I was a bit curious about this ‘Energy Medicine’ that the Friends of Science in Medicine said was being taught at Australian universities. So I tried the same trick as last time with homeopathy – Googled “energy medicine” site:.edu.au. Since then I’ve had this hanging around, but it’s too good not to post.
Image via Wikipedia
So RMIT has a Master of Wellness, which is mildly amusing and a bit depressing that you can get a MASTERS studying subjects like yoga COTH2162, CAM COTH2148 and Mindbody Wellness BESC1482:
A 2010 report estimates the global wellness industry to be worth more than $1.9 Trillion with beauty worth $679b, Fitness $390b, Nutrition $276b, Preventive Health $243b, Complementary Medicine $113b, Wellness Tourism $106b, Spa $60b, Medical Tourism $50b and Workplace Wellness $30b.
Work opportunities include the spa and wellness industry, the complementary healthcare sector, conventional healthcare and community health settings, the corporate sector and private practice as a wellness consultant.
Now we get to the good bit – Energy Medicine (MEDS2139). The RMIT School of Health Sciences takes the pseudoscience prize for the week, for teaching a course containing the ultimate canard (a canard is the SI unit for quackery). That’s right – RMIT has a health course that includes the word ‘quantum’ (and a bonus point for ‘holistic’).
Wow. At a university. Just wow. It’s really like a Hollywood script – you know the bit in the sci fi movie where they need to explain how the spaceship works and so they babble a whole pile of sciencey terms – “we’ve got to realign the subspace thrusters or else the alpha radiation from the quantum feedback is going to blow us to smithereens”. Or the forensics TV show equivalent – “I’ve extracted the organic gases from the dog poo at the murder scene and have used the mass spectrometer measure their bandwidth and determine whether the gut bacteria inside the rat the dog ate had been feeding onTotallius ridiculosi beetles, which is an endangered beetle only found in 2 square metres of a swamp upstate”.
They’d be better off saying that Energy Medicine, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, is like a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. [Thanks imdb.]
And I’m guessing how the university justifies it is this:
So they’re giving these students a solid enough grounding in real physics, chemistry, human physiology or scientific method to be able to critique the contents of this course? Refute the egregious invocation of quantum mechanics? Funnily enough, I didn’t notice any science subjects as a prerequisite.
When I Googled it the search also came up with plenty of videos from the course co-ordinator Mark Abadi. If anyone with time and a lot more patience than me really wants to torture themselves with some skeptical analysis, then there are lots of videos he’s posted on YouTube. I only opened one, clicked at a random spot and came up with him acting out a neuron firing and (very rough transcription):
what they found was that people could not sleep after having a phone conversation. So insomniacs, I know there are a few in the audience, don’t have a phone conversation before you go to bed. Don’t sleep next to your mobile phone because the waves, the electromagnetic pulse waves, from your mobile phone for a fact increase alpha waves in your brain which are not conducive to sleep. OK? Little simple there.
piezoelectric EM waves travel through the body. Information waves from the brain moves through living crystal matrix (collagen fibres). Million trillion cells are almost instantly and intrinsically linked. Ampère’s law important to know.
I can’t listen to any more pseudoscience!
Here are some skeptical articles on Energy Medicine on the Guardian, Skeptic’s Dictionary and an in-depth review. Here’s another .edu.au website talking about teaching energy medicine. And what on earth was Aunty thinking when they uncritically ran this Energy Medicine story – this is what happens when universities endorse this wibbly wobbly stuff.
Now I’m off to watch some less ridiculous and more enjoyable NCIS.
In other news this week:
Listen to Friends of Science in Medicine co-founder Prof Rob Morrison (known to many once upon a time as the scientist from The Curiosity Show) talking about FSM and its goals on the Token Skeptic podcast.
Homeopathy @ Southern Cross University
Southern Cross University have updated the website for their clinic that I wrote about previously. The naturopathy page I linked to is gone and has been re-written here (but you can see it how it was at the Webarchive). They’ve added a Thomas Edison quote, dropped in the word ‘professional’, removed the section on homeopathy and added a disclaimer:
A naturopath will advise on any condition that is not life-threatening, that is one that does not constitute a medical emergency.
That really doesn’t counteract the fact that the homeopathy page is still up, and they’re still saying homeopathy can treat potentially deadly conditions like asthma and if your symptoms get worse after homeopathic treatment that’s a sign the remedy is working.
The VC of SCU has come out and defended the university’s teaching of homeopathy – if you want to read a good critique of his comments go here.
Herbalists & naturopaths – an anti-vaxxer oops.
I noticed some of the National Herbalists Association of Australia members noticing me on their media & public relations discussion board, was mildly amused and mentioned it at the end of my previous post. To cut a long story short, it lead me what a ‘University trained naturopath’ wrote on a The Conversation article:
“FSM and some of the people here would do very well to spend 5 minutes over at greenmedinfo.org [she later corrects it to .com] – a repository of evidence based research through which the potential or actual therapeutic value of vitamins, minerals, herbs and foods can be determined. They also provide an alternative toxicology database which enables users to access information on the harmful properties of drugs, chemicals, vaccines, etc., which is not readily available elsewhere. “
Only problem is I checked on The Conversation and another sympathetic commenter is a little embarrassed that she posted that link – the supposedly “evidence based” resource about the harms of vaccination also contains anti-vaxxer info. The site needs to come with a public health warning.
sansscience
15/02/2012
Howdy new commenters. Up until the FSM posts I hadn’t had any problems, but now I’m making my comment guidelines explicit. If you try to post a comment that contains crude sexual references and/or coarse insults directed at me or anyone else, as has happened more than once since I started talking about Friends of Science in Medicine, please don’t be surprised when you find all subsequent attempts to comment are automatically blacklisted into my trash folder where I never have to look at them.
This blog had a fairly small community who would come and read it regularly and either know me personally or are friends of friends, and often they’ll give me feedback in person, rather than posting. And once or twice I’ve had nice people come along who I didn’t know and I’ve spoken to them off the wall.
If you choose to come and look and splutter with indignation, well, I’m not going to bother to make my blog private to try and protect you from looking at opinions you might disagree with. But it’s like you’ve joined a group of people meeting and having a discussion in a pub – it’s okay if you want to make a civilised interjection (I’ve allowed plenty of rambling, mildly insulting, ungrammatical or vociferously disagreeing comments on earlier posts on this topic), but if you’re getting too irritating, incoherent, insulting or threatening towards the clientele, then don’t act surprised when the bouncer kicks you out. I do not go along to forums I disagree with and leave comments there, especially not crudely insulting ones, so please don’t come and do that here. Also, if you wish to regularly write screeds, then create your own blog.
Dr D
15/02/2012
RMIT continue to offer Energy Medicine, but I would hazard a guess that almost no students enrol in it (or aromatherapy), so I suspect it will disappear at some point when they realise that the embarrassment of having people commenting on it (and comments as far away as the BMJ) is not worth the tiny income that it generates. Presumably it is cheap to run with the coordinator off shore (and quite possibly off the planet).
davidp
16/02/2012
The Bundoora campus of RMIT is where they also teach Nursing, Chinese Medicine and Chiropractic. I’m a bit worried about what the RMIT Nurses learn, especially about assessing evidence and critical thinking. U.S. nursing seems to be heavily infiltrated by magic thinking (theraputic touch, reiki, etc)
Since my partner is studying at RMIT (not Bundoora), I was upset to learn they “teach” “Energy Medicine”.
I know very little about Southern Cross University – is it considered reputable?
I found your blog some-how a few months ago, was shocked by the Energey medicine thing, and posted a link in a comment at Sceptics book of poo-poo.
Michael Czajka
14/03/2012
I can’t tell from this lambasting what RMIT are teaching. The course descriptions are too vague to tell (that’s a common criticism of most course descriptions).
Yes… microwaves most certainly do affect living cells. Yes… the body is electric (reactions are just electrons zapping around). It sounds like this is some of what they’re teaching. If they talk about atoms… then yes they will be discussing quantum physics.
Most of the debate about chiropractors went away some time ago when the AMA lost an anti-trust case and chiropractors moved towards evidence based approaches:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic
Most drugs are based on natural compounds found in nature aka chinese medicine. So the two complement each other.
Most people would be concerned if the courses were not evidence based… but I know that the practitioners of Chinese medicine at RMIT have been working with the chemistry department to work out what the active ingredients of natural medicine are. I know that they teach the chemistry of these ingredients. I know that the compounds used in natural medicines are the same ones used in many medicines eg. Artemisin/wormwood (a traditinal treatment for malaria) has a peroxide bond which is now the basis of the newest anti-malarials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin
Do Universities teach pseudoscience? I suspect they do… so a discussion about what is evidence based and what is not is a good thing.