What he said....

Dr. R. W. Donnell took the words right out of my mouth. An article in the Washington Post this week presented an uncritical look at why alternative modalities are “Earning a spot in the curriculum” of growing numbers of medical schools. Today, most of the major medical schools in our country are working to integrate alternatives into mainstream medicine “while maintaining Western standards of care,” according to the Post.

But teaching alternatives to medical students so that “they can guard against potentially harmful interactions between conventional practices and medicines and alternative ones....and to respect patients' cultural and ethnic backgrounds,” as the Post author emphasized, isn't what is really going on. And there is a distinct difference between teaching students the practice of alternatives and presenting alternatives in a way that encourages students to think about them critically and advocate for the patient.

As Dr. Wallace I. Sampson, M.D., at Stanford University School of Medicine and editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, reported in a recent issue of Academic Medicine, “advocacy [for alternatives] and noncritical assessment are the approaches currently taken by most U.S. medical schools.” A survey of alternative curricula in U.S. medical schools in 1995-1997 found that of 56 courses on alternatives, only four were oriented to criticism.

The Washington Post reiterated the popular claim that alternatives are “hard to research through conventional, Western-style studies” and reported that the most popular alternatives taught at four major medical schools included:

Acupuncture. The alternative therapy most widely embraced by medical schools is the ancient Chinese system for treating medical problems by stimulating key body points -- often by using very fine needles -- to manipulate “energy fields." Although there has been no scientific documentation about these fields or the precise mechanism by which acupuncture works....

Mind/Body Medicine. Guided imagery, meditation and other practices that harness the mind to promote health and healing have been adopted by conventional medicine as a means of managing stress and pain. While a recent analysis of 813 studies concluded that “no compelling evidence" exists yet to prove the theurapetic value of meditation...

Energy Medicine. According to Scott, “The area that will take a little bit longer is frontier medicine, or energy medicine. It's more difficult to research" than conventional medicine because, like acupuncture, it's founded on a belief in energy fields. This category includes such approaches as therapeutic touch, distant healing, prayer, and the laying-on of hands....

Dr. Donnell has been following this trend for a long time and cites countless examples of the promotion of pseudoscience and quackery by medical schools. Check out his blog piece to learn more of what the Post left out of the story. And, for the nursing school angle, check here.