Aberdeen looks to feather its nest in a field dubbed 'pure quackery'
Critics decry plans for an alternative medicine chair funded by 'holistic' clinic. Paul Jump writes
The University of Aberdeen is considering establishing a chair in a form of alternative medicine described by one expert as "pure quackery".
Aberdeen's governance and nominations committee is considering whether or not to establish a chair in "integrative health care and management" funded primarily by an anthroposophical clinic.
According to Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the University of Exeter, anthroposophy was founded in the early 20th century by Austrian spiritualist Rudolf Steiner.
Professor Ernst said that anthroposophical drug treatments were based on the movement's beliefs about the interplay between physiological and spiritual processes in illness and healing. One example is the use of mistletoe to treat cancer, which is based on the observation that, like cancer, mistletoe is a parasitic growth that eventually kills its host.
Describing anthroposophical medicine as "pure quackery", Professor Ernst said there was no robust evidence for its effectiveness, with some reports suggesting that mistletoe treatment offered "considerable potential for harm".
Freedom of Information requests submitted to Aberdeen by the freelance writer James Gray reveal that the £1.5 million cost of funding the chair for five years would be borne by the Raphael Medical Centre, a private anthroposophical clinic in Kent. The Software AG Foundation, the charitable arm of a German software firm known for funding anthroposophical projects, has also pledged €1.5 million (£1.2 million).
In a submission to the governance and nominations committee obtained by Mr Gray, Mike Greaves, head of Aberdeen's College of Life Sciences and Medicine, suggests that the chair might eventually grow into a research centre. The website of the umbrella group the Anthroposophic Health, Education & Social Care Movement says such a centre has been agreed "in principal" (sic) with Aberdeen and would be "key to furthering the anthroposophic healthcare approach worldwide".
The chair would be the first of its kind outside central Europe. The university also offers an undergraduate degree in "social pedagogy", which also has its roots in anthroposophy and is taught in collaboration with a local Steiner school.
Aberdeen's governance and nominations committee is due to decide next month whether to establish the chair. A paper submitted to it in January by Neva Haites, vice-principal for development, acknowledges that the donation's source could lead to "negative publicity" and doubts about the university's scientific credibility and integrity.
She also censures the anthroposophy movement's "premature and potentially damaging" statements about the centre, particularly the claim that it will offer postgraduate degrees in anthroposophical medicine. This "raises the possibility of a future conflict arising about the activities of the centre, which could prove damaging", she says.
Professor Greaves' paper says any appointee to the chair would need a medical qualification and a track record in medical research, as well as an "in-depth" knowledge of anthroposophical medicine.
But Professor Ernst said that even if Aberdeen appointed a "decent scientist", the new professor would have "no chance" of being academically independent.
The Raphael Medical Centre did not respond to a request for comment.
paul.jump@tsleducation.com.
Readers' comments (3)
26 Apr 2012 9:06am
It seems beyond belief that a university like Aberdeen would be tempted for a moment to accept money from sources like these. It would be debasement of academic standards on a scale unprecedented in the UK if they were to establish this chair. The really worrying part of the affair is that this was not instantly obvious to the university. Instead of saying straight away "thanks, but no thanks". Rather, men in dark suits will spend hours earnestly discussing whether it's appropriate to promote the strange and cult-like Steiner movement and its bizarre and dangerous ideas about medicine (e.g. http://www.dcscience.net/?p=3528 ). Vice-chancellors seem to lose their reason when someone brandishes a million pound cheque. James Gray has already revealed some of what's taught on the BA Social Pedagogy, Reincarnation, karma, heavenly beings and astral forces seem to feature (http://www.james-gray.org/heavenly-beings-and-astral-forces/ ). I've submitted a request under FOISA so the public can see the details. The only redeeming feature of this proposal is that, if it were to go ahead, we can look forward to a hilarious series for blogs and newspaper articles that reveal the nonsense of anthroposophical medicine to a much wider public. The only loser would be the University of Aberdeen.
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03 May 2012 4:04pm
For most of my life I have been treated by Anthroposophical doctors and the picture that is presented in this article and in many of the comments that follow is completely contrary to anything I have experienced. The clinic I go to has been working and developing for about 90 years and has trained hundreds of doctors who have entered professional life all over the world. Each one, without exception, has first had a medical degree from a recognized university, the equivalent of Aberdeen or any of the degrees you commentators might have. How does that make them quacks? (http://www.wegmanklinik.ch/) What I expect from an anthroposophical doctor is that he or she is conventionally qualified and in addition, has done a post-graduate training in anthroposophical medicine. I further expect that the doctor is interested in me as a person, not just in my illness, that they care about me and my health, think a bit about my case after having seen me and try to understand my needs and concerns. I expect this not because of any code I have read, but because that is the way I have always been treated. My mother died of cancer. She did not have access to anthroposophical care at the time and so went the course of Chemotherapy and later also Radiation. The radiation inadvertently burnt holes into her bladder, which made her seem incontinent and caused a lot of discomfort until she was fitted with a bag to catch the urine. I fetched her in the hospital about 4 weeks before her death. I saw the doctor in charge. Neither she nor I blamed him for what had happened, but he could not get out of that room fast enough! He was obviously embarrassed, and our acceptance of the situation in no way put him at his ease. I felt sorry for him. At the same time I cannot overlook the fact that his concern was with himself, with his own reputation, his sense of failure, and not with his patient, with her further care and treatment in preparation for her inevitable death. That was left up to us and to a kind hospice worker. It was humanly understandable, but not what I had come to expect from the role of a doctor in our lives. The man was a technician who felt he had failed to fix the damage. Humanly speaking, he could have been a mechanic and my mother a car. I recently broke my shoulder in a road accident. I went to the abovementioned clinic, where the doctor recommended I have it operated and referred me to the local hospital, as the clinic specialises in internal medicine, not surgery. At the hospital they confirmed her diagnosis, operated, treated me with concern and kindness, taking my wishes seriously and at no time showed the slightest rudeness or disrespect for the anthroposophical treatment or the clinic that had referred me. On the contrary, it was a matter of qualified physicians working in harmony with one another, in recognition of Swiss legislation that accepts alternative medicine, including Anthroposophical medicine. That is only natural in a democracy – that the concerns and needs of the patients, students and practitioners all have an equal voice. When I read what is written in this article and in many of the comments, I feel insulted in my intelligence, as if I did not know the difference between good professional health care and voodoo. The kind of contempt, rudeness and conceit towards equally qualified colleagues and the public that speaks out of what is written here, based purely on hearsay information by anything I have been able to discern, in no way takes me seriously as a patient, a human being or a part of the democratic process. It scorns the democratic process by which a university is part of the general spectrum of public service for the sake of educating students and doing original research, and makes it into a kind of Old Boys Club which has a reputation to defend. Ayurveda, Acupuncture and other disciplines that are used extensively by many qualified western doctors, where there are large clinics in Europe with doctors who have done post-graduate training in order to practice something they believe in, are simply dismissed by you as “quackery”. Your “reputation” would not allow you to take it seriously. What reputation, pray tell?! Every person I speak to from the UK, the moment anything medical is mentioned, begins to rant about British health care. They could not be more scathing. With derision they tout that Britain has the highest rate of cancer patient deaths in Europe. Your reputation sucks! According to your patients, your Health Care seems like the medical equivalent of British Rail. In Switzerland, where these sorts of services are accountable to a democratic electorate, they would never put up with British Rail. Consequently the trains arrive on time and take people where they want to go, and the Health Care actually cares. So, far from having a reputation to defend, your system seems to be badly in need of reform and of new ideas. But no one in your Old Boys Club seems to have ever even considered that Software AG and the proposed chair for Anthroposophical Medicine might just have in mind to bring a few such ideas into the public arena where a reputable university can do some authoritative research and students can have a choice in the kind of medical education they wish to receive. No, the whole idea is derided as the vested interest of a wealthy organisation as if this were the first chair at a university faculty to be privately funded by business, foundations or free donors. Your system, by all accounts, seems to have failed its patients, its public and its students, but when a new proposal comes up, the old boys immediately stand shoulder to shoulder, begin to bluster, to ridicule, to avoid personal investigation of the facts and show themselves in utter contempt of the plebs they are supposed to treat. And the idea that some new research should come from Europe is more than your elite club can countenance.
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09 May 2012 0:20am
Well, at least things seem to finally be adding up in Aberdeen... http://www.dcscience.net/?p=5261#080512 "The University has decided not to take forward a current proposal to establish a Chair in Integrative Health Care Management." I guess they realized the long-established scientific theorem - "If it quack like a duck"...
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