I read an AP article titled Medical schools add alternative remedies to curriculum the other day. The article was pretty balanced, explaining both sides of the situation.Apparently a growing number of medical schools are teaching acupuncture, herbology and other CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) to their students, often with the help of Uncle Sam. That's right, your tax dollars are being spent to teach your future doctors all about pseudoscience.
The government has spent more than $22 million to help medical and nursing schools start teaching about alternative medicine — lesson plans that some critics say are biased toward unproven remedies.
Additional tax money has been spent to recruit and train young doctors to do research in this field, launching some into careers as alternative medicine providers.
Doctors need to know about popular remedies so they can discuss them nonjudgmentally and give competent advice, the government says, and many universities and medical groups agree.
"Patients are using these things" whether doctors think they should or should not, and safety is a big concern, said Dr. Victor Sierpina, an acupuncturist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston who heads a group of academics who favor such training.
But to critics, it's like teaching Harry Potter medicine. Students are being asked to close their eyes to science principles that guide the rest of their training in order to keep an open mind about pseudoscience, they say.
"I'm concerned about the teaching of illogical thinking to medical students" and lending credence to biologically implausible theories like distance healing and energy fields, said Dr. Stephen Barrett, a retired physician who runs Quackwatch, a Web site on medical scams.
Personally, if I were using some herbal remedy or other treatment that had no scientific evidence behind it, I would want my doctor to let me know it's not tested and not proven effective. I want science-based medicine. I want my doctor to be informed about pseudoscience but he shouldn't be using my tax dollars to study it in school as if it were real medicine. That's a waste of money and incredibly misleading to students who might then add acupuncture or other nonsense into their future practice.
