Matthew Stein is an engineer and contributor to Huffington
Post. Stein might know his engineering, and much of what he writes on
environmental topics is sensible (though it veers on the sensationalist), but
when his writing veers into issues of medicine his engineering background is
not sufficient to avoid being stupid, and Stein does, in the end, seem to have
a tenuous grasp of science and critical thinking. His area of alleged expertise
is apparently disaster preparation and management, and he has written a couple
of books on the topic (When Disaster
Strikes: A Comprehensive Guide for Emergency Planning and Crisis Survival;
and When Technology Fails: A Manual for
Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency). Does his
output manage to rise above standard survivalist nonsense?
Well, his Huffpo contributions don’t suggest so. For
instance, in a post entitled “When a Superbug Strikes Close to Home, How Will
You Deal With it?” (discussed here,
and in more detail here)
he – after some scare tactics about superbugs – went on to recommend “many
alternative medicines, herbs,
and treatments that can be quite effective in the fight against a wide variety
of viruses and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, to which mainstream high-tech
Western medicine has little or nothing to offer.” Or, in other words, there are lot of cures they don’t want you to know about because relying on evidence and science is apparently a matter of close-minded,
conservative groupthink and therefore wrong by the Law of Conspiracies. He even suggests homeopathy as an answer.
Diagnosis: Though medical science isn’t Stein’s main topic,
he surely is an anti-science crank, which should affect his credibility on
other topics he writes about as well.
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