Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the doctor... Now the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under direction from the Biden Administration, could soon start employing "indigenous knowledge."

Because, you know, science.

The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could soon employ "Indigenous Knowledge" in their research, a document obtained by the Washington Free Beacon shows.

The document is a proposed revision of scientific integrity guidelines for the Department of Health and Human Services, which encompasses the FDA, CDC, and the National Institutes of Health. Going forward, agency staff should employ "multiple forms of evidence, such as Indigenous Knowledge," when analyzing data, the document states.

"Indigenous knowledge" posits that native peoples possess hidden wisdom about the workings of the universe and has been widely dismissed by experts as pseudoscience. The proposed guidelines point to other "non-traditional modes of science," including "citizen science, community-engaged research, participatory science, and crowdsourcing." Including these methods is part of the agency's "support" for "equity, justice, and trust," the document states.

"A strong culture of scientific integrity begins with ensuring a professional environment that is safe, equitable, and inclusive," the report says. "Issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility are an integral component of the entire scientific process."

You can view the entire document here.

While it's unclear who crop-dusted this noise into the agenda of what are supposedly two taxpayer-funded institutions of science, what is clear is that the FDA and the CDC have crossed the line into the ridiculous. Science, of course, is not an agenda or a body of knowledge; it is a tool, a means for observing data, compiling those observations, and determining how best to explain how those facts explain natural phenomena. The very term "theory" has a very different meaning in scientific language; in scientific parlance, "theory" means "a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena."

There is nothing data-based about these "indigenous" methods. There is no forming of a hypothesis, no documented gathering of data; there is no statistical analysis, there is no theory arrived at based on the data and analysis. These are, essentially, Stone Age methods, and the FDA and CDC should be red-faced with embarrassment for even proposing this.

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These agencies, supposedly tasked with ensuring the public's health, seem to have bought into the idea that "indigenous" people have some Magickal Mystery Tour of special knowledge about medicine that we civilized people lack. That is, of course, the purest of horse squeeze (which, I hasten to add, has no medicinal value.) Oh, there are probably some folks who honestly believe that these "indigenous" methods have some merit, but they don't; there are likely more people who are arguably harming themselves by buying into this nonsense. It's far more likely that charlatans are cashing in on the credulous with this garbage.

As is so often the case, South Park (and Cheech & Chong) nailed it, and years ago to boot.

In his great American novel "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck described an advocate of faith-healing, which is of a kind with "indigenous medicine:"

Pa, he figgers he's the bes' Jesus-jumper in these parts. So Pa picks out a feeny bush 'bout twicet as big as Uncle John's feeny bush, and Pa lets out a squawk like a sow
litterin' broken bottles, an' he takes a run at that feeny bush an' clears her an' bust his right leg. That took the sperit out of Pa. Preacher wants to pray it set, but Pa says, no,
by God, he'd got his heart full of havin' a doctor. Well, they wasn't a doctor, but they was a travelin' dentist, an' he set her.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with praying over a broken leg, but like old Pa Joad, you should have it properly set first - and if you have any medical problem, see a doctor, not a shaman. Your family will thank you for it.

This seems appropriate.