001. Edzard Ernst writes in the Medical Journal of Australia's "Integrative Medicine: More Than the Promotion of Unproven Treatments?" (2016-08):
"alternative medicine became complementary medicine, and now it seems to have morphed into integrative (or integrated) medicine [...which] made its debut in the mid-1990s with the slogan 'the best of both worlds' [...] it has been claimed that integrative medicine is merely a rebranding exercise for alternative medicine, and a critical assessment of the treatments that integrative clinics currently offer confirms this suspicion. The vast majority of such establishments advertise alternative therapies that lack a solid evidence base. Many of them offer homeopathy, for instance, about which the National Health and Medical Research Council recently concluded that: 'homeopathy should not be used to treat health conditions that are chronic, serious, or could become serious. People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness.' Promoting such questionable therapies under the guise of integrative medicine seems neither ethical nor in line with the currently accepted standards of evidence-based practice [...]";
as I'm fond of saying, 'oh snap!' And homeopathy is at the heart of naturopathy, and IM is a label naturopathy loves to use in its marketing.
No comments:
Post a Comment