As the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Dr. Edzard Ernst set out to apply rigorous scientific standards of evidence to find out which alternative medicine treatments worked and which didn’t. After 25 years of research and a torrent of published studies, he had determined that most of them didn’t. A lot of people were unhappy about his conclusions, and Ernst was forced into early retirement. If his enemies were hoping to silence him, their plan backfired. He no longer has to worry about political correctness or unhappy employers. Retirement freed him to devote all his time to thinking about all he had learned and communicating his findings to the public. In a profusion of books, articles, blogs, and public talks, he has become ever more willing to speak out strongly and call a spade a spade.
Recently he teamed up with a medical ethicist, Kevin Smith, to write More Harm than Good: The Moral Maze of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. In it, they argued that complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is unethical. Now he has written another book, SCAM: So-Called Alternative Medicine, showing that the very term alternative medicine is itself a scam. He explains,
Whatever it is, it is not an alternative:
- if a therapy does not work, it cannot be an alternative to medicine;
- if a therapy does work, it does not belong to alternative medicine but to medicine.
Ernst has been accused of doing nothing but debunking SCAM. Not true. He lists 20 CAM interventions that are backed by positive and sound evidence, and he rates most of these as “probably more effective” than conventional options. […]
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