From CAM to scam - complementary and alternative medicine - Editorial

Skeptical Inquirer, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Kendrick Frazier

"Complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) has become a fancy institutionalized term for a mixture of at best marginally respectable professed remedies and outright hooey. "Untested medical remedies" would be a better and more honest moniker. But the language comes from the proponents, not scientific critics. And that's typical. In this issue, Kimball Atwood IV, M.D., painstakingly documents how politics and proponents continue to distort the science carried out by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), the taxpayer-funded research institute that was born out of the political influence of a few elected officials who had become enamored of various untested remedies. Whatever they professed, they cared little about whether it carried out good science. The NCCAM advisory board has always been dominated by proponents of the treatments it supposedly was to investigate. Skeptics need not apply. And the result has been a continuation of questionable science about questionable remedies and treatments. And that is a prescription for waste of taxpayers' money and bad or possibly even fraudulent science.

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How does educational level affect one's credulity toward pseudoscience? The answer isn't simple. In fact, the situation has been fairly confusing. In this issue, Susan Carol Losh, assistant professor of educational psychology at Florida State University, and her colleagues attempt to untangle some of the conundrums. They examine twenty-three years of national survey data from the National Science Foundation's Surveys of Public Understanding of Science, 1979-2001. Collectively, says Losh, these surveys include more material about pseudoscience belief than any other national survey. Furthermore, they contain a wealth of detail about educational level, including not just level but major field and exposure to science courses. The researchers found, as did previous studies, that as degree level rises so too does pseudoscience rejection, But the more detailed data shows that the net effect of degree level drops by half or three-quarters when refinements to educational level are made. Other factors generally are at work. Exposure to science courses as a predictor of rejection of pseudoscience did stand up to all the controls for age, time, gender, religiosity, and so on--except for one question about UFOs.

James Underdown of our new Center for Inquiry--West writes about his and his colleagues first-hand investigation visiting the shows of television "mediums" John Edwards and James van Praagh. The surprise was that there were no surprises. Gimmicks and technology weren't needed to explain what's going on. Just old-fashioned cold-reading, a highly conditioned and compliant audience, and judicious editing of videotape are all that's required to give an impression to those so inclined that something mediumistic might have happened. The editing can all be justified as purely normal cleaning up and condensation, but amazingly what gets left out are many of the wrong answers and unsuccessful "fishing" types of questions. The few "hits" of course remain.

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From CAM to scam - complementary and alternative medicine - Editorial

Skeptical Inquirer, Sept-Oct, 2003 by Kendrick Frazier

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