(2010-07-19) Obama Berwick Cms Appoint Alt Med Issue

Barack Obama made a recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to head CMS. Berwick is a big proponent of "PatientCenteredMedicine", which sounds like a good thing. The Science Based Medicine crowd fears that his Consumerist approach supports quackery like the Anti Vax and CAM crowd. His presence at a Summit On Integrative Medicine confirms that fear. He mentioned homeopathy and acupuncture, not to criticize them as health claims, but only to warn that they shouldn’t compete with each other, or with other modalities, for limited health care resources... As an aside, it’s ironic that Berwick leans toward Single Payer health care. His radical “I want what I want when I want it” model of patient centeredness could never function in any conceivable form of single payer care in the U.S.