Academics fight plans for quack degrees at university

Academics at the University of Central Lancashire are fighting a last-ditch battle to stop it offering “science degrees” in acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. Here’s the story, courtesy of the Times Higher Education Supplement.

Plans to offer new science degrees in acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine at the University of Central Lancashire have met fierce opposition – from the university’s own staff. Mike Eslea, a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology, has written an “open letter” to the vice-chancellor opposing the courses on the grounds that they have “no academic justification” and would “severely damage” the reputation of the university. Three new degrees are being offered by the university from September in a partnership with the Northern College of Acupuncture. They are a BSc (hons) in acupuncture, an MSc in acupuncture and an MSc in Chinese herbal medicine. Dr Eslea said he was protesting now because there was a final “chance to make a stand before they are up and running”. His letter says there is a paucity of scientific evidence in the subjects, and the title BSc should not be given to courses that appear to be aimed at training practitioners. “The fact that they are science courses really rankles. Having these courses is damaging, and it makes us a laughing stock in the scientific community,” Dr Eslea said. The letter is being made available by Dr Eslea to all Uclan staff and students. As Times Higher Education went to press, the university said that seven people had added their names to the document. A Uclan spokesman said the new courses contained “significant elements” of science and noted that a core first-year module required students to critically review all types of complementary therapies.” The courses have gone through Uclan’s rigorous academic approval process during which senior academic staff from across the university, including those from the faculty of science and technology, considered the academic merits of the programmes. Subsequently, the courses have been considered and approved by a validation panel, which includes Uclan and external academics,” he said. 

Interesting how prominently Chinese quackery features in alternative medicine these days. The People’s Republic, which is lavish in its sponsorship of research into Chinese pseudoscience, must be thrilled.

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I find your flat dismissal of herbal medicine odd and illogical. Many orthodox pharmacuetical drugs are made from plant extracts and in most cases used for the same purpose as the herbal remedy has been traditionally used.
The trouble is that the raw plant or herb is cheap, so who is going to profit from it? farmers/producers perhaps…not pharmaceutical companies.

If I may transgress for a moment, to the subject of a food additive.
Stevia, a plant extract used as a sweetener, this has not gained approval in europe nor the US for use in food, because they quote its safety is as yet undetermined. this is odd, seeing as how the WHO study showed it to be very positive in its report, having no apparent side effects and actually having positive therapeutic qualities (this is not counterknowledge by the way).
Now what would happen to Monsanto’s cash cow ‘Aspartame’ if Stevia was approved. draw your own conclusions.
Stevia incidentally is used in Japan by Coca Cola.

I am quite sure we could draw a parallel in the field of medicine.
eg scientific studies have shown Butterbur to be at least as effective as Citirozine or Zirtek, (not counterknowledge) I use Zirtek and I find it to the best hayfever alleviation I have used, Trouble is it knocks me out, (I wonder how many accidents and deaths have been caused by this drowsiness side effect).
I have not yet tried butterbur as i cant find it in the stores, but i plan to give it a go next summer.
I am sick of the side effects of hayfever medication,
Having been refused entry to the air force because of cardiac arhythmia later assumed to be caused by The drug Triludan. It did clear up when I stopped taking it and I passed an RN medical and later a class 1 Civil Aviation medical with a sound cardio trace.

In my humble opinion i find your stance on many issues to be ridiculous and at the far end of the spectrum. However i think you know as well as most of us do that the world is many shades of grey…not black and white, to think it is is to be as deluded as a flat earther.

I’m not saying that herbal medicines don’t work ever – I’m saying that the only way to know if they work is to submit them to rigorous randomised tests. And Chinese herbal medicine, by and large, does not pass these tests, which have simply not been carried out. When they are, some herbs will pass them and most, I suspect, will fail. Meanwhile, I completely agree that there are grey areas – tests are not perfect, which is why they must be constantly refined and open to fresh challenges.

Dont mean to split hairs here Damian, but: How can TCM not pass these tests if they have not been carried out…your words!

You “suspect” they wouldnt pass the tests that have not been carried out is a bit of a dilution from the conviction you display in your book.

If the test were carried out who would do it? Not the corporate sector, and probably not universities as they receive much funding from the private sector. This leaves institutes which are independant with little funding.

One could say that it Herbal medicine is tested every day by countless number of people who seem to feel enough benefit to go back for more.
I would also like to make the point..or rather ask question, why is it that so many people seem to seek alternative therapies?
Would it be all the word of mouth recommendations from peers?…Partly. Or would it be a general dissillusionment in orthodox care?

This reflects many issues you discuss in your book. The big question is WHY so many people are turning to views that counter orthodoxy.
People make their own mind up and if they choose to sway away from orthodoxy, whether religious, political, medicine or whatever, then perhaps all’s not well in the classroom.
I mean its not like we are bombarded by counterknowledge, every day like we are by our media.
You actually have to look for most of this stuff, I would say 95% of the general population dont know what creationism is.
The human race has not just suddenly got really gullible, or at least not as gullible as a nation who believed in weapons of mass destruction

Steve’s conclusion shows the hippy mentality in full and shameless flow. What on Earth do the political attacks against George W.Bush have to do with the rationality or otherwise of Chinese medicine is a question that no sane person would even think of asking, let alone of answering. As for the so-called Chinese “medicine”, may i remind you that it is directly responsible for the endangerment and possible extinction of tigers and rhinos, hunted for the supposed medical properties of their horns and bones? This is the purest superstition: if an animal is strong, then its body parts will impart strength. Which does not encourage me to believe in the scientific value of anything else on their list.

Incidentally, Demian, while there is no doubt that the misguided Beijing leadership is promoting “Chinese medicine”, probably for image reasons – they themselves use their Western-trained doctors – what I see in my part of London is that the local Chinese apotecaries seem to be established and mostly patronized by Chinese immigrants. I have a suspicion that they would make a decent indicator of the spread of illegal immigration.

Fabio
I would challenge you to make a valid arguement agianst any point I have made in my posts.
Rather than simply pigeonhole me as a hippy.

Fabio, that rings depressingly true.

Chinese herbal medicine must be OK because lots of people use it – that is Steve’s basic argument.

You might as well say that astrology is fine, because lots of people get a kick out of reading their horoscopes.

Yes, some plants have proven medicinal qualities. People in China have known for millennia that sweet wormwood is good for fevers. But it took scientists, laboratories and the dreaded pharmaceutical industry to turn it into the most effective anti-malarial treatment on the planet.

It’s the same with any medicinal plant – it has to be tested, checked for side effects, and produced in a form, such as pills or syrups, that can be easily consumed in standard doses.

No doubt many herbal medicines, like homeopathy, may make people feel good through a placebo effect. so it might naively be argued that they are harmless.

I disagree. For although such “remedies” may not contain any actively toxic ingredient , if they persuade genuinely sick people to avoid conventional medicine, then they will result in death as certainly as any poison does.

Paul,My argument is actually that it works for many people, If people use it for a malady I dont think they are going to avoid other remedies if its not working…would you?
Yes lots of people read horoscopes, not because they believe in it, but as light enternainment when reading the paper.

I accept your point that many compounds efficacy can be improved, however lets not overlook the side effects of many drugs.

I note that the only arguments I get on this site rely on mis-quotes assumptions and taking comments out of context.

I’m stuck in a Saturday course at Beijing Chinese medicine university at the moment – entirely for visa reasons over the Olympics, like 90% of the people on it – and it’s remarkable just how pre-modern the whole thing is; you could be sitting in on a course of fifteenth-century medical knowledge. Great realms of thought are devoted to getting everything to sync up and correspond properly, and there’s nary a word of testing. What’s hilarious is the unspoken acknowledgement by the lecturers that the system is inferior – like the comment that if you took too much ?? (potentially toxic medicine) you should go to a Western doctor, or the admittance by one girl, obviously struggling between reality and teaching (since she had some evidence-based medical training) that it was basically impossible to test, because every doctor would give you a different answer.

I’m constantly surprised at your idea of “counterknowledge”. Is counterknowledge anything that is not the current belief at the pub in England?

Western medicine and science knows more about why acupuncture works than we know about several of our own pharmacological pain relief methods. The keyword here is “Gateway theory of pain”. Pain pathways in the nervous system have both inhibitory and excitatory fibres – and stimulation of the inhibitory signals may block the pain signals coming to the brain stem in the other direction. This stimulation may be done by pharmacological intervention or by inducing pain in other areas of the body. It’s not very hard to understand.

As you write in a comment above: “the only way to know if they work is to submit them to rigorous randomised tests. And Chinese herbal medicine, by and large, does not pass these tests, which have simply not been carried out.”

Not only is your logic absurd, your premises are wrong. A quick visit to PubMed – the main repository of medical research – gives about 10000 results on “chinese medicine”. If you believe PubMed is “counterknowledge”, the reasonably well-regarded science publication Nature alone gives 296 results on the the same query. Hardly untested.. (although searching medical databases with the term “chinese medicine” is slightly absurd)

I’m not saying chinese medicine works or not, but I find it strange that westerners getting morphine from a plant are any different than a Chinese getting another substance from another plant. Western medicine used morphine long before we knew its physiological functions too.

“Acupuncture” gives similar results. PubMed gives over 13000 results, Nature 202 results on the the same query. Some of these reports and articles, based on a quick glance, finds positive results for the use of acupuncture, some do not and some are reviews, even explaining the mechanisms of how this “quackery” works.

I’m not particularly interested in alternative medicine – the point is that this took me about 30 minutes to check up on. If you had the slightest interest in testing your own preconceptions you might have been able to nuance your statements about “quackery” somewhat – just not writing it off because of its Chinese roots.

Incidentally, Fabio, of course herbal medicine has nothing to do with Bush! Did I ever claim it did?
No I think not, I could have said tooth fairies.
Whatever link you saw is lost on me.
Is it maybe because I touched upon an example of government / media counterknowledge.

I totally agree with you, you regarding the use of wild animals.

Don’t you think that large pharmaceutical companies would be cornering the market in herbal extracts, if they were half as effective as more complex drugs? They’ve got billions: they could easily buy up the entire global harvest of echinacea, goldenseal, etc. and get even richer. Yet they don’t. The research, development, manufacture and marketing of medicine is a costly and complicated process that is essentially a gamble: if the public gets on board, one succeeds. If not, one loses. One would think herbal medicines, with legions of believers already willing to buy them without concern for trials and extensive research would represent an irresistible opportunity for ‘big-pharma’. So why haven’t they ditched costly synthetic drugs, and put it all into herbs? The fact is few herbal products can produce benefits in trials beyond the percentage allotted to the placebo effect. The compounds in modern medicines are often plant derived, to be sure. However, the compounds present are often too weak, or too mixed with other compounds to provide the same effect as a medicine made from selecting and concentrating the effective parts. Indeed, with some Chinese herbs these other compounds can have a deleterious effect: certain TCM herbs have been linked to the emergence of Hepatitis in patients, and this doesn’t even address the environmental question: where are the herbs produced, what’s in the soil, what is in the water….at the very least, a pharmaceutical product has been purged of these possible contaminants.

Dave, your faith in the pharmaceutical industry seems only surpassed by your lack of knowledge of how it works. The big money makers are patented products that can be produced and sold without competition. When the patents run out, non-brand versions of the same drugs flood the market and brings down the price. Take a look at a newly developed and patented drug like olanzapine versus an old one like benzodiazepine – if you look it up on Wikipedia (for ease), you’ll see that the former has one version (Zyprexa with variations) while the latter comes in a range of brands. The latter is also dirt cheap while the former is one of the most expensive drugs around, being a big money maker for the patent owner (Eli Lilly).

This economic reality also apply to any herb, naturally.

The general cognitive illusion of mixing up sterile production methods with science that is so prevalent at this site is also just exactly that: an illusion. Pharmaceutical products may have been purged of contaminants from soil, water and location (whatever this fear of these contaminants is based on) and they are also packaged and distributed professionally like someone else above appreciates, but this applies in equal amount to rubbish like homeopathic products.

And it certainly does not apply to the veggies and fruits any doctor in western medicine would recommend you to eat regularly.

But that is not relevant to the scientific method. What is relevant to the scientific method is repeatable falsifiability, testability and asking the right questions. There is absolutely no reason traditional chinese medicine can not be incorporated into that paradigm.

Which would probably show that this pre-scientific medicine is less effective than western medicine. But that is hardly because it is based on natural products.

As a side note, you may want to look up how many products in western medicine are linked to hepatitis. They are not few.

Dave, How are pharmaceutical companies going to put a patent on herbal extracts?
No patent no profit.

Plant varieties are patented all the time; a few modifications to increase concentrations of active ingredients, patent the altered variety, and voila: a patented herb. Surely I don’t have to explain this to you. No profits to be made in herbal extracts? You might want to tell this to the big players in the natural products market: clearly they didn’t get your memo.

The global commercial production of key medicinals is not large: a quick browse of trade classifieds will reveal large numbers of buyers eager to buy up whatever harvest is available. It wouldn’t be a big thing for a large pharm. company to purchase the global harvest of echinacea (as an example) and have a virtual commercial monopoly for a season or two: ample time to aggressively market their brand, and establish themselves as the dominant product. Combined with the subsequent introduction of a patented variety, touted as highly potent, there is a reasonable chance of big profit.

Mats put it best, in the portions of his post that actually stayed on topic: herbal medicines and pharmaceuticals occupy the same ‘economic reality’. In other words, there is no economic reason for pharma. not to get on board. Herbal products are big money: check the ‘natural medicine’ section at Wal Mart next time you’re by. The reason is instead a clinical one: natural medicines are simply far less effective for a given ailment, and the research indicates this. A pharm. company sells to governments, health agencies, and international medical orgs: they’re not in habit of purchasing large quantities of medicine based on testimonials from the pages of Prevention magazine. Put differently, they are subject to a much more rigid set of standards, and herbal medicines cannot meet them. Sure, PubMed yields results for TCM. This doesn’t mean that the studies provide support for its effectiveness. Simply that people have done studies. You really need to read the studies: the mere presence of a study doesn’t tell you a thing.

And mats, I hate to break it to you, but you really don’t know what you’re talking about. Monopoly control of a patented drug is the heart of the pharma. biz, but the ongoing success of established brands beyond the point of a patent’s expiry refutes your claim. Aspirin remains a top seller, though on any given shelf you’ll find numerous generic alternatives. Pharma. is about exploiting a monopoly long enough to establish one’s brand, both in the eyes or consumers, and in the minds of doctors and agencies, long enough to count on this loyalty carrying the product in the face of eventual competition. Essentially, it’s all about the head start. In some cases, using their political clout, pharma. will push legislation against generics (witness the situation regarding generic v. brand HIV meds. in Africa…deplorable, but a good example of big money made in the face of generic competition).

A long way of saying: sorry, fellas, but you’re wrong. Your idea of how the pharma. industry works suits your position, but isn’t reflected in reality. I’d suggest you really don’t understand the pharma. industry at all.

Now there’s a long post! I’ll implicate myself first in suggesting we’re beginning to stray well off the original topic of this old thread, and it might be good to let it die a ‘natural’ death. We could proably go back and forth for eternity.

A good few points there Dave, some I accept, and some I would call into question.
I do however stand by my original post in stating that herbal meds are not without merit. You have actually just reinfored my original claim that ….”Many orthodox pharmacuetical drugs are made from plant extracts and in most cases used for the same purpose as the herbal remedy has been traditionally used.”
I’m well aware of patented modified plant variety’s, but that is another issue I am not going to get into on this thread.

If a medicine must pass blind clinical tests, why will the FDA not allow companies to sell placebos as medicine. Placebos perform extremely well in clinical trials, sometimes outperforming the drug being tested.

And yet you are asking us to believe that “Western Medicine” is science, when it’s test procedure has bias against the control.

Western doctors have been trying to convince REAL scientists for decades that statistics is the same as the scientific method, and yet, many clinical trials show that it is not. Trials performed by different doctors in different conditions produce different results, thus failing the basic criteria of repeatability and peer review.

Chinese Medicine on the other hand has been refined by clinical experience over more than 1000 years, but admittedly, there is no way to test a Chinese Medical Doctor on their healing efficiency, unlike Western Medicine where test scores at University is the primary healing indicator.

It should also be noted that the worlds largest pharmaceutical companies began business as vitamin companies, the people they are now trying to crush. How ironic.

But don’t let me stop you from fighting the good fight for these Quacks, they are soon going to need all the help they can get.

i used Stevia extract as a sugar substitute because i am diabetic. Stevia is really sweeter than sucrose.’”"

Academics at the University of Central Lancashire are fighting a last-ditch battle to stop it offering “science degrees” in acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine. Here’s the story, courtesy of the Times Higher Education Supplement.

Plans to offer new science degrees in acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine at the University of Central Lancashire have met fierce opposition – from the university’s own staff. Mike Eslea, a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology, has written an “open letter” to the vice-chancellor opposing the courses on the grounds that they have “no academic justification” and would “severely damage” the reputation of the university. Three new degrees are being offered by the university from September in a partnership with the Northern College of Acupuncture. They are a BSc (hons) in acupuncture, an MSc in acupuncture and an MSc in Chinese herbal medicine. Dr Eslea said he was protesting now because there was a final “chance to make a stand before they are up and running”. His letter says there is a paucity of scientific evidence in the subjects, and the title BSc should not be given to courses that appear to be aimed at training practitioners. “The fact that they are science courses really rankles. Having these courses is damaging, and it makes us a laughing stock in the scientific community,” Dr Eslea said. The letter is being made available by Dr Eslea to all Uclan staff and students. As Times Higher Education went to press, the university said that seven people had added their names to the document. A Uclan spokesman said the new courses contained “significant elements” of science and noted that a core first-year module required students to critically review all types of complementary therapies.” The courses have gone through Uclan’s rigorous academic approval process during which senior academic staff from across the university, including those from the faculty of science and technology, considered the academic merits of the programmes. Subsequently, the courses have been considered and approved by a validation panel, which includes Uclan and external academics,” he said. 

Interesting how prominently Chinese quackery features in alternative medicine these days. The People’s Republic, which is lavish in its sponsorship of research into Chinese pseudoscience, must be thrilled.

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