Charles Krauthammer is a member of the board of the President's Council on Bioethics, a licensed psychiatrist (read: medical doctor, unlike psychologists) and has been partially paralyzed since a car accident (I think) in the mid-1970s. Therefore he knows whereof he speaks both as to medical issues affecting spinal cord injuries and the evils of false hope.
Today he takes John Edwards behind the woodshed (for you Northerners, that means "to task") for Edwards' lunatic preacher proclamation that if John Kerry is elected, folks like the late Christopher Reeve will be able to walk.
Krauthammer discusses the state of spinal cord repair research and the stem cell shibboleth, but also excoriates Edwards for his preposterous claims. Here are two key points:
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.
* * *
Politicians have long promised a chicken in every pot. It is part of the game. It is one thing to promise ethanol subsidies here, dairy price controls there. But to exploit the desperate hopes of desperate people with the promise of Christ-like cures is beyond the pale.
Indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment