Monday, February 06, 2006
More mainstream medical dabblings in pseudoscience
This time it’s the University of Minnesota department of CME teaming up with the American Board of Holistic Medicine. Their recent Integrative Holistic Medicine course featured Chi Gong, homeopathy, Native American Medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurvedic Medicine and much more. The course schedule speaks for itself.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Continuing Medical Education is a program that enables physicians to fulfill their commitment to the lifelong pursuit of learning. It allows for the expansion of knowledge with clear and direct benefit to the patient. I am a third-year allopathic medical student who recently completed a course in alternative medicine very similar in content to the CME course you mention in your post. I agree that most of the diagnostic methods and treatments presented in the course were nothing more than quackery. However, I also believe that ignorance with regard to the role in which they play in the lives of countless patients could constitute a lapse in a physician’s professional responsibility. Moreover, failure to recognize that patients are seeking alternative treatments could compromise a physicians’ ability to treat those patients appropriately. I use potentially dangerous interactions between certain pharmacological treatments and herbal remedies as examples. So you see the objective of CME courses in alternative medicine is not to proclaim the validity of individual modalities. Rather, it is to increase awareness so that today’s physicians have the knowledge they need to adequately treat their patients. This is the objective of all CME courses, and those involving alternative medicine are no different.
idiofix,
Thank you for your comments. You write "So you see the objective of CME courses in alternative medicine is not to proclaim the validity of individual modalities. "
If only that were true! My observations have been that all too many alt med CME and med school courses tend to be uncritical promotions of quackery. Very few that I'm aware of subject the claims to valid critical analysis. If you know of any that do, please let me know.
Post a Comment