Gaudet herself is a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and has for a while now been a central figure in efforts to give pseudoscience and quackery a place at legitimate institutions and thereby providing it with a disconcerting sheen of legitimacy. Gaudet is Executive Director of the Doctor of Whole Health Leadership (DWHL) program at the Southern California University of Health Sciences, co-founder of the Cornerstone Collaboration for Societal Change and of the Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health, and former Executive Director of the Whole Health Institute and of Duke Integrative Medicine and the University of Arizona Program in Integrative Medicine; she is also affiliated with the Institute for Functional Medicine. Tracy Gaudet is, in other words, a seminal figure in the push to legitimize integrative and holistic medical practices under the assumption that integrating non-reality based bullshit with real medicine somehow makes medicine better. And to quote from the description of the DWHL program, the program “integrates advanced whole health concepts, care models, personal self-exploration, and leadership development” that will equip students with “the skills and knowledge needed to drive system-level change, promoting the adoption of an integrative, whole-health approach to healthcare in the United States”: i.e. it is not a program that has anything to do with science or with the practice or research of medicine, but one that equips students to be effective lobbyists and marketers for the quackery people like Gaudet wants to market.
Not the least, Gaudet managed to do quite a bit of harm during her tenure as director of the Veterans Health Administration’s National Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation, where she was responsible for concentrated efforts to “re-envision” healthcare delivery by promoting naturopathy and integrative medicine. A typical example of those efforts is the attempt to co-opt the opioid crisis and requests for nonpharmacologic treatments for chronic pain to promote CAM modalities like auricular acupuncture as pain relief, with the help of questionable rants, a few shoddy studies (primarily this one and this one) and studies that failed to back up what their authors wanted the studies to show. They also, tellingly, offered up e.g. studies on “introducing BFA [battlefield acupuncture] into the aeromedical evacuation system” – it’s a rather typical characteristic of pseudiscientific woo to study the feasibility of integrating a technique into practice before determining whether it fucking works. They mostly succeeded.
Of course, Gaudet wasn’t satisfied with promoting acupuncture, which would have been bad enough; acupuncture, for Gaudet, is merely an apparently semi-legitimate Trojan horse for the real nonsense, like naturopathy, that Gaudet wished – and was somewhat successful in getting – veterans to be exposed to. Speaking at the 2015 annual DC Federal Legislative Initiative arranged by the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians (naturopaths really want to be ‘physicians’), she described naturopathy as “a huge answer for the country, for practice, for patients” that is available “at a pivotal transformational moment” in healthcare, referring to naturopathic practitioners as “pioneers” who have been practicing integrative medicine “all along.”
Still, Tracy Gaudet, Executive Director of the DWHL program, is probably a different Tracy Gaudet than Tracy Gaudet, Practical Ascension Guide, Personal Mastery Shaman and Wayshower of Awakening who works “with powerful light workers/warriors and change makers through the ascension process, to help accelerate them into more of their Soul self and Soul level gifts” and who uses her “combined training and intuitive connection to work multidimensionally through guided journeys, energy healings and activations, coaching and more to help expand you into greater possibilities and the next level that is open and available to you now”, though there seems to be some points of intellectual connection.
Diagnosis: It’s a myth, but one still yearns for that time before the post-truth era, before what was considered true and correct became interchangeable with whatever could be polished slick for marketing and inserted into some fashionable narrative about transformative innovation. In any case, Tracy Gaudet’s brand of post-truth posturing is a threat to health and well-being and to civilization.
Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence
Have you written anything on so-called Chinese medicine? I know of someone who is attending a school for this is Colorado. It seems like such quackery, but to question its ancient bona fides is considered politically incorrect by some.
ReplyDeleteYeah, we've mentioned it a number of times. More comprehensive resources on the subject are (e.g.) here and here. I suppose you're right that questioning it might strike some as "politically incorrect", yet it is also pretty clear that there is some ugly orientalists aspects to the motivations for Western people to be interested in TCM, too.
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