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Growth of Pseudoscience Harming Australian Universities
wired_parrot writes "The international credibility of Australia's universities is being undermined by the increase in the 'pseudoscientific' health courses they offer, two academics write in a recent article decrying that a third of Australian universities now offer courses in such subjects as homeopathy and traditional Chinese medicine, which undermines science-based medicine. 'As the number of alternative practitioners graduating from tertiary education institutions increases, further health-care resources are wasted, while the potential for harm increases.'"
I think people that use homeopathic medicine should be allowed to marry.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It doesn't take much. Just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit. Diluted well. It's more effective that way.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Seems that Australia is "diluting" its talent.
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
These "pseudo science" articles indicate that pseudo science works better than science seems to indicate. :vulgar language)
Plecebo works better than the real thing (warning
Accupunture works, doesn't matter where
Accupunture works
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
my favorite quote concerning alternative medicines is... "If Alternative medicine practices worked, they wouldn't be alternative any more" not sure where it came from.
Well, I skimmed the first chapter of a book on it, anyway. Less is more, right?
Just part of our decent into a post-industrial dark age, where technology is magic to most folks.
And since it's magic, why shouldn't other forms of magic work?
Check your premises.
I think you're missing a piece - the measurement of the health of a human is well within the realm of human perception and instrumentation. The goals of standard medicine and alternative medicine are the same: improve the health of a human. If standard medicine works and alternative medicine doesn't, well, you should be able to figure the rest out from there.
Human perception has proven itself to be pretty much useless many times..... But I guess you missed that lesson as you seem to have a pretty screwed up notion off science.
If it works it will be measureable and you can call it 'medicine', if you can't measure even a single thing different when using the stuff it is not medicine.
You can try and label it 'alternative' but it won't change the facts: its junk.
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Alternative therapy is outside the domain of science because science
Utter rubbish.
measure stuff with a physical instrument (human perception not being good enough).
Again, utter rubbish.
A trial (simplified): give people (a) a placebo and (b) homeopathic treatment. See which get better and which don't. Doesn't even require anything more than perception. Do I percieve this person as dead yes/no?
The results: homeopathy is no better than a placebo.
If it doesn't make you better, then by what reasoning or intuition is it doing any good at all?
So science has immediately disqualified itself from judging alternative medicine, yet still the science fundamentalists continue pushing their doctrine outside of its bounds.
More tosh. Simplifying, either medicine makes you better or it does not. Science can tell you if it does.
Please, in future learn *something* about science before dismissing it out of hand. And if you don't have the inclination to do that, then please carefully consider your comments about "fundemantalists".
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I think you'll find that it's so roundly rejected *because* it's already been researched properly and didn't hold up.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
... of worshipping science to the extent of all else.
Some "traditional medicines" are bupkus. Some are not. Just because science has not discovered something does not mean it doesn't exist. To think otherwise is arrogant. I can think of quite a few things in my life that science cannot (or at least does not at present) explain.
There are things about the human body and mind that science does not understand yet. And as long as their mindset continues to be "if I can't see it, smell it, touch it, taste it, or hear it, it doesn't exist" that will continue to be the case.
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The same way a course in "Star Trek" makes its way into Georgetown University. Or "Art History" or "Golf Management" or dozens of other courses at dozens of other universities. Because higher education stopped being about actual education and more about a) making money and b) making the students feel good about themselves.
Probably started around the time Philosophy classes stopped reading and teaching Neitzsche, Bacon, Aristotle, and Kant, and started being about... well, slacking off, wondering randomly about whatever, and getting high. Biggest contributing factor, IMO, was when people started to feel they need college degrees, but weren't smart enough or dedicated enough to actually study seriously. So, colleges started making up stupid courses people could take, without requiring them to actually do any work. This allows everyone to get a degree, but makes half of them worthless. But hey, now most people at least have a college degree, right?
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Science is not opposed to homeopathy or alternative medicine per se. If the course of treatment cannot be measured by physical measurements, that is perfectly fine. However, if the treatment does not have an effect on outcome of the patient, it is rightly labeled as ineffective. For example, clinical trials of massage and acupuncture have proven the effectiveness of these treatments for specific conditions. http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/en/d/Js4926e/ and http://nccam.nih.gov/health/massage However, homeopathy specifically the serial dilutions of compounds or extracts in water, has never been proven effective in any clinical trial and goes against basic precepts of chemistry and biology.
some chiropractors now extended their manipulation of the spine to children, and claimed that this could cure asthma, allergies, bedwetting, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, colic, fever and numerous other problems, and could serve as a substitute for vaccination.
Evidence? Studies? Clinical trials? Nothing has been presented to support the claim that chiropractors can cure asthma or bedwetting, let alone the really bizarre claims (a substitute for vaccination?).
There is no conspiracy or closed-mindedness. When evidence that herbal medicines do work, scientists embrace them:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_marijuana
You see that long and extensive list of studies? Did you notice that the scientific criticisms were almost entirely focused on smoking as a method of ingestion? Did you notice that the non-scientific criticisms were political, driven by America's far-right government agenda that has been pushed for decades now?
These scientists are objecting to the teaching of treatments that have no evidence to support their use, which have not been the subject of any studies, and for which no statement of efficacy can be made (how do we know these treatments do not cause more harm than good? how do we know that these treatments are not just a waste of time?).
Palm trees and 8
Hell, I'd be happy if they just re-introduced Rhetoric and Logic as required courses. That alone would knock out at least half of the garbage we have to put up with in both media and society...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Whoa, whoa wait a second. Art history is a non-serious field, on par with a course on Star Trek? Having you been smoking the straw man teaching your philosophy class?
That includes many things that we take advantage of daily -- even before we start on the stuff which is ridiculed by people like you
[citation needed]
Are scientists representatives of God?
No, scientists are just people who back up their claims with evidence, collected and analyzed according to careful procedures. Representatives of deities are the people who demand that we believe their claims regardless of the available evidence, because we are supposed to place value on "faith."
Do they really know EVERYTHING?
Did someone claim that scientists know everything? Scientists conclude their publications with lists of unanswered questions, which is what motivates scientific investigations in the first place. Scientists are not claiming that treatments which have not been investigated do not work -- they are claiming that there is no way to know, until those treatments are investigated.
I think a better question is this: do you think that you know everything? If you do not demand evidence, then how do you determine what is or is not true (or which treatments are or are not effective)?
Palm trees and 8
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science,
Er, not sure what that means. Things work or not because of the underlying physics of the universe. Science does not make things work or not.
Science explains things. It gives understanding. That may help devise other things that work by using the modelling powers of science.
lots of things that science is not yet able to measure,
Is there something specifically you have in mind?
and lots of things that science does not yet understand. That includes many things that we take advantage of daily --
Sure. Heck, science doesn't even understand gravity really.
even before we start on the stuff which is ridiculed by people like you.
And here we go. There's your leap. What things are these things that are taken advantage of on a daily basis and are ridiculed by the likes of me?
Do you really believe that Science explains everything? No
No scientist would every claim that - we'd be out of a job for a start. You're setting up a straw man.
Then why can't you accept that some real things may exist outside of the bounds of current scientific dogma.
You're angling to leap from "not everything is explained by science" to "my whacky theories of the world are true".
Just because science is not complete doesn't mean (e.g.) homeopathy works.
fundamentalists... fundamentalists... fundamentalists...
Inigo Montoya would like a word with you.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I started reading the title of this thread and though "please don't be the US".
After all, we have
- global climate change deniers
- anti-vaccination groups
- paleo diet followers
- raw foodism
- a museum that claims dinosaurs and cavemen lived together on the newly created 5 thousand year old Earth.
What a relief to know that the US is not the only developed country with a problem of people making up their own reality.
the problem with your argument is the definition of "better".
I was simplifying for the OP who clearly didn't understand science.
but if you're talking about reducing pain, then it gets complicated.
Yes certainly.
objectively, you can see that a proposed treatment has the same result that a placebo does. does this mean that the treatment is worthless?
Well, ethics aside, placebos aren't worthless treatments. But alternative-medicine placebos aren't any better than regular placebos.
but what do we do in the case of conditions where a "placebo" works very well for a significant fraction of people? shouldn't we fund some research into why the placebo works?
Certainly. The placebo effect is amazing and well worthy of scientific research.
Homeopathy for instance isn't. The science is done and it has been shown to be a simple instance of the placebo effect.
Fun fact: the placebo effect works even if people know they are taking placebos!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I don't mind the fluff being taught. What I object to is the teaching of outright falsehoods. Teaching homeopathy as medicine is akin to teaching a history course in which France was founded by Kiss after they'd defeated the Samoans by destroying their Deathstar.
Courses must be rigorous to be accredited - not three years spent wankibg for course credits.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
"Alternative medicine" that works is just called "medicine".
Lots of mainstream medical theory originated with folk remedies. Among the examples of alternative medicine that was studied and proven to have benefits are:
Willow bark tea (now called aspirin)
Exposure to Cow Pox to prevent Smallpox (origins of the vaccine)
Manual re-alignment of joints to aid in healing after an injury (now called physical therapy).
Now, the problem is that for every one remedy that works there are a bunch more that "only work if you believe" (placebo effect), or "work but can't be measured" (don't really work at all). Furthermore over time the ones that do work become accepted as legitimate medicine, so increasingly "alternative" medicines just the collection of crap that people believe because the guy who sold it to them had a "trustworthy face".
If a remedy actually works you can trivially prove it by conducting a double blind study (the control group will recover more slowly to a statistically significant degree than the experimental group). If your alternative medicine of choice can't live up to this than that means (with mathematical certainty) that any healing effects you feel are purely coincidental. Believing otherwise is roughly as intelligent as insisting that when your computer got a virus, and I performed a chant and reformatted the hard drive, it was the chant that got rid of the virus, and if you had believed a little more maybe you wouldn't have also lost all your files.
Here's what's going on in alternative medicine in Australia. Unfortunately this article is behind a paywall, so I'll give you an excerpt. (It helps to understand that when you give a lung x-ray, you have a good chance of finding spots that nobody can really interpret, that usually turn out to be harmless.)
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1110812
What's the Alternative? The Worldwide Web of Integrative Medicine
Ranjana Srivastava, F.R.A.C.P.
Department of Medical Oncology, Monash Medical Centre, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
N Engl J Med 2012; 366:783-785 March 1, 2012
Out of curiosity, an impressionable woman in her 30s attends an integrative medicine exhibition; having recently had a child, she's been sleep-deprived and wants to investigate natural remedies. At the seminar, she wins a door prize — a blood test that promises to diagnose cancer. She was considering getting a blood test anyway and seizes this opportunity for a more comprehensive workup. After all, you can't be too careful about avoiding cancer.
Weeks later, she receives a call from an apologetic but alarmed stranger telling her she has advanced cancer.
“How do you know?” she gasps.
“Your blood test is positive for circulating tumor cells.”
“What does that mean?” she cries.
He sends her a three-page report and tells her to seek immediate help. She spends a nail-biting week awaiting an appointment with the recommended integrative health expert.
Glancing at the report, the expert declares, “You have advanced non–small-cell lung cancer. You need treatment now.” The woman is petrified: Has her teenage smoking habit come back to haunt her?
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“Absolutely. There are circulating tumor cells in your blood.”
Tears streaming down her face, the woman asks, “What now?”
The practitioner prescribes a 12-week course of intravenous vitamin C, at a cost of $6,000, paid up front. Without further discussion, an appointment is made.
[Gets a CT scan, which shows 2 2mm nodules. They could be lung cancer.]
The hunt for a rapid cure brings the woman to my office. Relating her story, she shifts between self-assurance and sheepishness. “I know you find this incredible, but I need your help. I am dying of cancer.”
“There's no evidence of cancer,” I reply, seeking to reassure her.
Instead, her tone sharpens: “But I have circulating tumor cells! How can you say that?”
Incredulous, I try to explain too many things. The blood test is a long way from being validated for clinical use. It was unscrupulous even to offer it. Does it make sense to her that it was sent to an unheard-of overseas laboratory for processing? Why did no one recommend that she see an oncologist?
[Demands a PET scan. PET scan clear, the 2 nodules on the CT have disappeared. Probably transient foci of inflammation. Srivastava tells her, "There is no cancer." Woman still insists she has lung cancer. Demands to see a surgeon. Surgeon refuses to see her.]
Yeah, no kidding. No, art history doesn't offer you a direct career path, but neither does Philosophy, and that's been a pretty important component of university curriculum for a long time, as have many other liberal arts fields like anthropology, sociology, etc.
The saddest example I see of pseudoscience is in the birth communities, medical technology has taken us out of the tragic "good old days" when 1 in 10 babies and 1 in 100 mothers didn't survive a birth. But suddenly everyone thinks it's a great idea to run away from hospitals and doctors and use untrained homebirth attendants, even for high risk pregnancy. In Australia death rates are four times higher for homebirth babies.
Having recently been pregnant and seen the "trust NATURE" mantras thrown at me again and again in online communities, I'm so afraid of who else is being mislead. But the consequences are unimaginable.
spacefem.com
If shark cartiledge was shown to be effective "many times", then how come the best clinical research we have on glucosamine/chondroitin still inconclusive?
And here's the result of a 2010 metaanalysis of the literature:
So, does it make sense now why nobody paid attention to the research showing that shark cartilidge was efficacious? That research was almost certainly flawed, because serious research institutions have been unable to reproduce any effect.
You have been duped.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It's worth noting that the handful of homeopathy practitioners that I've met over the years have a holistic approach to their medicine. I'll try to provide an example :
Western Doctor visit : You sit in the waiting room for an hour before being taken back to a room. They spend 2 minutes to weigh, measure, and get your vitals. Doc walks in and you complain of headaches. He nods, looks you over, and prescribes Tylenol 3 and ushers you to the payment processor.
Homeopathy practitioner visit : You sit in the deserted waiting room for 5 minutes before going back to a room. The practitioner comes in and gets your measurements/vitals and asks you what's wrong. You say you're having headaches. They ask more questions about activity cycle, diet, stressors, and your social situation. They prescribe you a placebo, tell you to quit playing League of Legends until 2am, and get another 2 hours of exercise per week.
There are positives to the methodology that contribute to the observed successes in those that believe.....but the actual treatments are not one of them.
There are lots of things that work without the benefit of science
Name five.
lots of things that science is not yet able to measure,
Do you mean "measure" or do you mean "quantify"? Because measurement is not as important in science as many non-scientists believe. It is important, yes, but not so important that you couldn't do science without.
lots of things that science does not yet understand
Depending on your definition of "understand". Do you mean entirely, completely, know-everything-about? Then yes, pretty much everything falls into that category. But on almost everything that scientists have ever bothered to have a few looks at, we have at least a general idea of how it works. And - that is the important part - we are continually improving them.
Science basically works like this: Imagine the fact, law of nature or whatever you have is a number between 1 and 99. Instead of writing a book about how god made the number 42 special and everyone who says otherwise needs to die, scientists will figure out an experiment that tells them if the number is less or greater than 50. It takes ten years to build. They still don't know very much, but now they have a better idea than anyone else. Turns out it is less than 50, so the religious fanatics who wanted to kill all the scientists when they started the experiment may be right. Of course they now celebrate their "victory".
The scientists continue to work, and manage to come up with an experiment that can tell them that the number is +/- 10 of any number they choose to test. It is horribly expensive, so they only get funding to run it three times. Since they know it's But they are getting a pretty good idea.
So yes, we have many fields where we still don't know what the number is. But in almost all of them, we are much closer to it than guesswork, and on many, we already know the first 20 decimal places and are trying to figure out the 21st and 22nd.
Then why can't you accept that some real things may exist outside of the bounds of current scientific dogma.
Name five.
Do they really know EVERYTHING?
You don't seem to have any issues using a computer connected to a global network, neither of which has come into existence through homeopathy, praying or interpreting ancient mystical texts.
So here is the $1 mio. question for you:
If you trust scientists enough to put your life into their hands every time you take a plane - because, just in case you didn't know, planes don't fly because of acupuncture or Genesis - then what is your criterion for picking the areas of your life where you trust science, and where you doubt science?
Based on what wisdom and higher understanding do you decide which things fall into the bounds of science and which ones don't?
And, the $10 mio. bonus question: What does it take to convince you that you are wrong?
fundamentalists scientists
You really want to look up "fundamentalist".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
>I find it amusing and depressing that modern medical science has fallen so far. Everything that is known by modern medicine owes its beginnings in ancient medical practices such as Chinese medicine and homeopathy.
Far from having "fallen so far," modern medicine has come a long way since its roots. Polio killed people when I was a child, and I challenge you to find a homeopathic polio vaccine.
>A perfect example of this is aspirin. Hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago, the medical minds of the day would give their patients tea brewed from willow bark to ease their pain. Where is aspirin found in nature? Willow bark.
You seem to be confusing herbal medicine with homeopathy. I have a degree in botany and actually have studied and used herbal medicine (more as a hobby than anything.) Yes, willow bark, Salix sp. contains salicin, which is similar to acetylsalicylic acid. The concentration in the willow bark varies widely from species to species, and willows are relatively difficult to key out. In species with enough active ingredient to be effective, the concentration can vary from 0.01% to over 10% depending on time of year, growing location and other factors. That's a 100-fold difference in concentration of the active ingredient making it fairly difficult to make sure you get an effective dose and don't O.D. Personally, I find it easier and safer to take two 500 mg. tablets. Also, you don't want to give willow bark tea to a child, because of Reyes Syndrome, and I have yet to find the Tylenol Bush.
>Natural cures and remedies are available for most ailments,
No, they aren't. There are no natural remedies for polio, smallpox, yellow fever, scarlet fever, TB, Ebola, rabies, cholera, and a whole long list of others.
>but modern medicine has dismissed the natural treatments in favor of synthetic solutions.
That's because they work better. There is a treatment for breast cancer derived from the bark of the Pacific yew tree, Taxus brevifolia. If your wife, daughter, or sister has breast cancer, you really want them taking the commercial drug under the supervision of a good oncologist, rather than sucking on yew bark. Also, before a synthetic version was developed, the tree was damn near wiped out from people stripping the bark to sell.
>These same synthetic solutions have lead to the rise of super-germs and man-made diseases Mother Nature would have nightmares about.
"Super germs" have come about through the overuse of antibiotics, an entirely different issue.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
There are thousands of years of observation behind Chinese herbal medicine. There is a plausible mechanism of action.
That makes it, not "pseudoscience", but protoscience. To the best of my knowledge, Chinese doctors hadn't discovered double-blind statistically valid clinical trials. That makes their observations subject to improved scrutiny, but not necessarily wrong.
Pre-scientific medicine made some valid discoveries. Indian doctors had figured out that you should boil water before drinking it, and locate the privy downhill from the well. The Chinese figured out that motion was a necessity for health before we discovered anything about lymph circulation. The Greeks knew that being fat was bad for you.
Nor is Western medicine necessarily scientific. The "evidence-based medicine" movement is constantly finding that standard treatments are not justified scientifically.
The sound argument to be made here is that a university should be testing Chinese herbal medicine rather than teaching it.
Interesting comment on the article:
others are placebos so advanced that modern medicine may take decades to catch up
The combination of "placebos" and "advanced" scrambles my head. Are you sure you know what the placebo effect actually is ?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I dunno, I always found "applied phrenology" quite effective at behavioral modification.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If you look at all the homeopathic remedies available, there's an enormous number of them out there. Obviously, it's total BS, but its practitioners have made a real pseudoscience out of it, with tables of ailments and which corresponding remedy to try (the remedies themselves being some item, perhaps a poisonous substance, diluted so much into water that there's probably none left in the vial of water you're buying).
Homeopathy has been around since the early 19th century, and has been a fairly organized practice for almost the entire time, which has meant that it's been able to iterate and refine itself enough to have developed a very complex and mature (though not effective) set of doctrines.
One thing that's interesting, and surprising at first, is that homeopathy's success in the 19th century was due in large part to the fact that it worked better than many other medical practices, in that patients treated by homeopathic remedies often had better outcomes than patients treated by other methods. This seems to be at odds with the known fact that homeopathy doesn't work, but if you think about it for a bit it makes sense. Remember that ancient practices like bloodletting survived until well into the 19th century, and that scientific medicine was very immature -- the common use of anesthesia dates to the 1850s, and germ theory wasn't generally accepted until fairly late in the century. Both traditional and scientific medical practices were often harmful to the patient -- going to the doctor could kill you.
Now consider what a homeopathic doctor does. He visits you, gives you a checkup, then gives you a prescription for a lot of water with a few molecules of something else in it. Put another way, his treatment is bed rest, plenty of fluids, a nice placebo, and a little TLC. That regimen won't ever harm you, and for a lot of diseases and conditions it'll always be the preferred method of treatment. Compared with the sometimes incompetent, often misguided, and occasionally murderous regimes of other forms of 19th century medicine, it's no surprise that homeopathy was a popular and successful practice.
That says nothing about it's place in the 21st century, of course.
Actually, science has demonstrated that some alternative medicines, for some treatments, are significantly more effective than placebo. To wit, chiropractcy and acupuncture both proved effective, under scientific scrutiny, for headaches and upper back pain.
The reason they're alternative is because science doesn't understand the reason they work - as the explanations given by the practitioners are usually bunk (as is the wide list of ailments they claim to be able to correct). But there are nuggets of useful medicine buried in the dross.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face