CNN: WTF?

If this is a sign of things to come after CNN killed off its science reporting division, America's most trusted name in news may soon be worth watching only for the Anderson Cooper/Kathy Griffin New Year's comedy team-up. The network's senior medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen posted an article today with the headline "The best alternative medicine for children". It's just another in a long line of useless stories about "western" doctors being unable to treat illnesses better understood by "alternative" medicine. Some of the suggestions aren't too bad. Giving your child probiotics for diarrhea, for example, could actually be effective under a doctor's supervision. And there is evidence to suggest that the herb St. John's wort can help depression. But the problem with these "alternative" treatments is that they often aren't subjected to the rigorous standards of testing that real medicine is. Yes, St. John's wort may be an effective herb, but you'll often find different dosages from brand to brand or even from pill to pill. More egregious is this article's endorsement of using fish oil as an alternative to real asthma medication. Even if fish oil is an effective treatment for such a potentially life threatening illness, no parent should ever try and make an end run around a trained medical doctor. Cohen relates stories of parents who couldn't receive adequate treatment from their family pediatrician and had to turn to other sources, but she fails to mention the huge numbers of children whose lives are literally saved every passing minute by "western" medicine. This portrayal of trained doctors as stodgy know-nothings is dangerous and absurd. No homeopath or herbalist has ever made a medical contribution even approaching the benefits of real, evidence-based advancements like vaccinations, antibiotics, or any of the myriad contributions of "western" medicine that have created the quality of life we enjoy today.

In other words, Elizabeth Cohen (and by extension CNN) is bad at her job. Read all the misguided nonsense here.