Science-Based Medicine

In Part I of this series† we saw that in 2001 Dr. David Eisenberg, the Director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Alternative Medicine Research and Education (CAMRE), and Atty Michael Cohen, the CAMRE’s Director of Legal Programs, had contributed to a report commissioned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that would, if accepted as valid by the legislature, provide state protection for a group of quacks to practice ‘medicine.’ We also saw that Dr. Eisenberg had accepted funds from this very group, without having disclosed that information to the relevant state Commission. We saw examples of the quackery that the group espouses, including methods advocated by Thomas Kruzel, the Chief Medical Officer of the school that had contributed money to Dr. Eisenberg’s Harvard “Complementary and Integrative Medicine” course.

We continue now with the essay that I sent in the spring of 2002 to Dr. Dan Federman, the Senior Dean for Alumni Relations and Clinical Teaching at Harvard Medical School (HMS). As before, I’ve provided hyperlinks to many of the citations that I included in my original essay; some, however, are no longer available.

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The American Association of Health Freedom

Kruzel and Harvard’s Michael Cohen are listed as key figures—Kruzel the Secretary, Mr. Cohen the only lawyer on the Advisory Board—in a lobbying organization known as the American Association of Health Freedom (AAHF). Formerly known as the American Preventive Medical Association (APMA), it was founded by Julian Whitaker, MD, a former orthopedic surgical resident who decided that “natural therapies” offered a more lucrative career path. Its purpose, as suggested by the standard euphemism, is to convince government of the validity of dubious medical claims through political influence rather than science. The AAHF lobbies heavily for the passage of the annually defeated federal “Access to Medical Treatment” act, which would allow quacks to prey freely on unwary consumers.

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One of the most common refrains from advocates of quackery and “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) is the charge of being “close-minded,” that they reject out of hand any idea that does not fit within their world view. Of course, this is a canard, given that science, including science-based medicine, thrives on the open and free exchange of ideas, and it is not “close-mindedness” that (usually) leads to the rejection of dubious claims. Rather, it is the knowledge that, for many of such claims to be true, huge swaths of our current scientific understanding would have to be in error to such an extent that a major paradigm shift in various basic science would be necessary. While such paradigm shifts occasionally occur, they do not occur without the confluence of huge amounts of evidence, often coming from different fields and directions. In other words, to show that a paradigm is wrong or seriously incomplete requires evidence even more compelling than the evidence supporting the paradigm.

This video, via The World’s Fair, explains why when woo-meisters wrap themselves in the mantle of “open-mindedness” it’s almost always a crock:

I’ll have to keep this video around for my medical students to help them counter the inevitable charge of “close-mindedness” by CAM advocates. In fact, the part at the end, with the blond guy letting all sorts of rubbish into his brain because he has no critical thinking filter while demanding that others accept his views without evidence reminds me very much of a male version of Jenny McCarthy, full of the arrogance of ignorance. If the cartoon weren’t of such a good-looking young man, I’d say it was J.B. Handley, although the video does get the cartoonishness right.