#2851: Susan Folkman

 

Susan Kleppner Folkman is an American psychologist, author, and emerita professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. She is – by far – most famous for her writings on psychological stress and coping, and we don’t pretend to have the expertise needed to evaluate those contributions. But Folkman has also, for a long time, been a major champion of medical woo and quackery. Folkman was the first full-time director of UCSF’s Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, which offers (among other things) acupuncture, herbal medicine, manual therapies and Ayurvedic medicine, and Osher Foundation Distinguished Professor of Integrative Medicine; and from 2006, she was the chair of the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine and the North American Research Conference on Complementary and Integrative Medicine. She is, in other words, a major figure in the relentless effort to give woo and quackery a sheen of scientific and academic legitimacy without having the scientific grounding to justify that status.

 

Given her positions, Folkman was also selected to serve on an Institute of Medicine committee to identify major scientific and policy issues in “complementary and alternative medicine” research, regulation, training, credentialing and “integration with conventional medicine” in 2003, and she’s been a firm defender of, say, the practices of NCCAM, employing the standard misdirection techniques of CAM advocates of rebranding conventional therapies as somehow “alternative” (to make CAM seem more popular and legitimate than it in fact is), appealing to the popularity of CAM to justify spending money on it, and pointing out that although trials of CAM tend to be (when properly carried out) disappointing, that’s the situation with science-based medicine, too (i.e. neglecting the importance of starting with plausible hypotheses or the issue of how you adjust your confidence in the hypotheses when they don't pan out).

 

Diagnosis: A significant and powerful promoter of bullshit, and although we haven’t assessed her contributions to psychology on their own terms, her penchant for bullshit and garbage thinking on other issues might leave one wary of errors and blind spots there, too. That said, Folkman is fortunately retired and probably won’t do much more harm, at least not directly.