BBC NEWS | Health | Alternative therapy degree attack

BBC NEWS | Health | Alternative therapy degree attack:

"UK universities are teaching 'gobbledygook' following the explosion in science degrees in complementary medicine, a leading expert says.

There are now 61 complementary medicine courses of which 45 are science degrees, the Nature journal reported.

University College London Professor David Colquhoun urged watchdogs to act, as complementary medicine was not based on scientific evidence."

Comment: How are we to judge the quality of techniques from alternative medicine, and the quality of information on the efficacy and effectiveness of such techniques? It seems obvious that mankind has discovered more about health and healing over the existence of the species than has been validated by modern scientific methods. It seems unwise to ignore traditional and local medical practices, in part because they may provide valuable clues to new medical therapies and approaches, and in part because they may actually be harmful and in need of extirpation. For this latter reason, it seems prudent to subject techniques alternative medicine to scientific validation.

Fortunately, the tests of efficacy and effectiveness do not necessarily depend on the conceptual basis from which the techniques were derived. Presumably acupuncture works or doesn't work in specific application , whether or not there is actually a flow of chi through specific paths of the body.

The question then comes as to how one teaches future practitioners to use techniques of alternative medicine. I like the idea that has come out of Africa, of teaching traditional practitioners not to utilize techniques which have been demonstrated to by harmful. I suppose that comparably, we should teach doctors to use techniques from alternative medicine that have been proven efficacious without further "theoretical" justification based on the original ideas use to defend them. Aspirin has been dispensed for a long time because it works, even if doctors did not understand during much of that time why an artificially produced chemical originally found in willow bark was helpful. JAD