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The thread continues:

Thanks so much for posting my response.  It’s one of the many things I truly appreciate about your site, the airing of both sides. You posted an update from another reader immediately after mine:

True, some herbs have medicinal properties, but unless one has run a double-blind test, then you truly don’t know if the herbs do anything beyond the placebo effect. The US government has spent over a billion dollars trying to prove non-Western medical claims, and guess what? The herbs and other items very rarely do anything positive, occasionally show mild effects, and often have undocumented side effects.

I have to take issue with this comment as well.  I happen to work in the dietary supplement industry, specifically selling botanical extracts in raw material form to dietary supplement manufacturers and contract manufacturers.  I’ve worked for some of the largest German Botanical Extract companies that are at the forefront of research for botanical medicines.

I’m all for running double-blind tests, but the design of the study is incredibly important.  I’ll give you an example: St. John’s Wort.

You may recall in the late 1990’s that St. John’s Wort was discussed as an exciting way to treat depression and anxiety.  Historically it’s been used to treat various nerve conditions and disorders, as well as mild to moderate depression.  There was a huge explosion of sales of St. John’s Wort after Barbara Walters did a 20/20 special on the herbal extract that aired in early July of 1997.

Naturally the NIH decided to do it’s own double-blind placebo controlled study, but they decided in spite of little evidence, to research St. John’s Wort for treatment of moderate to severe depression.  However, most materia medica’s and botanical monographs for St. John’s Wort suggest it for mild to moderate depression.  So the study moved forward, and guess what? The results showed that it gave little to no effect for treating severe depression.  This was no shock to those of us in the industry but the general public and media response to the news was that yet another herbal medicine was proven to be ineffective.

Another great example is to think of the deaths we have in the U.S. each year by those who forage for wild mushrooms.  You inevitably hear about someone who picked and ate the wrong species and dies from liver toxicity.  In Germany they use an IV treatment of milk thistle extract, which is kept stocked in hospitals, and their outcomes are much better.  There have been a few instances of doctors in the U.S. using the IV therapy with promising results and there have been discussions with the FDA to approve the use of this therapy.

I’d be much more inclined to listen to studies on botanicals that come out of Europe because they actually use botanical medicine in their medical system much more than we do in the U.S., and their herbal therapies are often treated as drugs requiring a prescription.  They also integrate herbal therapy into their medical schools so medical doctors know how to properly use them and treat their patients.

Here’s the thing.  Botanical/herbal medicines are a great when used preventatively, or as a first line of defense against common illnesses and ailments, if you know how to use them properly and use them at the required dose.  If they don’t do the trick, you bring out the big guns, prescription medicines and more invasive surgical interventions.  I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but to take the either/or approach is to ignore centuries of successful historical use for botanical/herbal therapies.

(Photo of St. John’s Wort via Wikimedia Commons)

Joshua Kendell views obsessive-compulsive behavior as a productive trait held by many of America’s iconic innovators:

Many people will say, “Oh, I have to clean up my kitchen now because I have a little OCD.” But by “obsessive,” I don’t mean people who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD can be incapacitating, and those who suffer from this disorder are unlikely to start Apple or fly across the Atlantic on a piece of wood like Charles Lindbergh. These people are haunted by thoughts that just won’t go away; someone with OCD might be constantly worried that the house will burn down; as a result, he or she might be afraid to go out even after checking a thousand times that the burner on the stove is off.

The icons covered in my book are saddled (or blessed) with a related condition called obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD). While the obsessions and compulsions in both disorders can revolve around the same things—such as cleanliness or order—OCD is an anxiety disorder and OCPD is a character disorder. Rather being impaired by their intrusive thoughts, those with OCPD celebrate them. Like Steve Jobs, Henry Heinz prided himself on his company’s clean factory; for decades, his plant in Pittsburgh was a must-see destination for tourists. My icons were productive obsessives; they found a way to channel that which they couldn’t stop thinking about into some spectacular achievement. As a boy, Ted Williams thought of nothing else but hitting. As he once said, “When I wasn’t eating or sleeping, I was practicing my swing.”

Indiana’s recent school-grading controversy has led some to question the wisdom of ranking public schools on an A-to-F scale. Fifteen states do so, and several, including Indiana, use those grades to make decisions about school funding. Charter school advocate Nina Rees defends the A-to-F system:

In this era where we can go online and get rankings of hotels, restaurants, doctors and dog walkers, offering some sort of easy-to-understand metric for a school’s performance shouldn’t be counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t most parents rather have state education officials offer this information and explain its meaning than to have to rely on a real estate agent or next door neighbor to figure out whether a school is good or bad? … And giving parents an easy way to understand how schools are doing is critical; an A-to-F grading scale is something we are all familiar with and understand.

But edublogger RiShawn Biddle thinks the framework isn’t helpful:

It’s seductively simple. … But it doesn’t provide families the information they need to be able to make decisions. If you’re a parent, you want to know growth over time. Are they providing AP courses? How are they doing in algebra? If you’ve got young black sons, you want to know: Can this school serve your son well? You can’t get that from a letter grade.

Diane Ravitch agrees:

No state has gotten it right because it is too simplistic to label a complex institution with a single letter grade. There are too many variables, too many moving parts, too many different components that make up a school to say that it can be rated like a tomato or a pumpkin.

Meanwhile, accountability advocate Michael Petrilli says reformers are open to new ideas:

When you get results back and they don’t match up with reality, you’ve got a problem. I think there’s going to be a good conversation about whether boiling it all down to a single grade makes sense.

But Education Week‘s Andrew Ujifusa says changes won’t come overnight, if at all:

[L]awmakers might be able to confine the story in their minds to one misguided (or worse) individual. In that case, they may not be willing to roll back what they’ve done in their states because of the publicized actions of one man in one state. Organizations like the Foundation for Excellence in Education, which lobbies for states to adopt A-F accountability and had close links with Bennett, might at least in theory be just as willing to defend existing A-F systems in states, if they come under serious political attack. The subsequent question is, just how effective would such lobbying be?

More Dish on the grading scandal here, here, and here.

A reader writes:

If you haven’t had a chance to yet, I highly recommend you watch a new HBO documentary, The Crash Reel.  It’s the story of former professional snowboarder, Kevin Pearce, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after crashing in the half-pipe during a training run.  The movie does an amazing job showing exactly why we need to demand that if the people in charge of running the Olympics, the X-Games, the NFL, etc, won’t implement safety measures to protect these athletes from themselves, then we’re going to need the government to step in.

The specific issue for snowboarding competition is the ever increasing height of the half-pipe walls.

They allow for crowd-pleasing amplitude but has turned bumps, bruises, and the occasional broken bones into paralyzations, traumatic brain injuries, and deaths.  It took Kevin Pearce over two years to recover enough from his injury to realize that he could never snowboard professionally again, but if he hadn’t had the support of a truly amazing family, he would have been back on the slopes and had a very high chance of re-injuring his still-damaged brain.  His father draws the perfect analogy when he says something along the lines of, “NASCAR had to step in and limit the size of the engines in the race cars because, if they hadn’t, more and more drivers would be smashing into the walls.”

These athletes are conditioned to go bigger and it is up to us, as a society, to make sure rules are in place so they know they don’t need to maim or kill themselves to entertain us.

A related, long-running Dish thread: Is Football The Next Big Tobacco?

Lily Kuo relays new developments:

China’s national health and family planning commission is considering allowing any couple where one parent is an only child to have two children. This would effectively suspend the one-child rule for many more urban couples, the largest group affected by the policy. Some anticipate the reform will be announced in the fall at the National People’s Congress, when key economic reforms are often unveiled. Chinese media report (link in Chinese) that authorities are also considering allowing all couples to have two children after 2015. If that happens, China’s population would increase by an estimated 9.5 million more babies (link in Chinese) each year over the first five years, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch in a note over the weekend.

But it may already be too late to fix the economic damage:

China’s approximately 930-million-person labor force shrank last year for the first time in decades, and will decline further as a population bulge of people now in their 40s and 50s pass into retirement. Here’s how that looks:

A baby boom would help compensate, and increase the number of people who can support that aging population. However, it may be too little too late, given that the labor force is estimated to begin declining by as much as 10 million a year starting in 2025, and it will take at least 16 years for the effects of a baby boom that starts today to be felt in the workforce. The authorities may be unable to avoid unpopular measures like raising the country’s retirement age—55 for women and 60 for men.

Previous Dish on China’s demographic woes here and here.

Brian Thill contemplates the role of CGI birds in cinema:

Their first function seems to be in the service of some fairly straightforward notion of verisimilitude. After all, the world is filled with birds, so it shouldn’t be surprising that films would incorporate them. But it would be easy enough to have a sufficient measure of verisimilitude in your film about hobbits or zombies or supermen without needing birds. No theatergoer ever said of such a film, “It was okay, I guess, but it just wasn’t believable. I mean, where were the birds?”

When you scrutinize the shots that contain them, you begin to discover that they aren’t just there to make the unreal scenes feel a bit more real. These are instrumental birds.

Part of what they are there for is to indicate, by way of comparison, the scale and grandeur of the sweeping landscapes and vistas that are so central to establishing the proper atmosphere of awe and beauty in film. This has been a familiar tactic in painting for centuries. To take just one example: in the lower right corner of Frederic Edwin Church’s gigantic painting Cotopaxi (1862), which depicts an enormous volcanic eruption clouding the skies and the blazing sun, we find a tiny group of birds in flight in the bottom right corner, well beneath the vault of the high rugged cliffs in the foreground, minuscule against the backdrop of the sublime scale and power of the geologic world. If you didn’t look closely at the tumult of the enormous painting, those deliberately placed birds would be so easy to miss. …

Fake birds are important for their collective energy and motion, as objects meant to possess a vague kind of dynamic, living, animal presence, but they’re entirely unimportant in any close-up or individualized sense. It’s not the individual creature that has any standing or value, but the notion of the flock, of “Nature,” as set-dressing in cackling, aggregate form: philosophically unimportant as fellow living things, but cinematically (aesthetically) essential in the frame, functioning in much the same way that filmed images of clouds and rolling waves are supposed to. They’re shorthand for an emaciated natural world, a minor nature, beautifully and even lovingly rendered, but always subordinated to the comings and goings of man, the living object who matters.

Recent Dish on the role of birds in art here.

Byron York wonders why Rick Santorum isn’t considered the GOP’s 2016 frontrunner:

In 2012, he won 11 primaries and caucuses, making him the solid second-place finisher in a party that has a long history of nominating the candidate who finished second the last time around. (See Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.) And yet now, no one — no one — is suggesting Santorum will be the frontrunner in 2016, should he choose to run. As far as the political handicapping goes, Santorum’s 2012 victories don’t seem to count for much.

Larison solves the mystery:

York presents Santorum’s message on economic issues as one of the strengths of the campaign, and to some extent it was, but what goes unmentioned here is how allergic many in the GOP are to anything that sounds like economic populism.

His voting record is littered with all of the major blunders of the Bush years, so he can’t very credibly pose as a champion of limited government, and he has been denouncing libertarians for the better part of a decade. Santorum also comes across as abrasive, and when he speaks it usually feels as if he is lecturing and dictating to the audience rather than trying to appeal to them. If you wanted to invent a politician who could alienate several different parts of the Republican coalition all at once, you would design someone like Santorum.

Yglesias digs into Santorum’s economic agenda:

Joyner adds:

Santorum simply comes across as harsh and extreme, even to die-hard Republicans. While it’s true that the GOP has a tradition of nominating the guy whose “turn” it is, my strong guess is that, as when George W. Bush was nominated in 2000, none of the candidates from last time around will be relevant. Mitt Romney almost certainly won’t run again. Santorum hit his ceiling in 2012. Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich, who barely mattered, are has-beens.

Fisher asks, “How is it that U.S. and Soviet leaders went ahead with decades of summits despite disagreements so severe they implied a threat of World War III, while today a summit falls apart over a single NSA contractor and the slow progress in some minor security and trade cooperation measures?”:

It may actually be the case that the reset was doomed not by high tensions but by low stakes. Obama and Xi feel compelled to force a smile for the camera at Sunnylands in large part because the U.S. and China have arguably the most important bilateral relationship in the world; neither can afford to let it fall apart. The same was true of Washington-Moscow summits during the Cold War, when leaders who might despise one another would meet not despite but because of the very real threat of mutual nuclear annihilation.

Today, though, the United States and Russia have found themselves in a not-so-sweet spot in which they have enough overlapping areas of interest to spark bitter disagreements, but not enough that either wants to commit the necessary resources to get along. It’s just not the priority.

Ioffe provides the view from Moscow:

[F]or all the Kremlin’s pouting, there’s also a consensus in Moscow that, well, there’s not much left to talk about.

“Obviously, Obama just can’t come to Moscow with Snowden there, but they made clear they’re not totally shuttering the relationship,” says Fyodr Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, a voice that, traditionally, is not far from the Kremlin’s line. “Okay, well now, the score is now 1-1, but the other problem is that the relationship has no content now. Even if Obama came to Moscow, it’s not really clear what they’d talk about.”

Kimberly Marten believes that “Obama did exactly the right thing”:

Obama had made it clear that the Snowden case was his line in the sand, and Putin crossed that line unnecessarily. Putin could have chosen instead to give the Snowden request the 3-month administrative consideration period that the Kremlin originally mentioned when he originally made his asylum application, rather than granting Snowden the yearlong temporary asylum straight off. It looks like the meeting in Washington tomorrow between Secretary of State Kerry and Secretary of Defense Hagel and their Russian counterparts is still on, and that is the truly substantive part of the diplomatic interaction anyway. Assuming that the Russian side doesn’t cancel their participation in that meeting, then there has been no real change in the quality of the relationship.

Larison sees the issue differently:

As rebukes go, Obama’s cancellation of the bilateral summit meeting with Putin isn’t that strong, but it could and probably will be used as a pretext for greater antagonism on some issue. It goes without saying that the decision to cancel will have no positive effect on Moscow’s internal conduct, its asylum decision on Snowden, or any other outstanding disagreement between Washington and Moscow, but then it isn’t intended to have that effect. This is a decision primarily meant to placate American critics of Russia, who predictably won’t be satisfied with this gesture, and to save Obama the trouble of a meeting that would likely have been fruitless anyway.

Greenwald fumes:

The US constantly refuses requests to extradite – even where (unlike Russia) they have an extradition treaty with the requesting country and even where (unlike Snowden) the request involves actual, serious crimes, such as genocide, kidnapping, and terrorism. Maybe those facts should be part of whatever media commentary there is on Putin’s refusal to extradite Snowden and Obama’s rather extreme reaction to it. … I think it’s becoming increasingly clear here who the rogue and lawless nation is in this case.

Kaplan, on the other hand, supports the cancellation:

This year, Discovery’s “Shark Week” started off with a program (teaser here) offering “evidence” that there are still prehistoric Megalodon super-sharks living today. But except for a short, vaguely-worded disclaimer at the end of the show, its producers failed to point out that the program is essentially fiction. Christie Wilcox fumes:

No whale with a giant bite taken out of it has ever washed up here in Hawaii. No fishing vessel went mysteriously missing off of South Africa in April. No one has ever found unfossilized Megalodon teeth. Collin Drake? Doesn’t exist. The evidence was faked, the stories fabricated, and the scientists portrayed on it were actors. The idea that Megalodon could still be roaming the ocean is a complete and total myth.

Here’s what I don’t get, Discovery: Megalodons were real, incredible, fascinating sharks. There’s a ton of actual science about them that is well worth a two hour special. We’ve discovered their nursery grounds off the coast of Panama, for example. Their bite is thought to be the strongest of all time—strong enough to smash an automobile—beating out even the most monstrous dinosaurs. The real science of these animals should have been more than enough to inspire Discovery Channel viewers. But it’s as if you don’t care anymore about presenting the truth or reality. You chose, instead, to mislead your viewers with 120 minutes of bullshit. And the sad part is, you are so well trusted by your audience that you actually convinced them: according to your poll, upwards of 70% of your viewing public fell for the ruse and now believes that Megalodon isn’t extinct.

The above video is from Discovery’s Megalodon special from last summer that presents a fascinating but fact-based look at the extinct predator. Wil Wheaton thinks the network has now betrayed its core audience:

An entire generation has grown up watching Discovery Channel, learning about science and biology and physics, and that generation trusts Discovery Channel. We tune into Discovery Channel programming with the reasonable expectation that whatever we’re going to watch will be informative and truthful. We can trust Discovery Channel to educate us and our children about the world around us! That’s why we watch it in the first place!

The Megalodon special was the highest-rated “Shark Week” program ever, and a producer is still defending the program as some kind of journalistic enterprise. Chris Kirk notes a growing trend:

This isn’t the first time Discovery Communications, the media company that runs the Discovery Channel, has broadcasted dubious documentaries, and judging from the ratings it won’t be the last. The company also runs Animal Planet, which aired two pseudo-documentaries claiming to show scientific evidence of mermaids. The second documentary attracted 3.6 million viewers, unprecedented for the network.

These faux documentaries, which can best be described as anti-educational, seem to have grown more common on in recent years. The Disney-owned History channel, for example, has earned criticism for airing pseudoscience programs like Ancient Aliens, UFO Files, and the Nostradamus Effect instead of programs about, you know, history.

If these programs offer any signs that they are fictional, they are brief and inadequate signs. Unsurprisingly, then, many viewers buy into the false claims these documentaries peddle. Shortly after Discovery’s documentaries aired, for example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association found it necessary to assure the public that “no evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.”

Recent Dish on mermaids in their proper place – fiction – here and here.

Euny Hong profiles pharmacologist Ethan Perlstein, who tired of taking postdoc positions and is now crowd-funding his own research:

In September 2012, Perlstein decided to start a meth lab for mice to find out where radioactive amphetamines accumulate in mouse brain cells. He launched a crowdfunding campaign on the site Rockethub, a kind of Kickstarter for science for academic projects. The tag line, “Crowdfund my meth lab, yo,” was accompanied by a photo from Breaking Bad, about a teacher who runs a meth lab. The goal: to raise $25,000. … It is a safe bet that some of his former peers thought the move populist or unbecoming of an academic, particularly with the Breaking Bad allusions. But it worked: He raised $25,460 from over 400 people.

Perlstein expects more researchers to break outside the confines of the university:

The independent scientist movement is not a fad, said Perlstein, as long as problems for scientists in academia continue. “There are too many people rising up in the pyramid scheme of academia to be absorbed by positions,” he said. “Independent science is a safety valve that allows the pressure building from all this excess human capital. The independent path could absorb them, but that’s not going to edify academia. They will keep charging along as if nothing ever happened.”

But Jay Ulfelder wonders if the money will actually materialize outside of academia, particularly for social scientists:

As someone who’s managed to make a good living for the past two and a half years as an independent scholar—or freelance researcher or consultant or whatever the heck it is that I do—I want this to be true. Honestly, though, I think it’s still very, very hard to survive professionally without a regular paycheck and an institutional or corporate mooring, and the vast majority of people who try will fail.

Why? Let’s start with Perlstein’s story. His mouse meth-lab project raised about $25,000 on Kickstarter. Getting one $25K chunk of funding is great, but it’s hardly going to make your year. For that, you’re going to need to string together at least a few projects of that size or larger (remember, that funding also has to cover research expenses). Each of those projects will require a proposal or crowdfunding campaign, and those things take a lot of unpaid time to put together. Most projects won’t have a Breaking Bad hook, and many attempts to inject that kind of playful tone and pop-cultural relevance into your marketing campaign will fall terribly flat.