Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

Activism among medical researchers can be effective, so more need to stand up and be counted. A word of warning, however, because those who dare to question the value of alternative medicine can easily become the target of attacks on their reputation and integrity. They are often accused of being in the pay of the big pharmaceutical corporations. The only defence against such criticisms is to highlight the fact that medical researchers are generally driven by the desire to cure disease and increase both the quality and length of human life.

For instance, Professor Michael Baum, who is a specialist in breast cancer and a signatory of the 2006 letter arguing against unproven treatments in the NHS, has adopted the following approach when lecturing on the subject of evidence-based medicine: ‘I often introduce myself as a son of a mother, a husband of a wife, a brother of a sister, a father of two daughters and an uncle to seven nieces. My mother died tragically from breast cancer and my sister is a long-term survivor.’ In other words, Professor Baum has both a personal and a professional interest in identifying the best treatments for breast cancer, and in particular the death of his own mother has inspired his dedication to saving lives.

3 Universities

Science degrees have always been a treasured commodity. Students who have successfully completed a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree have demonstrated that they have grasped the general principles and foundations of a particular discipline and are ready to study at a higher level. By earning a science degree, graduates have shown that they understand the knowledge derived from previous experiments and are close to conducting their own research. Or at least that is what science degrees used to represent. Today, some universities have decided to devalue the significance of the BSc by demeaning the traditions of science and prostituting the integrity of scholarship.

Universities around the world are now offering degrees in various forms of alternative medicine, which undermines everything that a university should stand for. How can a university offer a BSc degree course in alternative medicine teaching the principles of Ch’i, potentization and subluxations (key concepts in acupuncture, homeopathy and chiropractic therapy respectively), when they make no scientific sense whatsoever? Such degrees do a disservice to students, who are given the false impression that they are learning the science behind a system of healthcare. At the same time, patients can also be misled, because they may hear that alternative medicine is being taught at university and will then assume that it must be effective. In short, universities give alternative medicine an undeserved level of credibility.

The completely crass nature of alternative-medicine degrees is easily demonstrated by a question posed in 2005 to students taking the ‘Homeopathic Materia Medica 2A’ examination at the University of Westminster, London: ‘Psorinum and Sulphur are Psoric remedies. Discuss the ways in which the symptoms of these remedies reflect their miasmatic nature.’ This question is a throwback to the Dark Ages of medicine, when it was believed that disease was caused by miasmas, which were poisonous vapours — this idea became obsolete in the late nineteenth century when scientists developed the more accurate and useful germ theory of disease.

Professor David Colquhoun surveyed the state of play in Britain in 2007 and discovered that there are sixty-one degree courses in alternative medicine, of which forty-five are BSc degrees, spread across sixteen universities. Five of the BSc degrees specialize in homeopathy — this means that students spend three years studying a subject that we have demolished in this book in a single chapter.

The worst offender seems to be the University of Westminster, which offers fourteen degrees in alternative medicine. This university offers many degrees in more respectable subjects and its staff in other departments have generally good reputations, so why has it started to offer meaningless degrees in phoney subjects? According to Colquhoun, the problem is that universities that offer courses in unproven therapies have prioritized profit above integrity:

This is the equivalent of teaching witchdoctory. If you have a Bachelor of Science degree, it ought to be in something that can vaguely be described as science…I’d like to see vice-chancellors get honest. They’ve lost their way and are happy to teach anything to get bums on seats. They think anything that makes money is OK. We know that these courses are showing bigger rises than any other subject, while maths and other subjects are going down.