Patricia Herman is a behavioral scientist at the RAND corporation and Co-Director of the RAND Research Across Complementary and Integrative Health Institutions (REACH) Center. She is also a “licensed naturopathic doctor”, which makes her qualified for an entry here by default – even though she might immediately come across as one of the less chaotically delusional figures in naturopathy (the comparison class is … colorful), something that ultimately probably makes her more dangerous than some of her colleagues.
Herman is a pusher of the de facto CAM scam-by-smoke-and-mirrors known as non-pharmacological interventions, and has, most notably, published papers e.g. on the ‘cost-effectiveness’ of alternative medicine approaches, thus making her a figure of some importance in the grand strategy of trying to provide a sheen of legitimacy to the nonsense practices falling under the heading ‘complementary and alternative medicine’. Her contributions to the study of the economics of CAM include e.g. a paper attempting to do something close to a systematic review by applying economic analysis quality checklists to a number of what the authors deemed “high-quality” studies of alternative treatments to conclude, of course, that there seemed to be a number of “highly cost-effective, and even cost saving,” such therapies. And that, of course, is entirely what you’d expect them to find given the standards they use for “high-quality”. In reality, given that the treatments in question don’t offer meaningful clinical benefits, any cost-effectiveness analysis is meaningless, making their effort an instance of tooth-fairy science. Her paper “The Problematic Economics of Integrative Oncology” is discussed here (yes, she does recognize that the costs of woo are high but fails magnificently to draw the proper conclusions from that recognition).
Diagnosis: Yes, she does come across as a Very Serious Person on the issue of complementary and alternative medicine. And no, you shouldn’t listen to what she has to say.
Hat-tip: Science-based medicine
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