Welcome to episode one hundred and eighty four of the Token Skeptic.
As you may have heard in the news this week, the American Food and Drug Administration has given a controversial Houston doctor the green light to continue providing experimental cancer treatments. The FDA has lifted restrictions on a clinical trial run by Stanislaw Burzynski, who for nearly 40 years has claimed that he has discovered natural substances that can fight certain cancers.
It’s due to worrying cases like this and many others, that the Safe and Secular Campaign was created – at http://safeandsecular.org:
To keep health care safe, effective, accessible and responsive to needs – it has to be secular. It has to be based on scientific principles. Not magical thinking. Not religious beliefs. Not conspiracy theories: Evidence and reality… Right now health care is beset by two plagues:
The imposition of religious dogma on health care, resulting in limited access to and even the denial of medical services;
The shameless marketing of sham remedies, sold as “natural” or “traditional” cures, often accompanied by the rejection of scientifically proven treatments.
…Keep Health Care Safe and Secular is harnessing the talent, intelligence, and enthusiasm of people who want to ensure that our health care is focused on effective remedies and proven outcomes. We’re educating the public, the media, and policy-makers about the threat of misinformation, dogma, and quackery. And we’ve created this website to provide you with the information you need and the actions you can take, right now, to help keep health care safe and secular.
For this interview, I speak to the Centre for Inquiry’s Policy Director Michael De Dora, about how he first became an advocate for secularism, freedom of religion, belief, and expression, about the campaign, its goals, and what it’s like in the USA when faced with challenges to good health.
Theme songs are P&P by Derek K. Miller of www.penmachine.com and Leap Second by Milton Mermikides, of www.miltonmermikides.com.
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