Integrative medicine is the integration of science-based claims with pseudoscientific rejections of those science-based claims, and is thus nonsense. But it’s popular, and there is lots of money (and no standards, evicence or accountability) in it. Even medical journals like The BMJ, which has been on a questionable professional trajectory the last few years, have picked up on the trend. In 2017, for instance, they published a number “state of the art reviews” on “integrative medicine” that bought into the pseudoscience with few questions, one of them being a review of management of chronic pain using complementary and integrative medicine by Lucy Chen and Andreas Michalsen, a German crackpot. The opening is somewhat telling: “Recent advances in basic science and clinical research on CIM [complementary and integrative medicine] have substantially increased patients’ awareness about the potential therapeutic use of CIM” – that sentence goes in a somewhat different manner than you’d expect from a medical research paper.
The paper in question (more elaborate criticism here and here) is anyways a case study in cherry-picking of small and poor studies that might be interpreted as providing support for the treatments they promote – largely acupuncture (including bee venom acupuncture), which is theatrical placebo – and overlooking all the large and good negative studies (there is also misrepresentation in the sense of citing studies to support a claim that the study cited does not at all support, a standard pseudoscience ploy). Acupuncture does not work for chronic pain. They also cover “mind-body” therapies, which is a favorite of quacks because the category lumps together science-based techniques (like exercise) with nonsense, and claims that the therapies overall has evidence supporting it (because the science-based ones do); it also lets them dabble in popular exoticism, given that they tend to promote exercise with non-Western-sounding names (tai chi rather than aerobics) because Eastern mysticism is better for marketing to the relevant audiences. There is also (questionable) dietary and supplement pushing, and even the absolute quackery that is anthroposophic medicine gets a heads-up.
Lucy Chen is a real MD affiliated with the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Translational Pain Research, and a seasoned acupuncture researcher. We have not bothered to look into her research output in any detail, but if the BMJ review is an indication, caution is warranted.
Diagnosis: Yet another champion of integrating medical science with alternative facts in a true post-truth fashion, and she’s got willing, powerful audiences. It’s sad, but at this point hardly novel anymore.
Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence
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