Hucksterism on KQED

Did any of you happen upon a KQED fundraising TV show recently on "preventing" Alzheimers "Change Your Brain, Change Your Life" ? As this Salon article rightly points out, it was an out and out infomercial of the worst kind. KQED should be ashamed presenting such drivel. After reading this article I will be writing the station for this con man a forum.
http://www.salon.com/...

An excerpt:

"In a recent Slate article, critical of the Los Angeles Times for publishing an Op-Ed by Amen, in which Amen argued that all presidential candidates should be given brain scans, Daniel Engber wrote, "Perhaps the paper's editors assumed Amen was credible because of all his appearances in other publications. In that case, they've only exacerbated the problem, further padding his resume as an 'expert' on the brain."

The same criticism surely applies to those PBS stations that aired "Change Your Brain, Change Your Life" without internal review or audience notification that no program review had been performed. At the least, the stations should simultaneously display a disclaimer indicating that the program's contents haven't been specifically vetted by PBS. Without such a disclaimer, anyone watching a PBS-aired program must assume a caveat emptor default position.

According to the PBS mission statement, "as a non-commercial enterprise, we can maintain our commitment to delivering quality, innovative and distinctive media content as our utmost priority. By guaranteeing our programs treat complex social issues with journalistic integrity and compassion, our audiences know they can rely on us to provide accurate, impartial information." In the case of Amen, that is simply not true."

The writer of this critique, Robert Burton, who happens to live in Sausalito. is a neurologist/fiction writer whose latest book is entitled ON BEING CERTAIN: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not More info here: http://tinyurl.com/5o...

The central premise:
Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of ?knowing what we know? are sensations that feel like thoughts, but arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that function independently of reason.

We should invite him to our Friday night presentations.