Michael Hiltzik LA Times 10-24-17
Dr. Andrew Weil, perhaps the nation’s best-known purveyor of “New Age” medicine, has written The Times to “take umbrage” at my recent column warning that UC Irvine risks becoming a haven for quacks if it’s not careful about deploying a $200-million gift from the Samueli family.
Weil, whose familiar bearded visage peeks out from covers of his more than 20 published books, desires to make a distinction between “quackery,” which “refers to dishonest practices performed by those who pretend to have special knowledge and skill in some field,” and what he does at his Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona.
Real integrative medicine, he says, is “healing-oriented medicine that reaffirms the importance of the relationship between practitioner and patient, focuses on the entire patient and body systems, is informed by evidence, and makes use of all therapeutic and lifestyle approaches to achieve optimal health and healing.”
Fair enough. But then why does Weil exaggerate, in the very same letter to the editor, the level of professional acceptance of some of his “integrative” nostrums? (Weil’s letter is co-signed by three of his acolytes at his center and a recent graduate, as if to suggest there’s strength in numbers even if everyone’s a member of the same family.) Weil says integrative medicine, presumably as he practices it, is “informed by evidence.” But the evidence he cites in his letter isn’t very convincing.
Before we delve further, some background: Henry and Susan Samueli, whose multibillion-dollar fortune springs from his co-founding of the semiconductor firm Broadcom, are sworn adherents of integrative medicine, including homeopathy, which has been scientifically discredited.
Some of their huge gift will go to fund a building for the Samueli College of Health Sciences, which will incorporate UC Irvine’s medical and nursing schools and planned schools of pharmacy and “population health” (that is, public health). But most of the money will be devoted to an endowment for up to 15 chairs for world-class faculty with “expertise in integrative health” and for the training of students in that curriculum.
As I reported last month, medical professionals who believe that healthcare should be based on treatments validated by science view the very term “integrative medicine” as a path to introduce unproven or disproven therapies into medicine. UC Irvine has hewed very close to that line in relation to an earlier gift from the Samuelis, which was used to fund a center at the university that actually offered homeopathy to patients. (The mention of homeopathy disappeared from one of the college’s web page after I asked about it; but a naturopath on the staff is still promoting homeopathy under the UC Irvine imprimatur even now.)
Promoters of integrative medicine often play a couple of shell games with the public. First, they assert that conventional doctors treat only discrete diseases in isolation, while integrative medicos approach health “holistically.” This is what Weil is up to when he writes in his letter that his method “reaffirms the importance of the relationship between practitioner and patient [and] focuses on the entire patient and body systems.” The distinction is absurd, of course, as it’s hardly uncommon for any patent to be queried by his or her doctor about lifestyle, diet, home environment and so on...
Full column at http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-weil-20171024-story.html
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