Finally, another voice complaining publicly about the University of Maryland School of Medicine teaching quackery pseudo-medicine through its Center for Integrative Medicine!
In Why Medical Schools Should Not Teach Integrative Medicine, Steven Salzberg, a faculty member at the University of Maryland College Park, writes:
"Academic freedom allows professors to proclaim all sorts of wild ideas, including nonsensical ones, but we don’t have to allow them to teach courses with no basis in reality." You'd think that would be a pretty basic standard for any valid educational institution, especially a high-regarded medical school, but apparently not.
Salzberg points out, frankly, that the CIM's "clinical services" such as qigong, reiki, and reflexology are scientific and medical "nonsense." And he asks about CIM's use of homeopathy through its clinical services, "Why isn’t this malpractice? I haven’t figured that out yet." Why indeed?
Why aren't members of the faculty at the Medical School who believe in science and science-based medicine protesting, often and loudly, the teaching of pseudoscience and alternative-to-real-medicine to future doctors at their school? Why is the school allowed to offer classes that make our future doctors dumber, and put their future patients at risk?
And why aren't doctors who work within the University of Maryland Medical System protesting the CIM's providing clinical services that offer pseudo-medicine as valid equivalents of science-based medicine, thereby confusing, misleading, and eventually harming the public? Isn't there an ethical problem in offering pseudo-medicine to patients as if it were real medicine?
The only class in CIM the medical school should be teaching is "Why Complementary and Integrative Medicine is Utter Nonsense."
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