Opinion: Arianna Huffington wants to sell health advice and products. Science help us.

Arianna Huffington got very rich off writers working for free and by providing a platform for quacks to push dubious medical advice, including dangerous amounts of anti-vaccination nonsense.

Now, she’s leaving the Huffington Post and apparently taking the worst of it with her to her new start up, Thrive Global, a “corporate and consumer well-being and productivity platform.” Translating start up-talk into communicable English can be a challenge even for readers at the 10^th-grade level, but whatever it is that Thrive ends up doing, know that Huffington will garner a lot of money doing it. 

This write-up on Thrive from Business Insider tries to pin down exactly what Huffington plans on doing beyond preaching platitudes about wellness and health to corporate HR types worried about worker burnout. Details are scant – Kobe Bryant will apparently have a job after retiring from basketball, and there will be (surely expensive) Thrive retreats that focus on wellness – so it might be unfair to pick apart an operation that doesn’t exist yet except on paper and in investors’ heads.

But on the vague topic of “wellness,” Huffington’s past body of work is extensive, and it isn’t encouraging. I confess not to having read her two most recent books — on the need for more sleep and redefining success (the latter is titled “Thrive”) — but as someone who has consumed a steady diet of Huffington Post fare on vaccination and “alternative” medicine, I can say the public’s health would probably be better off without Huffington hawking wellness products or providing pseudo-medical advice.

I’ve written a handful of pieces on the public health crisis of diminishing vaccination rates, work that required doing some opposition research. The articles that soberly presented the evidence on vaccines and the risks of forgoing them appeared mostly in peer-reviewed medical journals and in newspapers and magazines with a respect for scientific consensus. As for the other side (and I say “other side” without any implication of moral equivalence), one place served as a clearinghouse for articles that ranged from insidiously raising questions about the vaccination schedule to angrily rejecting the work of scientists and doctors: the Huffington Post. This isn’t to say that site publishes only pieces from vaccine deniers (to the contrary, its more recent record on the topic is better), but parents worried about harming their children and who might withhold valuable medical treatment at the slightest suggestion that something could go wrong can easily find archives of material at the Huffington Post to confirm their worst fears.

Here is a small selection of the dangerous quackery peddled on the site started by a woman who now wants to go in the health and wellness business. 

Jenny McCarthy goes to bat for the discredited Dr. Andrew Wakefield:

"Last week, parents were told a British researcher’s 1998 report linking the MMR shot to autism was fraudulent — that this debate about vaccines and autism is now over, and parents should no longer worry about giving their children six vaccines at a single pediatric appointment or 36 by the time they are five years old.

"Is that the whole story? Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s study of 12 children with autism actually looked at bowel disease, not vaccines. The study’s conclusion stated, “We did not prove an association between measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described [autism].”

"Dr. Wakefield did something I wish all doctors would do: he listened to parents and reported what they said. His paper also said that, “Onset of behavioral symptoms was associated, by the parents, with measles, mumps and rubella vaccination in 8 of the 12 children,” and that, “further investigations are needed to examine this syndrome [autism with gut disease] and its possible relation to this vaccine.”

"Since when is repeating the words of parents and recommending further investigation a crime? As I’ve learned, the answer is whenever someone questions the safety of any vaccines."

Bill Maher, who proudly embraces the scientific consensus on climate change, doesn’t do the same for flu vaccination:

"But just to reassure all those people who have such a romantic attachment to vaccines: I know, there are vaccines that have had their battles with the bad guys and won — great! And if you have a compromised immune system and can’t boost it naturally, as in poor countries where the children are eating dirt, then a vaccine can be a white knight — bravo! Does the polio vaccine have the power to prevent children from getting polio, and did it indeed do just that in the 1950s? I believe it does, and it did. But polio had diminished by over 50 percent in the thirty years before the vaccine — that’s a pretty big fact in the polio story that you don’t often hear and which merits debate. It may be the case that the vaccine should have been used anyway to finish polio off, but there are some interesting facts on the other side.

"So yes, I get it, we learned how to trick our immune systems. And maybe sometimes, you gotta do it. But maybe the immune system doesn’t like being tricked so many times. Maybe we should be studying that instead of shouting down debate....

"Is it worth it to get vaccines for every bug that goes around? Injecting something into my bloodstream? I’d like to reserve that for emergencies. This is the flu, and there’s always a flu. I’ve said it before, America is a panicky country. It’s like we look for things to panic about. The reports from Australia, where they’re over their flu season, is that its not a terribly virulent flu. The worldwide numbers support that. But you’d never get that impression from the media in this country."

Pediatrician Jay Gordon is not pleased with the portrayal of his antivaccination friends in a PBS documentary:

"I base everything I do on my reading of CDC and World Health Organization statistics about disease incidence in the United States and elsewhere. I base everything I do on having spent the past thirty years in pediatric practice watching tens of thousands of children get vaccines, not get vaccines and the differences I see.

"Vaccines change children.

"Most experts would argue that the changes are unequivocally good. My experience and three decades of observation and study tell me otherwise. Vaccines are neither all good—as this biased, miserable PBS treacle would have you believe—nor all bad as the strident anti-vaccine camp argues....

"The way vaccines are manufactured and administered right now in 2010 makes vaccines and their ingredients part of the group of toxins which have led to a huge increase in childhood diseases including autism. Your show made parents’ decisions harder and did nothing except regurgitate old news."

The Huffington Post didn’t keep scientific fantasy confined to vaccination; it also posted pieces on intelligent design and “alternative” cancer cures, among other things. The doctor-edited Science Based Medicine blog has pushed back against the Huffington Post’s assault on science multiple times. 

I understand there’s a reason we have a thriving sector of the economy selling extra-medical advice that Huffington now wants to join: People are unsatisfied with the medical establishment, and they want answers they can understand. Doctors, nurses, therapists and other accredited medical professionals can be inept at satisfying patients (though most are quite good at this, in my experience). It can be easy to ignore their years of education and piles of graduate degrees and certifications when a doctor tells you you’re out of treatment options or can’t give a clear answer on a therapy’s outcome because he or she (or the science) doesn’t have a clear answer. 

But we should be skeptical of anyone who sees economic opportunity in selling us answers that science and mainstream medicine have not yet provided (despite their best efforts). Huffington has gone a step further and enabled people who encourage dangerous behavior and deserve to be ignored. Keep that in mind before you “Thrive” (for a price, of course).   

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook