If you think Social Security and Medicare will go broke, then you're just ignorant. That's a Republican Party scare claim.
The only way they will go broke is if Republicans somehow take over the entire federal government and destroy them (which is possible, but unlikely). You should start reading newspapers. I recommend reading Paul Krugman's column. As Krugman says, the Republicans want to discredit successful government programs, as part of their anti-government, anti-tax ideology.
If Ronald Reagan had said, back in the 1980s, “Let’s increase a regressive tax that falls mainly on the working class, while cutting taxes that fall mainly on much richer people,” he would have faced a political firestorm. But because the increase in the regressive payroll tax was recommended by the Greenspan Commission to support Social Security, it was politically in a different box – you might even call it a lockbox – from Reagan’s tax cuts.
Their answer to the pretty good numbers is to say that the trust fund is meaningless, because it’s invested in U.S. government bonds. They aren’t really saying that government bonds are worthless; their point is that the whole notion of a separate budget for Social Security is a fiction. But there are two problems with their position.
The lesser problem is that if you say that there is no link between the payroll tax and future Social Security benefits – which is what denying the reality of the trust fund amounts to – then Greenspan and company pulled a fast one back in the 1980s: they sold a regressive tax switch, raising taxes on workers while cutting them on the wealthy, on false pretenses. More broadly, we’re breaking a major promise if we now, after 20 years of high payroll taxes to pay for Social Security’s future, declare that it was all a little joke on the public.
The bigger problem for those who want to see a crisis in Social Security’s future is this: if Social Security is just part of the federal budget, with no budget or trust fund of its own, then, well, it’s just part of the federal budget: there can’t be a Social Security crisis.
The Republicans, particularly Newt Gingrich, started a deliberate strategy of attacking the other side for their political advantage. The Republicans would rather discredit government in general, if it makes the Democrats look bad, and encourages people to vote the Democrats out of office. If the Republicans can get voters to believe, "Both sides are worthless, vote them all out," then they've won.
Political scientists can quote Republican strategists like Gingrich saying exactly that in so many words.
P.S. a third party would be nice, but it's almost impossible in our political system. We haven't had a successful third party in over 100 years. If you vote for a third party candidate, your second-favorite candidate loses. In 2000, when people voted for Ralph Nader, they let George W. Bush win the election over Al Gore.
(When Rep. Allen West (R-FL) said that 78-81 Democrats in Congress are members of the Communist Party, no Republican leaders condemns him.
Washington politics and Congress haven't been this dysfunctional in 40 years. The problem is with the Republican party. "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." This is not "both sides do it." Moderate and center-right Republicans are extinct.
This started first with Newt Gingrich, whose strategy was to convice voters that Congress was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents. As speaker, Gingrich wanted to compromise with Clinton but couldn't.
Second, Grover Norquist founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985, and his Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which binds signers never to support a tax increase, including closing loopholes, has been signed by 238/242 House and 41/47 Senate Republicans, followed by other litmus-test pledges.
This makes compromise impossible. The filibuster has become routine. Senate Republicans have blocked every nominee. This has produced complete gridlock and America's first credit downgrade. Republicans were forced to vote against bills they co-sponsored. Mike Lofgren wrote an anguished diatribe.
Journalists should report this, not "a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon.")
This is the opposite of the way government agencies and corporations calculate lives vs. costs.
Automobile companies routinely have to choose between building cars that will save lives but cost more. Construction companies have to routinely choose between using work safety procedures that will save lives but cost more. Coal companies have to routinely choose between pollution controls that save lives but cost more.
The right-wing economists (in the Wall Street Journal editorial page, for example) say that everything has costs, and we can't spend too much to save a life, because that money could save other lives more cheaply elsewhere. They argue that people don't want to spend more money on safety, in the free marketplace. The government agencies used to calculate the value of a human life at about $1 million; now I've seen it up to $2 or $3 million. If a regulation saves a life at the cost of $3 million, they don't want to do it.
You get all different numbers depending on how you calculate it. If you ask lumberjacks how much of a salary cut they would take in order to make their job safer, you'd get an inferred value of life at maybe $100,000. (That's the one corporations want to use.) When they compensated victims of the World Trade Center, they decided that a rich man's life was worth more than a poor man's life.
If you think it out for a while, you'll see how this leads to inconsistent and ridiculous conclusions. My favorite question for conservatives was, "Suppose your mother was killed in an accident, you went to court, and you were compensated for her death. How much would you have to get in order to feel that you came out ahead?"
Anyway, when it comes to government regulations that make people safer, and save thousands of lives, the conservative economists, corporations and Republicans say, "There has to be some limit to the amount you spend to save a life."
When it comes to Homeland Security, the same Wall Street Journal editorial page says, "There's no limit to the amount you spend to save a life."
I figure my chances of being killed on an airplane by a terrorist are about 1 in a billion. The security costs me about $50 more on a plane ticket and takes at least another hour to get through boarding. I can't take my pocket knife along. I'd rather skip this security.
One of the fascinating things is the way he drew arteries and veins. He drew them straight. In real life, blood vessels are sinusoidal, like river meanders. (There are good fluid mechanical reasons for that.) So he must have been making quick notes.
I've done that myself, sitting in a lecture with the slides flashing by. I don't have time to make detailed drawings, so I just make quick sketches!
That's right, one of the main lessons of biology is that real life doesn't look like the textbooks!
When I was learning to draw, I copied Da Vinci's drawings.
When I studied anatomy, I went back to Da Vinci's anatomical drawings. Comparing them to the modern anatomy books, and the human anatomy I've seen in museums, some of Da Vinci's work was done with uncanny accuracy, but some of his other drawings were just plain wrong. You can see where he was copying from real life, and where he was interpolating and guessing. When he drew from life, he was really good.
I don't fault him for that. We built on his work. Of course we went beyond him. We had 500 years to do it.
But every time I see one of those awesome 3D CT and MRI reconstructions that surgeons use before they operate, I wonder what Da Vinci would have thought if he could see them.
There was an article in Science magazine about why the same U.S. government agency that wanted to withhold the data talked it over and decided that it wouldn't work.
For one thing, it was impossible to make up a list of "legitimate" research facilities and "non-legitimate" research facilities.
On the other side, the "select agents" regulations already threw the field of infectious diseases into an uproar. Foreign graduate students couldn't work on them. One accomplished infectious disease scientist went to jail for a year for filling out his paperwork wrong. A lot of scientists just stopped working on those agents. Who wants to spend a year waiting for the government to allow you to publish your next paper? Who wants to spend a year defending yourself from trumped-up criminal charges?
Most dietitians and nutritionists have earned a bachelor’s degree in dietetics, foods and nutrition, food service systems management, or a related area. Programs include courses in nutrition, physiology, chemistry, and biology. Training
Dietitians and nutritionists typically participate in several hundred hours of supervised training, usually in the form of an internship following graduation from college. However, some programs in dietetics include this training as part of the coursework.
Many dietitians and nutritionists have advanced degrees.
It sounds like you don't know what a nutritionist is. You're confusing them with restaurant chefs or natural food store salesmen.
Nutritionists who deal with diabetes work for doctors,
A friend of mine just told me that she couldn't eat lettuce because she was taking warfarin. Lettuce, which has vitamin K, would counteract the warfarin and cause internal bleeding. It could kill her. A lot of foods have interactions with commonly-prescribed drugs. Nutritionists have to know things like that.
There's so much bullshit going on in nutrition that nutritionists need a good background in science to know what to trust.
The First Amendment doesn't protect you from from prosecution if you say, "I'll sell you this drug which will cure your cancer for $1,000," when you're not a doctor and the drug doesn't cure cancer.
In the 1960s, William D. Kelley, D.D.S. (1925-2005) developed a program for cancer patients that involved dietary measures, vitamin and enzyme supplements, and computerized "metabolic typing." Kelley classified people as "sympathetic dominant," "parasympathetic dominant," or metabolically "balanced" and made dietary recommendations for each type. He claimed that his "Protein Metabolism Evaluation Index" could diagnose cancer before it was clinically apparent and that his "Kelley Malignancy Index could detect "the presence or absence of cancer, the growth rate of the tumor, the location of the tumor mass, prognosis of the treatment, age of the tumor and the regulation of medication for treatment." In 1970, Kelley was enjoined from practicing medicine without a license after witnesses testified that he had diagnosed lung cancer on the basis of blood from a patient's finger and prescribed dietary supplements, enzymes, and a diet as treatment. In 1976, following unsuccessful court appeals, his Texas dental license was suspended for five years. He never resumed dental practice but continued to promote his methdology in other ways.
There have been several cases of parents of children with diabetes who refused to follow conventional medicine, "treated" their children with prayer and diet, and the children died.
They were prosecuted for child abuse, and often sent to jail, sometimes for long prison terms.
That PDF is worth reading carefully. You cross the line when you provide individualized services to treat diabetes:
Persons who are not licensed to practice dietetics/nutrition in North Carolina can provide general non-medical nutrition information. Nutrition Information is defined in 21 NCAC 17.0402 as nonfraudulent nutrition information related to food, food materials, or dietary supplements which is designed for one or more healthy population groups and is based on valid scientific evidence, reports, and studies. Nutrition information is not based on an individual nutrition assessment as referenced in G.S. 90-352 or medical nutrition therapy as referenced in 21 NCAC 17.0101(11) and is not individualized to provide nutrition care services to prevent, manage, treat, cure or rehabilitate a medical condition, illness, or injury for a specific person or group as referenced in G.S. 90-352 and 21 NCAC 17.0101(12).
When you write a book, you charge money for it, right?
The limit is when a specific person gives you the details of his medical problem, and you give him detailed advice on treating it, especially as part of a business.
When you write a book, you can give any medical advice you want. That's general advice. If you let people call you up, and you gave them specific advice on how to apply your book to their medical condition, that would be the practice of medicine. That would go beyond the limit.
Declan McCullagh doesn't understand the way the First Amendment works in this country. It doesn't protect you from prosecution if you go into a bank and say, "This is a stickup." It doesn't protect you from from prosecution if you say, "I'll sell you this drug which will cure your cancer for $1,000," when you're not a doctor and the drug doesn't cure cancer.
Courts draw a fairly clear line between OTOH publishing a book or magazine article or having a discussion with a friend over dinner, and OTOH offering yourself to the public as an expert, giving specific advice to individuals about their specific conditions, and charging money for it. According to TFA, Steve Cooksey crossed that line. They're giving him a chance to stop, and he better take it. I'm sure he's sincere, but sincere stupid people do a lot of damage.
Doctors have to draw the same line. When are they treating a patient, and when are they just giving general advice, as they do when they write a book, teach a class or discuss a case with a colleague in the cafeteria?
That comes up a lot in malpractice cases. A patient can sue a doctor if they have a doctor-patient relationship, but not when the doctor was simply giving educational advice.
A doctor is treating someone as a patient when he asks questions about the patient's specific conditions, gives specific advice, and (especially) charges money for advice.
It sounds like Steve Cooksey was soliciting questions about peoples' specific conditions, giving specific advice, and taking money for his advice in the treatment of diabetes. That's the practice of medicine.
Diabetes is a medical condition. It's not like being a life coach.
If diabetes is treated right, you're often likely to live a long, reasonably healthy life. If it's not treated right, you can die, lose a foot, go blind, and get strokes (which are sometimes worse than death). Lots of people (including children) with diabetes have died because they (or their parents) refused conventional medicine.
That includes diet. In diabetes, diet is a serious business.
North Carolina decided that they didn't want to let anybody without medical qualifications put up a web site and advertise that they're treating a medical condition. You can't practice medicine without a license. That's the legislature's right. We settled that at the beginning of the 20th Century. It doesn't violate the First Amendment.
If you understand science, and you've been reading newspapers and magazines, it will be clear which newspapers and reporters can report science accurately and which can't. Most of the major newspapers, like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, etc. do a pretty good job most of the time. I know which reporters at the NYT I can trust and which reporters fuck up sometimes. (When they do fuck up, it's usually because they trust a scientist who is exaggerating the importance of his research. The ones who fuck up are the ones who don't check their facts with another scientist who might disagree.) That's my data, and if you disagree I'd like to see specific examples of stories that you think they get wrong.
There's nothing wrong with tabloids per se. The New York Daily News has very good science reporting. The National Enquirer, surprisingly, had very accurate medical coverage.
I do see a lot of bullshit in the Huffington Post, mostly columns written by self-proclaimed experts. That's what you get for free. I also see a lot of bullshit in the Wall Street Journal, but at least they keep it on the editorial page.
In my reporting I check out a lot of facts. Some of them hold up, and some of them turn out to be lies. I remember for next time who told me the truth and who told me the lies.
Among the European publications, I read the New Scientist, Nature, and The Guardian, and whatever other newspapers appear in Google News. Their science reporting is usually (to use their phrase), spot on. (I also deal with PR people from European agencies.)
If you don't know the difference between the publications and reporters that report accurately on science, and those that don't, then you're not doing your job. In this snow radar story, if the PR department was terrified that the reporter would get the story wrong, they could have searched for his stories in the Ottawa Citizen and seen that he usually did a good job. But they should have known that before he called. It's their job to follow the news coverage.
Journalists are more likely to mis-quote (or ignore) an official answer if you hand them boilerplate generalities that have passed through 11 (!) layers of review and don't say anything meaningful, like the NRC statement. Then the reporters have to ignore your useless statement and figure the story out on their own, for better or worse. You've lost your opportunity to have any input. As the Ottawa Citizen says, as a result of the NRC's stonewalling, the story didn't mention the contribution of the NRC, which is what they were trying to do in the first place.
I know this is Slashdot, but just look at the final Ottawa Citizen story. http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/NASA+latest+destination+southern+Ontario+hamlet/6237144/story.html It actually did explain why the research was important: Ordinary radar can't tell the difference between wet snow and dry snow. They were testing new radar that could. It told the whole story from the perspective of NASA, not NRC. What else could the reporter do?
So you're wrong on the facts. The reporter did get the story right.
If you refuse to speak to reporters, you never get your story out, you lose control of the story, you let your critics tell the story for you, and you don't have a chance to correct errors if there are any. If the story's important enough, I'll go around you and write the story my own way. What purpose does the PR department serve?
Lol. Do you read the papers? Most reporters today aren't in the business of making sure they get the right quote. They're in the business of waiting for a mistake (or an isolated sentence or phrase that could be construed as one) - and, if they get one, putting it as a headline and milking it for all it's worth.
This is a fantasy of people who don't read the newspapers and have a vague idea that the newspapers are publishing things they disagree with. The only people who do that are the advocacy sites like Breitbart's, and the right-wing tabloids like Murdoch's. When I ask people like you for examples, they can't come up with them. If you read the actual story in the Ottawa Citizen, http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/NASA+latest+destination+southern+Ontario+hamlet/6237144/story.html you'd see that it was accurate.
As a science journalist who has been in this situation a few times, I would ask you, how do you think you would get a more accurate story:
(1) By letting the journalist speak to the scientist, who can explain the research to the journalist,
or
(2) by refusing to communicate with the journalist, and letting the journalist figure it out himself, from an abstract or technical paper?
Let's assume that the reporter is dumb and doesn't understand the science. Choice (2) will give you an even less accurate story. You want to spread ignorance? Don't explain things to journalists. Don't let the public know what you're doing.
But actually, the Canadians have pretty good science journalists and editors.
When I write a complicated story, and it's important to get every fact right, I tell the source, "Let me read my notes back to you to make sure I'm getting you right."
If you're a scientist, and you're worried about being quoted accurately, I would suggest that you say, "Could you read your notes back to me to make sure you're quoting me right?"
That's not the same as reviewing the story for approval. The reporter has a right to write whatever he wants. You have a right to make sure that when he quotes you, he gets your quotes right. A competent PR guy would know how to do that.
A competent PR guy would look at the reporter's other stories, if he had any doubt, and see whether he gets his facts right. But the Ottawa Citizen is a real newspaper, so they should know what they're doing.
But this incident goes beyond worrying about errors. They're terrified that somehow, something might possibly go wrong, despite past experience, and that fear weighs more heavily than the interest in doing their job and informing and educating the public about what their government is doing with their tax money.
That's good, because it teaches you not to take books (and teachers) as authorities, but instead forces you to think out the answer yourself. Why is this vital sign important? What's the mechanism of this disease that causes it to change?
That's bad, if you have high-stakes testing, because high-stakes tests are equivalent to rewarding or punishing people on the basis of a roll of the dice.
They used to have it in the Wall Street Journal, but that was a long time ago, before Murdoch bought it even. Look up some old issues from the 1970s in the library.
Don't ever take a law school admissions test. In the example booklet I read, every question was wrong, and you had to pick the least wrong answer. That's the way it was supposed to be. Legal thinking is like that. Don't be surprised that the Supreme Court figured out a way to give the election to GWB.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think Social Security and Medicare will go broke, then you're just ignorant. That's a Republican Party scare claim.
The only way they will go broke is if Republicans somehow take over the entire federal government and destroy them (which is possible, but unlikely). You should start reading newspapers. I recommend reading Paul Krugman's column. As Krugman says, the Republicans want to discredit successful government programs, as part of their anti-government, anti-tax ideology.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/cockroach-ideas/
Conscience of a Liberal
Cockroach Ideas
By PAUL KRUGMAN
March 13, 2011, 12:57 pm
“the Social Security trust fund doesn’t exist”
If Ronald Reagan had said, back in the 1980s, “Let’s increase a regressive tax that falls mainly on the working class, while cutting taxes that fall mainly on much richer people,” he would have faced a political firestorm. But because the increase in the regressive payroll tax was recommended by the Greenspan Commission to support Social Security, it was politically in a different box – you might even call it a lockbox – from Reagan’s tax cuts.
Their answer to the pretty good numbers is to say that the trust fund is meaningless, because it’s invested in U.S. government bonds. They aren’t really saying that government bonds are worthless; their point is that the whole notion of a separate budget for Social Security is a fiction.
But there are two problems with their position.
The lesser problem is that if you say that there is no link between the payroll tax and future Social Security benefits – which is what denying the reality of the trust fund amounts to – then Greenspan and company pulled a fast one back in the 1980s: they sold a regressive tax switch, raising taxes on workers while cutting them on the wealthy, on false pretenses. More broadly, we’re breaking a major promise if we now, after 20 years of high payroll taxes to pay for Social Security’s future, declare that it was all a little joke on the public.
The bigger problem for those who want to see a crisis in Social Security’s future is this: if Social Security is just part of the federal budget, with no budget or trust fund of its own, then, well, it’s just part of the federal budget: there can’t be a Social Security crisis.
That's not quite true.
The Republicans, particularly Newt Gingrich, started a deliberate strategy of attacking the other side for their political advantage. The Republicans would rather discredit government in general, if it makes the Democrats look bad, and encourages people to vote the Democrats out of office. If the Republicans can get voters to believe, "Both sides are worthless, vote them all out," then they've won.
Political scientists can quote Republican strategists like Gingrich saying exactly that in so many words.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html
Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.
By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Published: April 27
P.S. a third party would be nice, but it's almost impossible in our political system. We haven't had a successful third party in over 100 years. If you vote for a third party candidate, your second-favorite candidate loses. In 2000, when people voted for Ralph Nader, they let George W. Bush win the election over Al Gore.
Here's what two political scientists have to say (my notes):
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/lets-just-say-it-the-republicans-are-the-problem/2012/04/27/gIQAxCVUlT_story.html
Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.
By Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Published: April 27
(When Rep. Allen West (R-FL) said that 78-81 Democrats in Congress are members of the Communist Party, no Republican leaders condemns him.
Washington politics and Congress haven't been this dysfunctional in 40 years. The problem is with the Republican party. "The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." This is not "both sides do it." Moderate and center-right Republicans are extinct.
This started first with Newt Gingrich, whose strategy was to convice voters that Congress was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents. As speaker, Gingrich wanted to compromise with Clinton but couldn't.
Second, Grover Norquist founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985, and his Taxpayer Protection Pledge, which binds signers never to support a tax increase, including closing loopholes, has been signed by 238/242 House and 41/47 Senate Republicans, followed by other litmus-test pledges.
This makes compromise impossible. The filibuster has become routine. Senate Republicans have blocked every nominee. This has produced complete gridlock and America's first credit downgrade. Republicans were forced to vote against bills they co-sponsored. Mike Lofgren wrote an anguished diatribe.
Journalists should report this, not "a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon.")
This is the opposite of the way government agencies and corporations calculate lives vs. costs.
Automobile companies routinely have to choose between building cars that will save lives but cost more. Construction companies have to routinely choose between using work safety procedures that will save lives but cost more. Coal companies have to routinely choose between pollution controls that save lives but cost more.
The right-wing economists (in the Wall Street Journal editorial page, for example) say that everything has costs, and we can't spend too much to save a life, because that money could save other lives more cheaply elsewhere. They argue that people don't want to spend more money on safety, in the free marketplace. The government agencies used to calculate the value of a human life at about $1 million; now I've seen it up to $2 or $3 million. If a regulation saves a life at the cost of $3 million, they don't want to do it.
You get all different numbers depending on how you calculate it. If you ask lumberjacks how much of a salary cut they would take in order to make their job safer, you'd get an inferred value of life at maybe $100,000. (That's the one corporations want to use.) When they compensated victims of the World Trade Center, they decided that a rich man's life was worth more than a poor man's life.
If you think it out for a while, you'll see how this leads to inconsistent and ridiculous conclusions. My favorite question for conservatives was, "Suppose your mother was killed in an accident, you went to court, and you were compensated for her death. How much would you have to get in order to feel that you came out ahead?"
Anyway, when it comes to government regulations that make people safer, and save thousands of lives, the conservative economists, corporations and Republicans say, "There has to be some limit to the amount you spend to save a life."
When it comes to Homeland Security, the same Wall Street Journal editorial page says, "There's no limit to the amount you spend to save a life."
I figure my chances of being killed on an airplane by a terrorist are about 1 in a billion. The security costs me about $50 more on a plane ticket and takes at least another hour to get through boarding. I can't take my pocket knife along. I'd rather skip this security.
p.s. I was looking over those drawings again at http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/exhibitions/leonardo-da-vinci-anatomist
One of the fascinating things is the way he drew arteries and veins. He drew them straight. In real life, blood vessels are sinusoidal, like river meanders. (There are good fluid mechanical reasons for that.) So he must have been making quick notes.
I've done that myself, sitting in a lecture with the slides flashing by. I don't have time to make detailed drawings, so I just make quick sketches!
That's right, one of the main lessons of biology is that real life doesn't look like the textbooks!
When I was learning to draw, I copied Da Vinci's drawings.
When I studied anatomy, I went back to Da Vinci's anatomical drawings. Comparing them to the modern anatomy books, and the human anatomy I've seen in museums, some of Da Vinci's work was done with uncanny accuracy, but some of his other drawings were just plain wrong. You can see where he was copying from real life, and where he was interpolating and guessing. When he drew from life, he was really good.
I don't fault him for that. We built on his work. Of course we went beyond him. We had 500 years to do it.
But every time I see one of those awesome 3D CT and MRI reconstructions that surgeons use before they operate, I wonder what Da Vinci would have thought if he could see them.
There was an article in Science magazine about why the same U.S. government agency that wanted to withhold the data talked it over and decided that it wouldn't work.
For one thing, it was impossible to make up a list of "legitimate" research facilities and "non-legitimate" research facilities.
On the other side, the "select agents" regulations already threw the field of infectious diseases into an uproar. Foreign graduate students couldn't work on them. One accomplished infectious disease scientist went to jail for a year for filling out his paperwork wrong. A lot of scientists just stopped working on those agents. Who wants to spend a year waiting for the government to allow you to publish your next paper? Who wants to spend a year defending yourself from trumped-up criminal charges?
Did you look up the curriculum required for this certification?
It sounds like you don't know what a nutritionist is. You're confusing them with restaurant chefs or natural food store salesmen.
Nutritionists who deal with diabetes work for doctors,
A friend of mine just told me that she couldn't eat lettuce because she was taking warfarin. Lettuce, which has vitamin K, would counteract the warfarin and cause internal bleeding. It could kill her. A lot of foods have interactions with commonly-prescribed drugs. Nutritionists have to know things like that.
There's so much bullshit going on in nutrition that nutritionists need a good background in science to know what to trust.
The First Amendment doesn't protect you from from prosecution if you say, "I'll sell you this drug which will cure your cancer for $1,000," when you're not a doctor and the drug doesn't cure cancer.
This is worth repeating in more detail:
In the 1960s, William D. Kelley, D.D.S. (1925-2005) developed a program for cancer patients that involved dietary measures, vitamin and enzyme supplements, and computerized "metabolic typing." Kelley classified people as "sympathetic dominant," "parasympathetic dominant," or metabolically "balanced" and made dietary recommendations for each type. He claimed that his "Protein Metabolism Evaluation Index" could diagnose cancer before it was clinically apparent and that his "Kelley Malignancy Index could detect "the presence or absence of cancer, the growth rate of the tumor, the location of the tumor mass, prognosis of the treatment, age of the tumor and the regulation of medication for treatment." In 1970, Kelley was enjoined from practicing medicine without a license after witnesses testified that he had diagnosed lung cancer on the basis of blood from a patient's finger and prescribed dietary supplements, enzymes, and a diet as treatment. In 1976, following unsuccessful court appeals, his Texas dental license was suspended for five years. He never resumed dental practice but continued to promote his methdology in other ways.
"The board also directed Cooksey to remove a link offering one-on-one support, a personal-training type of service he offered for a small fee."
There have been several cases of parents of children with diabetes who refused to follow conventional medicine, "treated" their children with prayer and diet, and the children died.
They were prosecuted for child abuse, and often sent to jail, sometimes for long prison terms.
That PDF is worth reading carefully. You cross the line when you provide individualized services to treat diabetes:
The problem is he's merely providing diet advice, which is not medical advice.
For a diabetic, diet advice is medical advice.
Doctors hire dieticians for their practice.
There are scientific studies about what works and what doesn't.
Wait, what's the limit of that argument?
When you write a book, you charge money for it, right?
The limit is when a specific person gives you the details of his medical problem, and you give him detailed advice on treating it, especially as part of a business.
When you write a book, you can give any medical advice you want. That's general advice. If you let people call you up, and you gave them specific advice on how to apply your book to their medical condition, that would be the practice of medicine. That would go beyond the limit.
Declan McCullagh doesn't understand the way the First Amendment works in this country. It doesn't protect you from prosecution if you go into a bank and say, "This is a stickup." It doesn't protect you from from prosecution if you say, "I'll sell you this drug which will cure your cancer for $1,000," when you're not a doctor and the drug doesn't cure cancer.
Courts draw a fairly clear line between OTOH publishing a book or magazine article or having a discussion with a friend over dinner, and OTOH offering yourself to the public as an expert, giving specific advice to individuals about their specific conditions, and charging money for it. According to TFA, Steve Cooksey crossed that line. They're giving him a chance to stop, and he better take it. I'm sure he's sincere, but sincere stupid people do a lot of damage.
Doctors have to draw the same line. When are they treating a patient, and when are they just giving general advice, as they do when they write a book, teach a class or discuss a case with a colleague in the cafeteria?
That comes up a lot in malpractice cases. A patient can sue a doctor if they have a doctor-patient relationship, but not when the doctor was simply giving educational advice.
A doctor is treating someone as a patient when he asks questions about the patient's specific conditions, gives specific advice, and (especially) charges money for advice.
(Here's an article about that on Medscape, with a free but annoying signin required http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/759163?src=ptalk)
It sounds like Steve Cooksey was soliciting questions about peoples' specific conditions, giving specific advice, and taking money for his advice in the treatment of diabetes. That's the practice of medicine.
Diabetes is a medical condition. It's not like being a life coach.
If diabetes is treated right, you're often likely to live a long, reasonably healthy life. If it's not treated right, you can die, lose a foot, go blind, and get strokes (which are sometimes worse than death). Lots of people (including children) with diabetes have died because they (or their parents) refused conventional medicine.
That includes diet. In diabetes, diet is a serious business.
North Carolina decided that they didn't want to let anybody without medical qualifications put up a web site and advertise that they're treating a medical condition. You can't practice medicine without a license. That's the legislature's right. We settled that at the beginning of the 20th Century. It doesn't violate the First Amendment.
I am not making the No True Scotsman fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_scotsman_fallacy
If you understand science, and you've been reading newspapers and magazines, it will be clear which newspapers and reporters can report science accurately and which can't. Most of the major newspapers, like the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, etc. do a pretty good job most of the time. I know which reporters at the NYT I can trust and which reporters fuck up sometimes. (When they do fuck up, it's usually because they trust a scientist who is exaggerating the importance of his research. The ones who fuck up are the ones who don't check their facts with another scientist who might disagree.) That's my data, and if you disagree I'd like to see specific examples of stories that you think they get wrong.
There's nothing wrong with tabloids per se. The New York Daily News has very good science reporting. The National Enquirer, surprisingly, had very accurate medical coverage.
I do see a lot of bullshit in the Huffington Post, mostly columns written by self-proclaimed experts. That's what you get for free. I also see a lot of bullshit in the Wall Street Journal, but at least they keep it on the editorial page.
In my reporting I check out a lot of facts. Some of them hold up, and some of them turn out to be lies. I remember for next time who told me the truth and who told me the lies.
Among the European publications, I read the New Scientist, Nature, and The Guardian, and whatever other newspapers appear in Google News. Their science reporting is usually (to use their phrase), spot on. (I also deal with PR people from European agencies.)
If you don't know the difference between the publications and reporters that report accurately on science, and those that don't, then you're not doing your job. In this snow radar story, if the PR department was terrified that the reporter would get the story wrong, they could have searched for his stories in the Ottawa Citizen and seen that he usually did a good job. But they should have known that before he called. It's their job to follow the news coverage.
Journalists are more likely to mis-quote (or ignore) an official answer if you hand them boilerplate generalities that have passed through 11 (!) layers of review and don't say anything meaningful, like the NRC statement. Then the reporters have to ignore your useless statement and figure the story out on their own, for better or worse. You've lost your opportunity to have any input. As the Ottawa Citizen says, as a result of the NRC's stonewalling, the story didn't mention the contribution of the NRC, which is what they were trying to do in the first place.
I know this is Slashdot, but just look at the final Ottawa Citizen story. http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/NASA+latest+destination+southern+Ontario+hamlet/6237144/story.html It actually did explain why the research was important: Ordinary radar can't tell the difference between wet snow and dry snow. They were testing new radar that could. It told the whole story from the perspective of NASA, not NRC. What else could the reporter do?
So you're wrong on the facts. The reporter did get the story right.
If you refuse to speak to reporters, you never get your story out, you lose control of the story, you let your critics tell the story for you, and you don't have a chance to correct errors if there are any. If the story's important enough, I'll go around you and write the story my own way. What purpose does the PR department serve?
Lol. Do you read the papers? Most reporters today aren't in the business of making sure they get the right quote. They're in the business of waiting for a mistake (or an isolated sentence or phrase that could be construed as one) - and, if they get one, putting it as a headline and milking it for all it's worth.
This is a fantasy of people who don't read the newspapers and have a vague idea that the newspapers are publishing things they disagree with. The only people who do that are the advocacy sites like Breitbart's, and the right-wing tabloids like Murdoch's. When I ask people like you for examples, they can't come up with them. If you read the actual story in the Ottawa Citizen, http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/NASA+latest+destination+southern+Ontario+hamlet/6237144/story.html you'd see that it was accurate.
As a science journalist who has been in this situation a few times, I would ask you, how do you think you would get a more accurate story:
(1) By letting the journalist speak to the scientist, who can explain the research to the journalist,
or
(2) by refusing to communicate with the journalist, and letting the journalist figure it out himself, from an abstract or technical paper?
Let's assume that the reporter is dumb and doesn't understand the science. Choice (2) will give you an even less accurate story. You want to spread ignorance? Don't explain things to journalists. Don't let the public know what you're doing.
But actually, the Canadians have pretty good science journalists and editors.
When I write a complicated story, and it's important to get every fact right, I tell the source, "Let me read my notes back to you to make sure I'm getting you right."
If you're a scientist, and you're worried about being quoted accurately, I would suggest that you say, "Could you read your notes back to me to make sure you're quoting me right?"
That's not the same as reviewing the story for approval. The reporter has a right to write whatever he wants. You have a right to make sure that when he quotes you, he gets your quotes right. A competent PR guy would know how to do that.
A competent PR guy would look at the reporter's other stories, if he had any doubt, and see whether he gets his facts right. But the Ottawa Citizen is a real newspaper, so they should know what they're doing.
But this incident goes beyond worrying about errors. They're terrified that somehow, something might possibly go wrong, despite past experience, and that fear weighs more heavily than the interest in doing their job and informing and educating the public about what their government is doing with their tax money.
USA! USA! USA!
"US-style"? I beg your pardon.
American governments can give false information to the public with total impunity. http://www.salon.com/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/
That's good, because it teaches you not to take books (and teachers) as authorities, but instead forces you to think out the answer yourself. Why is this vital sign important? What's the mechanism of this disease that causes it to change?
That's bad, if you have high-stakes testing, because high-stakes tests are equivalent to rewarding or punishing people on the basis of a roll of the dice.
They used to have it in the Wall Street Journal, but that was a long time ago, before Murdoch bought it even. Look up some old issues from the 1970s in the library.
Don't ever take a law school admissions test. In the example booklet I read, every question was wrong, and you had to pick the least wrong answer. That's the way it was supposed to be. Legal thinking is like that. Don't be surprised that the Supreme Court figured out a way to give the election to GWB.