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, say Australian academics.
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 gynecology 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.”
In today’s retort, Stephen Myers, a Professor of Complementary
Medicine and Director of the Natural Medicine Research Unit at Southern Cross
University, and coauthors warn that there is “great danger for the public if
complementary medicine practice is allowed to develop outside mainstream
education.” It would undermine “safe practice and critical appraisal.”
Among the coauthors is Kerryn
Phelps, former President of the Australian Medical Association, and Adjunct
Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health at the University
of Sydney.
“Science sets out to rigorously
eliminate bias, not to assert it,” they write. “The arguments mounted for the
closure of complementary medicine courses in Australian universities by the
Friends of Science in Medicine in a recent editorial … are highly emotive and,
while having a gloss of superficial reasonableness, they do not stand up to
critical review.”
Professor Myers said that
complementary medicine was a broad field that could not be described with
generalizations. It was important, he added, to distinguish the major
professional and university-based disciplines of traditional Chinese medicine,
chiropractic, osteopathy and naturopathy from “fringe practices, and the
actions of rogue or unqualified practitioners”.
Two “comprehensive reviews” of
complementary medicine practice and training in Australia over the past 15
years — one on traditional Chinese medicine and the other on naturopathy and Western herbal medicine – had both
supported the movement of these professions into a university setting, “just as
earlier reviews had done for chiropractic and osteopathy”, Professor Myers
said.
“It is not melodramatic to point
out that if the Friends of Science in Medicine were to succeed in their stated
aims, they would achieve a dystopia — a medical ‘1984’ where only one way of
knowing the body in health and illness is permitted in public discourse.”
But John Dwyer, President of FSM
and Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales, said Professor
Myers had misrepresented the position of his organization:
“A look at our website makes it
clear we strongly support research into currently alternative approaches if
they are credible and there is sufficient evidence to warrant science dollars
being used to settle the question of efficacy.
“It is pointless to argue about
who is right and who is wrong, who should be believed and who should not,” he
said. “That is the whole point of our approach, to subject claims to proper
scientific scrutiny, as science excels in determining impartially whether these
supposed treatments are effective or not.
“The fact that many complementary
and alternative medicines have been scientifically examined and found to be
ineffective bears out our concerns, and no amount of assertion, declaiming,
authoritative pronouncement, no matter whether it comes from exponents of
complementary medicine or FSM is relevant in the face of good scientific
research findings published in respected journals.
“The criticism of FSM for putting
a forceful point of view on the need for scientific research sits very oddly
with those who base their belief in many complementary and alternative
medicines on the dogmatic pronouncement and descriptions uttered by sole
individuals who have invented various medicines, often centuries ago, and who
are still blindly followed to this day, despite centuries of scientific
discovery and advancement in medicine.”
In a separate article in today’s
issue of MJA, Paul Komesaroff, a Professor of Medicine at Monash University,
and coauthors wrote that the views in the March editorial by FSM “exceed the
boundaries of reasoned debate and risk compromising the values that FSM claims
to support”.
Professor Komesaroff said that
while there was now an extensive evidence base for complementary therapies, the
concept of evidence-based medicine was highly contested within Western medicine
itself.
It was not appropriate, he said,
for doctors or scientists with a particular view of medicine to impose those
views on the whole community.
“It is important that those who
seek to be friends of science do not inadvertently become its enemies. We call
on the members of FSM to revise their tactics and instead support open,
respectful dialogue in the great spirit and tradition of science itself.”
——
[This article was originally
published at The
Conversation. Read the original article.
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