Insanity Rules (They Will Never Be Explained)

I do not want to make Janet Fraser's grief any worse. But some things must be said,...

This case is,...symbolic - of a demonisation of Western medicine (the flower of Western civilisation),...

And of a growing tide of irrationality,...

Just the most extreme manifestation of a cult,...

...This unreason has spread,...

We've had a Sydney coroner investigate why a girl dying of infection was treated by her parents with homeopathy rather than Western drugs that would have saved her.

In Melbourne, a coroner investigated the death of a toddler whose epilepsy was likewise treated with homeopathy,...

And then of a Melbourne man who sweated to death in a "North American Indian" purification ritual.

Again you'll object: every society has a few irrational people, so what's new?

Yet what is new is that we institutionalise unreason now,...

Pandering to what we must resist.

Take the homeopathy favoured by Fraser.

The Lancet medical journal says not one study has proved the worth of a "therapy" based on a theory that a little of what kills you makes you stronger.

Despite that, taxpayer-funded TAFE colleges teach homeopathy as science.

Victoria University until recently offered bachelor degrees in naturopathy and homeopathy,...

Covering "vibrational medicine" and "the metaphysical".

EVEN crazier, VicHealth gave women in Ouyen $7000 to hold a naked rain dance.

And home birth activists, even interviewed mid-way through a tragic labour, still get a good press.

Just pray now that the,...government's maternal services review will at least refuse demands that home births be covered by Medicare.

But when unreason is so on the hoof that millions of us believe man is heating the world to hell, despite no rise in temperatures since at least 2002, what hope that reason will triumph?

What hope, when even children now die of our superstitions?

-- Andrew Bolt, with a must-read column about "perhaps Australia's most ferocious advocate of home births", how she killed her baby, and why TMR does what we do, along with Australia's Herald Sun.