Bastions of quackademic medicine: Georgetown University « Science-Based Medicine

Dr David Gorski explains why "Caring for the whole person" is a crock of shit. There is a reason Reiki and Therapeutic Touch are not used to stop internal bleeding or heal a broken arm.  There is a reason that anecdotes lacking any basis in science are considered systematically misleading.  There is a reason that the people who die of untreated cancer are not around to talk about how the quack's treatment doesn't work.

We frequently discuss a disturbing phenomenon known as quackademic medicine. Basically, quackademic medicine is a phenomenon that has taken hold over the last two decades in medical academia in which once ostensibly science-based medical schools and academic medical centers embrace quackery. This embrace was once called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) but among quackademics the preferred term is now “integrative medicine.” Of course, when looked at objectively, integrative medicine is far more a brand than a specialty. Specifically, it’s a combination of rebranding some science-based modalities, such as nutrition and exercise, as somehow being “alternative” or “integrative” with the integration of outright quackery, such as reiki and “energy healing,” acupuncture, and naturopathy, into conventional medicine. As my good bud and fellow Science-Based Medicine (SBM) blogger Mark Crislip put it, mixing cow pie with apple pie does not make the cow pie better, but we seem to be “integrating” the cow pie of quackery with the apple pie of science-based medicine thinking that somehow it will improve the smell, taste, and texture of the cow pie.

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Yes, Georgetown is telling its medical students, forget all that boring old reductionist “Western” science you’ve learned all these years. Open your mind to the sympathetic magic that is homeopathy. Never mind that it has no basis in science and its precepts violate multiple well-established laws of physics and chemistry. Personally, I don’t mind a medical school teaching homeopathy, but only so that doctors know what it is and how utterly pseudoscientific it is. (Most doctors still think it’s just herbal medicine.) However, clearly that’s not what Georgetown is doing. How a pharmacologist can teach homeopathy as anything but as an example of the most abject pseudoscience is beyond me, but that’s what Amri sure appears to be doing, her claim that “we are teaching them [medical students] how to evaluate the science of the therapy, critically analyze it and learn about these medical systems in the most open-minded way” notwithstanding. She seems to be all about the open-mindedness and not so much about critical thinking, similar to the entire Georgetown CAM curriculum.

Bastions of quackademic medicine: Georgetown University « Science-Based Medicine