Memo to CAM enthusiasts, try not to shoot yourself in the foot publicly next time.
I am, of course, referring to the recent article in the Medical Journal of Australia “The Legitimacy of Academic Complementary Medicine” (conversation article here). This is a supposed reply to the article “Tertiary education institutions should not offer pseudoscientific medical courses” (see the Conversation piece here).
The “Legitimacy” article pretty comprehensively misses the point of MacLennan and Morrison’s original. However, my article “What CAM courses at universities should look like” covers most of those misconceptions, so I won’t revisit them here. Instead I want to focus on the following statement, because it effectively destroys the credibility of the entire article.
We need to be careful about dismissing medicine that comes in from “left field”. Forty years ago there was a common view amongst doctors that diet had ‘nothing to do with disease’, except for an obvious illness such as diabetes, scurvy or beri beri, despite the fact that any farmer knew that diet had an awful lot to do with animal health – It was only “Naturopathic crackpots” that insisted that diet was important in many aspects of human health and disease, yet now we know that there can be ‘subclinical’ vitamin C deficiency long before actual scurvy is diagnosed. And there are studies which are scathing about the inadequacy of hospital nutrition. it may well be true that homoeopathy is to a large extent ‘unproven’ but, at least there can be no toxic chemical side-effects – which is not what one can say about most drugs. Only a fool would rely just on homoeopathy and ignore other forms of medicine, including nutritional medicine. The British Royal Family is an example of successfully combining different medical therapies to produce a positive result.