[p2p-research] Millions of Health Freedom Fighters - Newsletter

[Kevin Carson]

On 1/6/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> however, I did quickly check the bolen site and then the documentary he
> recommended on the gerson cancer therapy, and that shows the background of
> his critique
>
> the gerson therapy has cured scores of peoplee, there are many witnesses and
> in one Japanese clinic, careful statistics show a cure rate of 50% which is
> apparently high for cancer,
>
> what the healthcare articles do in Wikipedia, is to faithfully represent
> only the mainstream, and whether we agree with it or not, the failure to
> represent non-mainstream points of view is a problem, and a valid critique

I agree that his frustration with that is justified, but I think it
falls under my original statement that his critique applied mainly to
very small specialty areas.

And his beef with Wikipedia's treatment of alternative medicine
doesn't jibe very well with the general language he used to criticize
Wikipedia's editing practices.

When most people hear a complaint that Wikipedia lets crazy vagrants
edit it from library computers, they're not thinking "Oh, yeah, those
damn shopping bag people keep editing out the alternative medicine
material and replacing it with mainstream medical material."

The press is full of criticisms of "the cult of the amateur" that
sound very much like Bolen's, but most such people object to what they
see as excess freedom for advocates of the alternative (whether it be
alt medicine, heterodox econ, or whatever) without being properly
subject to gatekeeping authority by properly qualified
"professionals."

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html