Medical 'Research'

I remember this past summer when, during the height of the Presidential campaigns, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin (always good for a sound bite) made mention of the fact that so much money was being wasted on medical research that was pointless. Now as a self-professed mother of a 'special needs' baby and aunt of an autistic baby, it seemed incongrous to a lot of people that she questioned medical research regarding fruit flies when it is one of the areas which is being researched to provide medicines to treat autism. Now for the layperson it isn't suprising if you didn't know it but being so high up on the public stage and knowing that everything you say will be scrutinized, you would have thought that perhaps someone would have vetted her comments and ensured she didn't link fruit fly research to a topic that she should know about.

But I digress. This isn't to be a blog on what Sarah Palin does and doesn't (or should and shouldn't) know but rather on the topic of medical research and how she does have a case that some medical 'research' is wasteful. Case in point? Well a recent study has concluded that 'rocking out' (or banging your head in time to heavy metal or rock music) can be detrimental to your health. Researchers at the University of New South Wales (in Australia) concluded that the average heavy metal song has approximately 146 beats per minute. So if you bang your head violently that many times in a minute you are likely to give yourself a mild head injury of some sort.

Now I ask the obvious question; did we really need medical research to point that fact out to us? Perhaps the link between fruit flies and autism treatments is not blatantly obvious but the linkage between shaking your head violently nearly 146 times in a minute should be obvious even to the most dense of people. I grant you that once something has been 'medically proven' or 'scientifically researched' it becomes more obvious that it's probably something bad for our health but I'm sure that someone invested a great deal of money into the subject and has now found out something that most people who have done headbanging probably realize a long time ago; that headbanging gives you a headache to say the least.

Now there are tons of medical conditions out there that aren't understood or there are other activities that we do on a day to day basis that I would like to know more about. Now for example does repeated use of a cell phone really cause cancer to form in your brain? That is something I would like to spend money on to research and discover conclusively. Do I need to spend money to find out that texting while driving increases chances for a car accident? No! I mean any idiot should be able to see that as a fact and those that don't accept that as a given are usually those that do it all the time until the day they themselves get into an accident. In such cases a medical conclusion isn't enough to warrant a change in behavior for many people. Sometimes it takes experiencing the problem to open our eyes to the issue.

Overindulging in fattening foods is bad for our health? Shouldn't that be obvious? But what if the foods labeled 'fat free' aren't truly fat free. That's worth knowing or understanding for the public. Kids playing video games all day and not taking part in physical activity leads to obesity. Shouldn't the 'not taking part in physical activity' part of the statement make the obesity part a little more obvious. It all comes back to the theory that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you don't move for a day at a time then that whole pizza you ate isn't going to get burned off calorie wise. But just to be sure maybe we should give a medical lab a few million to confirm it for us. What I'm trying to say is we need to figure out how to beat cancer and heart disease... not prove that voluntarily shaking your head can give you minor head injuries.