Government Information Is No Longer Dependable

There are a couple of government agencies that have always been considered a sort of gold standard for medical information. The Centers for Disease Control, for instance, posts a lot of information and advice, and it ... was ... considered an authoritative source.

I followed the links to this article in Glamour, of all places.

For the past 15 years, Ruth Shaber, M.D., has been an ob-gyn in San Francisco for Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation's largest health maintenance organizations. She sees all types of women—union members, executives, waitresses. Most of them, Dr. Shaber says, have questions for her, including how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases, how to preserve their fertility, how to prevent breast and cervical cancer and whether the latest Internet health scare they've heard is really true.

Dr. Shaber tries hard to separate fact from fiction because, she says, "rumor and hearsay can start to seem real." In the past, she'd sometimes refer patients to government websites and printed fact sheets, or rely on those outlets to help create her own materials. Not anymore. "As a physician, I can no longer trust government sources," says Dr. Shaber. She is not a political activist or a conspiracy theorist; in addition to her own practice, she's Kaiser Permanente's director of women's health services for northern California and head of the HMO's Women's Health Research Institute. Yet this decidedly mainstream doctor and administrator says, "I no longer trust FDA decisions or materials generated [by the government]. Ten years ago, I would not have had to scrutinize government information. Now I don't feel comfortable giving it to my patients."

Such doctor mistrust represents a major change. For the past 100 years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been the world's premier government agency ensuring drug safety. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have similarly stellar track records. But recently, Dr. Shaber charges, the government has lost its most precious asset: credibility.

How did it happen? Many prominent figures in science and public health think they know the answer. "People believe that religiously based social conservatives have direct lines to the powers that be within the U.S. government, the administration, Congress, and are influencing public-health policy, practice and research in ways that are unprecedented and very dangerous," says Judith Auerbach, Ph.D., a former NIH official who is now a vice president at the nonprofit American Foundation for AIDS Research. In fact, Glamour, has found that on issues ranging from STDs to birth control, some radical conservative activists have used fudged and sometimes flatly false data to persuade the government to promote their agenda of abstinence until marriage. The fallout: Young women now read false data on government websites, learn bogus information in federally funded sex-education programs and struggle to get safe, legal contraceptives—all of which, critics argue, may put them at greater risk for unplanned pregnancies and STDs.

"Abstinence is a laudable goal," says Deborah Arrindell, vice president of health policy for the nonpartisan American Social Health Association, an STD-awareness group. "But it is not how young women live their lives—the reality is that most women have premarital sex. Our government is focusing not on women's health but on a moral agenda." Consider this a wake-up call. The new lies about women's health

This is a surprisingly thorough and well-done article, and it's quite long. I would suggest that women readers of this blog, especially, should check it out, as it turns out a lot of the misinformation has to do with women's health.

There are several things going on here. One is the religious right's desire to promote their narrow view of sexuality. There is a sexist aspect to it, which I'm not going to get into, but you don't have to dig very deep to find the message that women should be staying home and taking care of the babies. There is good old-fashioned Republican corruption, with the drug companies re-writing scientific results to make their products sell better, and well-financed politicians helping them do it in government publications and web sites. All of these things come together in our one-party federal government to produce a literature of lies.

Everybody knows this is happening, but it almost seems like nobody cares. We just sit in front of our TVs and let this happen to our country while we wonder about that blonde girl who disappeared in Aruba.