Fresh from its successes in the United Kingdom, the campaign to close down complementary and alternative medicine courses at universities is moving down under. A new group called the Friends of Science in Medicine wants to stop what it calls “pseudoscience” on campus, and vice chancellors at many of Australia’s universities are in its sights. So is this a reasonable reassertion of scientific principles or a bellicose, tribal attack on the competition?
Any “friend of science” would surely be horrified by much of what happens inside conventional medicine, yet the campaign in Australia is aimed solely at the complementary sector. One of the founders of the Australian campaign, the University of New South Wales emeritus professor John Dwyer, says that it is not a witch hunt and not about attacking practitioners or researchers: it is about ending the teaching of “pseudoscience.”
Alan Bensoussan, a complementary medicine researcher at the University of Western Sydney, says that although the Friends of Science in Medicine sounds innocuous enough, he fears it is an attempt to purge universities of learning about areas such as Chinese medicine, approaches that could produce new ways of dealing with some chronic diseases.
http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e1075.full?ijkey=zwFDDTnYJvF0ooA&keytype=ref
