We’ve had ample opportunity (e.g. here) to talk about the intrusion of quackery into academic medicine under the brand name ‘integrative medicine’ – the idea that mixing nonsense with real medicine somehow makes medicine better – and some of the reasons for why it happens and some of the rhetorical techniques used for marketing it. Some common reasons include:
- there is often significant amounts of money, through gifts and donations, attached to such projects, and the administrators who make the decisions are not necessarily deeply motivated by mere medical concerns
- it’s glitzy, faddish and easily marketable (integrative medicine is all about marketing, of course).
Some common marketing tricks include:
- Appealing to real problems inpatient care, such as the opioid crisis and the desire for non-pharmacological ways of addressing the conditions and the suffering that opioids are used to alleviate – while being notoriously vague about whether the alternatives actually work to treat the relevant conditions because they don’t.
- The Trojan horse strategy of rebranding elements from conventional medicine (like diet and exercise) as somehow ‘alternative’ to argue that there is nothing scary about alternative medicine and that its critics are hysterical, and then use the rebranding to introduce bullshit like reiki, homeopathy or acupuncture as if such quackery is merely an extension of the obvious, non-alternative measures. (And once integrated into institutions doing real medicine, proponents of quackery can then use the institutional credentials to claim that their pseudoscience is science-based without actually doing any science)
One of the major movers in the attempts to whitewash quackery and providing such nonsense with a sheen of legitimacy through equipping pseudoscience with academic affiliations, is Heather Greenle. Greenlee has an MPH in addition to an ND degree from Bastyr University, and she is a board-certified naturopath (“naturopathic physician”), medical director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center Integrative Medicine, and associate professor with the Division of Medical Oncology at the UW School of Medicine. Greenlee is an advocate of “integrative therapies” in cancer treatments to “ease side effects and bolster overall physical and emotional health”. Officially, her “goal is to help patients with cancer make sound decisions about using integrative medicine”. That is, of course, not her actual goal. Here is a discussion of a purportedly rigorous study on acupuncture she was part of. And here is a discussion of a press release from her center that perfectly illustrates the distortions and tricks people like Greenlee employ to market integrative practices.
Greenlee was also president of the Society for Integrative Oncology from 2013 to 2015. The Society for Integrative Oncology is an organization that purports to be “dedicated to studying how to apply evidence-based integrative medicine to the treatment of cancer”, and which has its own journal, the Journal of the Society for Integrative Oncology. The level and type of dedication they’re talking about is discussed here. You may also wonder what, exactly, integrative oncology actually is, but if so, you should probably not ask them. The group (nevertheless) publishes guidelines for what they deem to be “evidence-based” supportive care for cancer patients, including a 2015 set of guidelines concerning breast cancer patients, which, with its addendum ‘Clinical practice guidelines on the evidence-based use of integrative therapies during and after breast cancer treatment’ written by Greenlee et al. in 2017, is discussed here, and yes, it is mostly convential suggestions mixed with fluff and acupuncture – the ‘evidence-based’ claim is, as you’d expect, based on appealing to real studies (for the conventional therapies) and appeals to ancient traditions and vitalism for the rest.
As part of her organized and concentrated efforts to whitewash quackery, Greenlee has also for instance been involved with a University of Michigan course to miseducate healthcare professionals with infomercials about “integrative oncology”. The course would offer modules on a range of quackery, in particular various “mind-body” interventions and “natural” products, but also energy medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, supplements (no, seriously), Ayurvedic medicine, naturopathy, and high-dose Vitamin C, and it would of course do so with the help of the strategy mentioned above: coopt conventional science-based diet and lifestyle modalities (though their dietary recommendations of course themselves mixes the sound with the pseudoscientific), and use these recommendations as a Trojan horse for insane quackery like homeopathy.
Diagnosis: No, she is not a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. But that makes her just more dangerous, insofar as the target for her disinformation and propaganda on behalf of woo and pseudoscience is academic institutions. And she seems to be rather successful.
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