The latest issue of the official journal of the European Atherosclerosis Society features a credulous article on traditional Chinese medicine. TCM is presented as a system of medicine whose use should “spread to Western societies.” Sadly, the editors failed here, as the article consists of revisionist history, pseudoscience, and false equivalence.
Dr. Robin Berzin founded a concierge functional medicine practice, Parsley Health. Her practice is growing and has expanded to three major cities thus far, and she’s begun a foray into pediatrics? Are holistic concierge medical practices the future of “integrating” quackery into medicine, be it functional medicine or other models?
The Department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan has embraced integrating quackery with medicine in its “integrative medicine” program. But what is it teaching its trainees? Unfortunately, I’ve started to find out.
Helene Langevin has been named the new director of the National Center for Complemenary and Integrative Health. Given her history of dodgy acupuncture research, my prediction is that the quackery will flow again at NCCIH, the way it did in the 1990s when Tom Harkin zealously protected it from any attempt to impose scientific rigor on it.
Last Sunday, 60 MINUTES Australia broadcast a story about a very sympathetic girl with cerebral palsy and her family, who traveled to Bioss Stem Cells, a stem cell clinic in Monterrey, Mexico, for unproven “stem cell” treatments. The story was nearly completely devoid of skepticism and played, in essence, as a 20 minute advertisement for quacks. It is one of the worst examples of boosterism and false balance about unproven treatments I’ve ever seen.
