Just Musing

This whole "I'm Cured" thing with Ted Haggard has me thinking. What I'm
thinking is that he's a liar. Still a liar. And still out there damaging people.

But beyond that, I'm wondering about the therapists and psychologists in this country. I do a lot of research on medical devices and (legal) drugs. Medical devices and surgical techniques are heavily regulated in this country. Testing, testing, and even more testing goes into each one. And every time a company wants their "safe" device approved for something even slightly different, they have to go through the trial and approval stage all over again. If a doctor wants to put a shunt in your arteries, you can be fairly sure that the device will do what it's supposed to, and that the surgeon has been trained specifically how to insert it.

However, when you get to the world of therapy, it seems that anything goes.
Homosexuality is no longer considered to be a mental illness, and yet people out there claim they can "cure" it. Kids are put into institutions and "treated" with methods that surely wouldn't be allowed under the Geneva convention, and yet parents are allowed to have their kids tortured in the name of a cure. Why? Why are these places allowed to be open? Why are those "doctors" allowed to further harm people who shouldn't be patients in the first place - because there's nothing wrong with them. The sickness is in society, not the person. Why are parents allowed to commit their children to behavior modification boot camps that, again, torture and psychologically harm the inmates, er, patients? Why are religious leaders, under the guise of therapy, allowed to screw up the most vulnerable people in our population?

I don't understand why these practitioners don't have to prove in rigorous clinical studies that their methods work. Oh that's right - because the use of medicine to harm patients were outlawed after the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. And torture and brainwashing haven't been considered safe medical practices since the Nazis.

Why don't they pull the licences of quacks? Why don't states shut the doors of such facilities? Or do the Feds and States tacitly agree that it's okay to torture homosexuals?

Silly me. I answered that one for myself.