Posted by David Gorski on November 21, 2016
It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered Glenn Sabin. You might remember him, though. He runs a consulting firm, FON Therapeutics, which is dedicated to the promotion of “integrative” health, or, as I like to put it, the “integration of pseudoscience and quackery with science-based medicine. What I remember most about Sabin is how he once proclaimed that “integrative medicine” was a brand, not a specialty. Unfortunately, he was correct in his assessment. Basically, he declared, “CAM [complementary and alternative medicine] is dead. The evolution of evidence-based, personalized integrative medicine, and its implementation in clinic, lives on.” The reason CAM was being killed by its advocates was, of course, because the term CAM contains the word “alternative” in it, and that was a barrier to mainstream acceptance. It didn’t bother Sabin one whit that there’s a lot of unscientific and unproven quackery in the CAM that has mostly become integrative medicine:
It’s true that not all stress reduction techniques, say, Reiki, boast a solid evidence base. But many clinicians who offer services like Reiki do so because they’ve observed it helping many of their patients to relax, thus lessening their need for certain medications. They rationalize that since the intervention is not potentially harmful and their patient is more relaxed and reporting beneficial value, then what difference does it really make if we don’t yet know exactly how it works?
To him, “integrative” health and medicine were the future, mainly because the connotation is much more favorable. To paraphrase how I put it at the time, no longer were CAM practitioners content to have their favorite quackery be “complementary” to real medicine. After all, “complementary” implied a subsidiary position. Medicine was the cake, and their nostrums were just the icing, and that wasn’t anywhere good enough. Those promoting CAM craved respect. They wanted to be co-equals with physicians and science- and evidence-based medicine. The term “integrative medicine” served their purpose perfectly. No longer were their treatments merely “complementary” to real medicine. Oh, no. Now they were “integrating” their treatments with those of science- and evidence-based medicine! The implication, the very, very, very intentional implication, was that alternative medicine was co-equal to science- and evidence-based medicine, an equal partner in the “integrating.”
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Tags: acupuncture, complementary and alternative medicine, FON Therapeutics, Glenn Sabin, integrative medicine, John Weeks, National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, traditional Chinese medicine
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Acupuncture, Critical Thinking, Medical Academia, Traditional Chinese Medicine