Complementary and Alternative Quackery
This is the best post I’ve ever seen detailing why complementary and alternative medicine is more or less complete bunk when compared with actual, studied medical science. Dr Novella goes through the list and explains the main problems with each of the more prominent on-the-cusp-of-acceptance treatment modalities, including chiropractic, acupuncture, and homeopathy, and details how they “bait and switch” their victims.
A quick clip from the conclusion:
All of these modalities fall under an artificial category - so called “complementary and alternative” medicine (CAM) or “integrative” medicine that was created as the ultimate bait and switch.
The deception is largely two-fold. The first is to include modalities within this false category that are legitimate, like nutrition, exercise, physical therapy, relaxation, etc., - and then claim that these legitimize the entire category of CAM, even the far-out stuff like homeopathy. This is just a higher-order version of including physical therapy modalities within the umbrella of chiropractic, for example.
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The second kind of deception created by the category of CAM is in the language used itself - “complementary” and “integrative.” What, exactly, are CAM modalities integrating? On close examination it is quite clear - the movement is an effort to mix unscientific, disproved, and dubious modalities into scientific medicine. The bait is that CAM offers legitimate alternatives, the switch is that it primarily promotes treatments that don’t work or are at best untested and highly implausible.
If there were truth in marketing then we would have the Office of Implausible Medicine, the Journal of Bad Medical Science, the Center for Rejected Therapies, and the Institute of Dubious Medical Claims - all under the umbrella of unscientific medicine. It used to be called, even more simply, “health fraud.”
If you’ve got the time to sit down and read it, particularly if you don’t know much about the subject or if you just want to bone up a bit, I can’t recommend this post (and the rest of the blog as well, in addition to Steve’s other blog NeuroLogica) enough.
Tags: cam, science, skepticism