Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Attack on complementary medicine ‘undermines safety’

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 gynaecology 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.”

Read more: http://theconversation.edu.au/attack-on-complementary-medicine-undermines-safety-8264

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