Don't protest famed creationist commencement speaker; admire his tenancity in clinging to his beliefs

Emory University students and faculty are upset that renowned Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon, Dr. Ben Carson, will be this year's commencement speaker. Why the fuss? Because Carson's a creationist who denies the validity of the Theory of Evolution. 

In an op-ed column in Sunday's Baltimore Sun, Richard Weikart, scolds the Emory protesters. Among other arguments, Weikart claims that Charles Darwin himself would agree with Carson's belief equating "acceptance of evolution with a lack of ethics and morality."

Weikart ends his column with:

Emory University graduates should feel honored to receive a commencement address from Dr. Carson. Aside from the obvious — his path-breaking surgical techniques and medical expertise that landed him a position at one of the most prestigious academic hospitals in the United States — his life story of overcoming poverty and his subsequent dedication to philanthropy are exemplary and inspirational. His willingness to courageously embrace ideas he considers true, despite the ridicule directed toward him, should count as another point in his favor.

Yes! Let's admire a man who despite the advantage of incredible intelligence and a good education, chooses to ignore science and reason in order to cling to a particularly anti-science and anti-education interpretation of mythology.

And, by all means, let's admire a man who adamantly believes in silly things despite ridicule. Because stubbornly refusing to change your views, no matter how ridiculous, is such a virtue.

Not-a-diagnostician David Geier kicked off Maryland Commission on Autism

According to an article in The Baltimore Sun, the proponent of a dangerous and untested treatment for children with autism, David Geier, who was on the Maryland Commission on Autism as a "diagnostician," even though he has no education or training that would qualify him to diagnose anyone with anything, was removed from the Commission by Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley.

David Geier was recently charged with practicing medicine without a license.

O'Malley's action came after Geier refused to resign despite a statement from Geier though his attorney that he only worked as an "administrator" in the clinics headed by his father, Dr. Mark Geier, whose license to practice medicine was recently suspended by the Maryland Board of Physicians. Neither David Geier nor his attorney explained how an "administrator" was qualified to serve in the capacity of "diagnostician" on the Commission.

The question remains: how did David Geier ever get to be appointed to the Commission as a "diagnostician" in the first place? And why was there was no public outcry from qualified Commission members about his appointment?

Not-a-doctor David Geier charged with practicing medicine without a license

Well, finally.

The Baltimore Sun reports that the Maryland Board of Physicians has charged not-a-doctor, not-a-diagnostician David Geier with practicing medicine without a license.

He is the son and business associate of Mark Geier, the physician whose license to practice medicine was recently suspended by the same Maryland board on an emergency basis based on charges that he endangered the lives of children with autism by treating them with dangerous treatments based on junk science, and by diagnosing some children with "precocious puberty," even though the children did not meet the medical criteria for that diagnosis.

Given that at least one of the complaints against David Geier dates back to 2008, what in the world took the Maryland Board of Physicians so long to act? Is this the expedient way Maryland should be acting to protect patients, especially children?

When is someone who can't diagnose a "diagnostician"?

When is someone who isn't qualified to diagnose autism--or anything else as far as I can tell--a "diagnostician"? And how does that not-qualified-to-diagnose-ician get appointed to the Maryland Commission on Autism as a diagnostician? Especially if that someone promotes dangerous treatments for children with autism, based on junk science? 

One of the side-stories to develop out of The Maryland Board of Physicians suspending the medical license of Dr. Mark Geier is that his son, David Geier, who has a B.A. in biology, and is not a doctor or any other type of professional qualified to diagnose autism, or indeed, any medical condition, is on the Maryland Commission on Autism as its legally required "diagnostician" member.

According to The Baltimore Sun's article about David Geier's position on the Commission, the statute that created the commission did not definite "diagnostician" and the legal definition is "broad." It's not clear from the article who made the claim that the legal definition is "broad," or how broad "broad" legally is, but one can't help but wonder how useful any definition of "diagnostician" is, if it includes someone who is not licensed, nor otherwise qualified, to diagnose anything or anyone.

Maryland State Board of Physicians finally acts against autism non-expert Geier

The Maryland Board of Physicians has finally taken action against Dr. Mark Geier, the Maryland physician who marketed himself as an "autism expert," even though he had no credentials that would qualify him as such, and who treated children with unstudied and potentially dangerous therapies. The Board's order suspended Geier's license to practice medicine in Maryland.

According to an article in today's Baltimore Sun, Geier's lawyer, Joseph A. Schwartz III, is quoted as saying: "If you read the [order], you say, 'Holy God, this is awful.' But if it were so awful, they should have an injured child, and they don't."

Really? That's the legal standard? Doctors can treat children with untested and potentially dangerous therapies based on junk science, misdiagnose them, experiment upon them, and fail to secure the informed consent from the children's parents, but you can't take emergency action against that doctor until you actually have "an injured child"?

While Schwarz claims Geier is not "an immediate threat to patients," in my opinion, he's been a threat to patients since the day he started treating children with autism with treatment protocols that included Lupon and chelation. Given that Geier began his controversial treatments more than five years ago, and his alleged autism treatments were hardly a secret (also see here), why did it take the Board of Physicians so long to stop Geier?

Since Geier's son, David, who is not a doctor, and claims no medical training, allegedly examined and diagnosed at least one patient according to the Board of Physicians' order against Mark Geier, can we also hope to finally see some action taken against him in the near future?

Another voice speaking out against pseudomedicine classes at the University of Maryland School of Medicine

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."

PZ takes on woo at University of Maryland School of Medicine

PZ Myers blogged yesterday about a subject that has caused me, if not quite despair, then severe despondency: the medical and health woo being embraced by the University of Maryland School of Medicine and given a veneer of pseudo-plausibility by its Center for Integrative Medicine.

When I go to a doctor, I expect one who is trained in science-based medicine, not the art of woo.

Woo medicine in The Baltimore Sun--again

Oh, Baltimore Sun! While I frequently lament your continuing wasting away into a emaciated and frail version of your former self, there are times when I feel almost a sense of relief that almost no one reads you these days. Thursday, June 10, 2010, was one of those days.

I turned to your "Health & Style" section, and there, on page 3, I found yet another article presenting woo medicine as fact: "How and when to seek alternative therapies," part of your "Ask the expert" series, taken from an edited transcript of a June 8 chat with Dr. Joyce Frye on the Picture of Health blog.

Dr. Frye, "an osteopathic physician board-certified in obstetrics and gynecology and in integrative and holistic medicine with the Center for Integrative Medicine and the University of Maryland School of Medicine," is the same woo-promoting doctor I previously blogged about in March in my post "Allergy woo." Homeopathy has not emerged from the pathetic pit of pseudo-medicine since March. No surprise really, since it's failed to provide any evidence of efficacy in the more than 200 years it's been competing with science-based medicine, and as admitted by The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, "a number of its key concepts are not consistent with the current understanding of science, particularly chemistry and physics." 

Furthermore, well-designed scientific studies have shown that acupuncture, which Dr. Frye also recommended in the article, works no better than a placebo or sham acupuncture.

Still, no wonder, as noted by the article, "alternative remedies are becoming more common." Not only are there plenty of websites promoting woo to the gullible and desperate, but also, as demonstrated by this article, claims for woo medicine are being credulously reported as fact by mainstream media like The Sun, increasingly taught at medical and nursing schools, and offered in hospitals.

(As to why and how academic medicine has increasingly supported alternative-to-real-medicine, and related issues--like medical ethics and academic-medicine-woo's pernicious effect upon the health of patients--I refer you to Orac's blog, Respectful Insolence, on which he has written extensively, and with increasing despair, about the subject.)

I did find this part of the article amusing, in the same way I find The Great Oz amusing when he insists, "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain": 

Q: Are there watchdogs for alternative medicine practitioners?   

A: Unfortunately, the "watchdogs" are usually skeptics who want to hold all alternative practitioners out as "quacks," so they aren't very helpful...." 

Yes, indeed, don't listen to those silly critical thinking watchdogs who ask for evidence that alternative-to-real-medicine works as claimed.  

OK, Sun, I understand that you relied on an expert who is on the faculty at the generally well-regarded University of Maryland School of Medicine. But would you publish, without question or criticism, an article in which an expert in finance who taught at a respected business school, recommended alchemy as an effective method of attaining financial independence? 

Sigh. Maybe, given your credulous reporting of woo medicine, you would.

Allergy woo

I've seen woo regularly covered by The Baltimore Sun and local TV stations, not skeptically, asking, "What's the evidence this works as alleged?" or "Do the claims made about [insert name of woo] even make sense when considered rationally and based on what we know about biology, chemistry, and physics?" Rather the local media tends to credulously report on, or even supports the use of, woo without any critical analysis. 

An article in today's Sun, "Nothing to sneeze at", (titled "Easing your allergies" in the on-line version of the article) is but the most recent example.

In the article, Jill Rosen, writes: 

Doctors say more allergy sufferers are looking for relief beyond traditional medicines and taking fresh looks at natural remedies such as the Neti pot, vitamins and herbs. 

And physicians say these things work--particularly for people with mild or moderate symptoms. 

I have no problems with the use of a Neti pot, even if, as the article indicates, it's been endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, a frequent promoter of woo and magical thinking. Saline nose spray? I have no problem with that either, or with the suggestion that allergy sufferers use humidifiers and hot showers to "moisturize dry raw noses."

But then the woo-recommending starts:

The writer interviewed Dr. Joyce Frye, who is described as "an assistant professor of family and community medicine with the University of Maryland School of Medicine's Center for Integrative Medicine", a inter-departmental center that promotes the use of woo, and is a center whose existence at the medical school, which I would expect to be promoting and using science-based medicine--not alternatives to it--should be embarrassed.

The article continues: 

While using these techniques to wash out nasal passages and refresh the nose, doctors also are pointing patients to herbal medications that can help with congestion, watery eyes and sneezing.

While drugs like Zyrtec and Claritin suppress symptoms, herbs work in the opposite way, Frye says.

"The homeopathic concept is that symptoms are the body's best response to restoring itself to health," Frye says. "Rather than suppressing symptoms, we should use small doses of herbs to help stimulate the body's self-corrective impulses to get healthy again."
... 

The thing people need to understand with the herbal remedies, Frye says, is that they work slowly and become more effective over time. Though people in Asia have understood this for thousands of years, the lack of immediate results can frustrate Westerners who expect on-the-spot relief.

"The herbal medicines are so highly diluted that people stuck in the old world of chemistry think there can't be anything in them, and that it's all placebo effect," Frye says. "That's not true."

"People stuck in the old world of chemistry"? I guess Frye is referring to those who are out-of-touch with the new world of pseudoscience and woo. You know, people like chemists, biologists, or doctors who believe in medicine which is based on evidence of efficacy. Yeah, evidence-based science is just so old-fashioned and out-of-date.

There happens to be a damn good reason to reject homeopathy as a treatment for allergies or anything else. It's utter nonsense, quackery.

Although the article and Dr. Frye muddle the distinction, perhaps deliberately, there's a difference between herbal remedies which contain active ingredients, such as the Ginkgo Biloba, Echinachea, and St. John's Wort found on many store shelves and homeopathy.

While the safety and effectiveness of herbal remedies are debatable, the same isn't true of homeopathy. Homeopathy is without a doubt safe (except perhaps if you forgo actual effective treatment and remain sick or get even sicker), but is ineffective as a treatment for anything. And the reason I can say that without qualification is homeopathic remedies are--water.

The National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) explains one of the basic principles of homeopathy this way:

The principle of dilutions (or "law of minimum dose") states that the lower the dose of the medication, the greater its effectiveness. In homeopathy, substances are diluted in a stepwise fashion and shaken vigorously between each dilution. This process, referred to as "potentization," is believed to transmit some form of information or energy from the original substance to the final diluted remedy. Most homeopathic remedies are so dilute that no molecules of the healing substance remain; however, in homeopathy, it is believed that the substance has left its imprint or "essence," which stimulates the body to heal itself (this theory is called the "memory of water"). 

Let me repeat from above for emphasis: "Most homeopathic remedies are so dilute that no molecules of the healing substance remain." Given that undeniable fact, there's no plausible way it could work.

You might wonder, as I have, why homeopathic water only has memory of the diluted substance, and not say, the fish poop, pollutants, or other substances with which the water may have been in contact at some point.

Wonder no more. My understanding is that when the homeopaths prepare their remedies, they psychically impart their "intentions" into the water, so that the water knows what substance it is supposed to remember. Really. And it's this absurd system of non-medicine that both The Sun and the medical school are supporting.

Homeopathy is nonsense without a doubt. As NCCAM admits about homeopathy: "There are challenges in studying homeopathy and controversies regarding the field, largely because a number of its key concepts are not consistent with the current understanding of science, particularly chemistry and physics." 

Why then, you ask, would the University of Maryland School of Medicine be teaching and promoting medical rubbish like homeopathy? Good question, and one I'd be interested in hearing the school answer. No matter what rationale the school may offer, I suspect the answer boils down to money and giving patients what they want, not what they can actually benefit from. And for this they ought to be ashamed.

And as for The Baltimore Sun, what's next, I ask? Will you perhaps be promoting the use of astrology to make investment decisions on your financial page? Or promoting divination as a method of making important decisions like which candidate to vote for, or as a tool for police to use to solve crimes?