Nonsense. Quackery should always be called what it is. Leave witch doctors treating witches but have a no-tolerance policy for treating humans.
Cutting complementary medicine courses from universities would dilute the quality of the education available and threaten safe practice but have no impact on demand for it, according to academics writing in the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) today.
In an emphatic response to recent comments by Friends of Science in Medicine (FSM), a body that is committed to stemming the spread of “pseudoscience” in medicine, the authors accuse some in the medical orthodoxy of trying to stifle divergent views.
Writing in the MJA in March, two founding members of FSM, Alastair MacLennan, a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Adelaide, and Robert Morrison of Flinders University, wrote: “Pseudoscientific courses sully the genuinely scientific courses and research conducted at the same institutions. Their scientists and students should be concerned by any retreat from the primacy of an experimental, evidence-based approach in science and medicine.”
Medicine should be science-based. As such anything that is taught as medicine in the Schools of Science – as a course in the Zoology, Biology, Biochemistry, or Physiology departments – should be acceptable. If it is taught in the Folklore or Religion departments, forget it!
The whole argument sounds a lot like behaviour I see in some religions. Rather than simply switch to a new religion, people rant and rant that their religion is unfair and should change. Rather than just leave “alternative medicine” to it’s own category, believers demand we push it into the “real medicine” category. This is looking for validation of a belief that one knows full well is wrong but does not want that to be so. Medicine indeed based on science. If one wants to skip science and run straight to the infomercials, that’s okay. Just don’t try renaming the infomercials as science.