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The Tea Party's Favorite Doctors Are Cuckoo Quacks - 'Think Glenn Beck with an MD'

*They’re not just against health care reform. They think Obama may have hypnotized voters and that climate legislation threatens your health.*

Most tea party protests against health care reform feature a standard cast of characters. Revolution-era patriots in greatcoats and tricorne hats; LaRouchies handing out pictures of Obama with a Hitler mustache; the people with the giant fetus signs; and some guy dressed as an actual tea bag. Then, there are the doctors. Real doctors. They wear white coats and they look respectable. And many of them come from a group with a respectable-sounding name—the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.

As tea partiers have become the leading opposition to health care reform, AAPS has lent credibility to their criticism of the emerging health care legislation. Before the big 9/12 rally in Washington, AAPS cosponsored a protest on Capitol Hill with the Tea Party Patriots that AAPS says attracted 1,000 physicians. The organization's president, Mark Kellen, appeared with Georgia representatives Tom Price and Phil Gingrey—GOP members of the congressional doctors' caucus—to slam the bill.

AAPS docs hopped Tea Party Express buses to protest the American Medical Association's annual meeting in Houston (the AMA endorsed the House bill), and staged a live reading of the legislation to highlight objectionable passages. When Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann called for tea partiers to come to the Capitol on November 5 to "kill the bill," AAPS doctors organized a national "tele-town hall" to prep attendees. On Fox News and talk radio, AAPS docs often appear to offer an expert medical opinion against reform.

Yet despite the lab coats and the official-sounding name, the docs of the AAPS are hardly part of mainstream medical society. Think Glenn Beck with an MD. The group (which did not return calls for comment for this story) has been around since 1943. Some of its former leaders were John Birchers, and its political philosophy comes straight out of Ayn Rand. Its general counsel is Andrew Schlafly, son of the legendary conservative activist Phyllis. The AAPS statement of principles declares that it is "evil" and "immoral" for physicians to participate in Medicare and Medicaid, and its journal is a repository for quackery. Its website features claims that tobacco taxes harm public health and electronic medical records are a form of "data control" like that employed by the East German secret police. An article on the AAPS website speculated that Barack Obama may have won the presidency by hypnotizing voters, especially cohorts known to be susceptible to "neurolinguistic programming"—that is, according to the writer, young people, educated people, and possibly Jews.

For decades the AAPS has opposed any attempt—real or imagined—to expand the government's role in health care. Its last big moment in the spotlight came in 1993, when it sued Hillary Clinton to stop "socialized medicine," prompting a trial court to order the then first lady to disclose the participants of her health care task force. The organization requires members to sign a "declaration of independence" agreeing to stop participating with any third-party payers—meaning not only government programs like Medicare, but private insurers, too. Basically AAPS doctors believe that medicine should be a cash-and-carry business.

This free-market fundamentalism has made the AAPS a natural ally for big corporations. Documents released as a result of the tobacco litigation the 1990s and early 2000s show that Philip Morris officials worked with AAPS executive director Jane Orient to help the company's "junk science" campaign that attacked indoor smoking bans. The tobacco company also relied on AAPS to generate "third party press releases" in support of its agenda, according to documents in the tobacco archives. In this fall's edition of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, an economist who has previously received funding from Philip Morris wrote an article arguing that a tobacco tax "leads to deterioration in public health"—because it leads people to switch to cigarettes with more nicotine so they can smoke fewer of them.

For the AAPS journal, however, this is tame stuff. The publication's archives present a kind of alternate-universe scientific world, in which abortion causes breast cancer and vaccines cause autism, but HIV does not cause AIDS. Cutting carbon emissions represents a grave threat to global health (because environmental regulation would make people poorer and, consequently, sicker). In 2005, the journal erroneously claimed that illegal immigration had caused a leprosy epidemic in the US, a claim that was reported as fact in more mainstream outlets such as Lou Dobbs' show.

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For doctors, less sleep is linked with more mistakes

The debate over the lengthy hours and the sleepless overnight shifts that characterize medical training programs continues to rage, both in the U.S. and abroad. But new research published in the October 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association underscores that getting enough sleep isn't only crucial for medical residents. In an analysis of nearly 1900 surgical and obstetrical procedures performed by attending physicians—that is, senior doctors who have completed training—the day after completing overnight shifts, researchers found that, in surgeries, mistakes were made nearly twice as often when the doctor had slept fewer than 6 hours, compared with those performed by surgeons who had gotten more sleep.

The study, led by Dr. Jeffrey M. Rothschild of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, set out to determine whether working late night or overnight shifts (between 12AM and 6AM) negatively impacted doctor's performance the day after. Rothschild and colleagues analyzed data for procedures performed between January 2000 and December 2007 by 86 surgeons and 134 obstetricians and gynecologists who had just worked a late night or overnight shift. Those were then compared with some 8,500 procedures performed by doctors who hadn't just pulled all-nighters.

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