How Celebrities, Senators, Dietary Supplements Muddle Medicine

As the columnist Frank Bruni recently opined in, The New York Times, there has been an unsettling corruption of academia by celebrity culture. Whether it is Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates self-censoring his television show at the request of the actor Ben Affleck or the University of Houston spending $155,000 to schedule actor Matthew McConaughey to give its commencement address this spring, some academic institutions are blurring the lines between academic virtues and celebrity values.¹¹

This does not bode well for any of us. To quote Thomas Paine, “Character is much easier kept than recovered.”

Simon M. Helfgott, MD, is associate professor of medicine in the Division of Rheumatology, Immunology and Allergy at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

References

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