There are sometimes when two contradictory thought streams start charging through my brain and I can’t cope. This is one.

I got an email from a PR person for this website http://www.yourcandidatesyourhealth.org/ which tells you your local candidates record essentially for or against embryonic stem cell research. As you might guess, the idea from Research!America and the Lasker Foundation is to encourage people to vote against candidates opposing stem cell research (or at least get them to change their mind. The Research!America folks are a cross-section of business and academic types who like medical research.

And honestly how can any rational person be against them? When the choice is between them and the creationists who were only happy when we all lived in the dark ages, and don’t believe in the Enlightenment, personal liberty, the scientific method, et al. (Not of course that they won’t use the technological fruits of the movements they despise, particularly Talk Radio!).

But on the other hand, any really rational assessment of the health care system shows that we are spending way too much on medical research. The NIH alone is $30 billion a year, and that’s about doubled by private industry. Now we’re adding billions more at the state level. The problem is that the application of the products of that research is downright shoddy, and we’re spending almost nothing comparatively to figure out how to make it better.

It would be much better for the country and the health care system if we took the $30 billion spent on the NIH and the $300 million spent on AHRQ and flipped them. Then we’d really figure out how to apply the stuff we already know evenly and appropriately. We just don’t need more me-too cancer drugs at $4,000 a pop, when we can’t figure out how to get an Rx for aspirin in to the hands of discharged cardiac care patients (or whatever the appropriate cheap therapy is).

I’m convinced that if we put a ten year moratorium on all new medical research today, and spent all the money figuring out how to apply—and then actually applying—our medical knowledge across the board, we’d be much better off. Of course that’s never going to happen, and we need to save science from the hands of the anti-Enlightenment Philistines. But I remain to be convinced that the Research!America folks are applying their scientific resources in the most appropriate way possible.

Meanwhile, Steve Parker tells me about the launch of a new site called www.BreastCancerAwareness.com  which is pretty self-explanatory and looks like it’ll be a useful resource.