly a site that promotes "a reasoned discussion," in its founder's words, of health and medicine.
...
The Huffington Post's most famous unscientific stand is against childhood vaccines. From what seems like its first day on the Internet, the site has played host to the anti-vaccine movement, granting center stage to the movement's most prolific and outspoken proponents, such as author David Kirby, Jenny McCarthy's pediatrician Jay Gordon and detox advocate Dierdre Imus, wife of shock jock Don Imus. (It should be noted the site promoted Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2005 article "Deadly Immunity," jointly published by Rolling Stone and Salon, which accused the Centers for Disease Control, and other health agencies, of covering up the links between autism and vaccines. The article was widely criticized by the medical community and required both publications to make numerous corrections of fact and analysis.)

http://www.salon.com/env/vital_signs/2009/07/30/huffington_post/

[realisticphish]

1. yeah

"The Huffington Post is crazy about (insert anything here)"

Never been a fan.

[trotsky]

2. Absolutely true.

There is an overwhelming amount of quackery and woo on Huffpost. Big homebase for the anti-vaxers.