Culture
What would you think if your child went to college to learn that amethyst crystals “release special yin energy”, or that cancer can be cured with coffee, which is injected into buttock area? What if a student were taught that the heart is not a pump for pumping blood, as medicine has believed for many centuries, but “the leader of human thought and behavior.”
In this situation, you would probably demand a refund of tuition fees. For more than a decade, “theories” such as these have been studied at some of the UK's government-accredited educational institutions. Examples of teaching alternative medicine courses have been observed at Westminster and Edinburgh Medical Universities. Indeed, since the mid-1990s, such theories have been presented and studied as if they were related to real medicine.
“Non-traditional” (that is, not based on proven facts) methods in medicine have been fighting against scientists and opponents of various false theories for many years. Such treatments may seem quite harmless and even more convenient than conventional medicine. Unfortunately, one thing is absolutely certain: homeopathic treatments that are not based on proven facts and data may not only fail to help in the event of a disaster, but also cause significant harm to people.
Alternative medicine can do significant harm. Often, a patient, hoping for non-traditional methods of treatment, begins to avoid taking drugs that can cure him or alleviate his condition. In particularly dangerous cases, such as when an AIDS patient begins to take various herbal tinctures and preparations, this method of treatment can simply kill the patient. Some people argue that Steve Jobs might be alive now if he had decided to treat pancreatic cancer from the very beginning not with a questionable diet, but with a proven method — chemotherapy.
One of the senior researchers at a major British university was simply amazed to learn about the existence of such strange courses. It is absolutely necessary to put an end to all these useless theories and teachings, which not only do not help with treatment, but can also cause irreparable harm to human health. Moreover, relevant authorities should ensure that students study accredited academic disciplines rather than “practical magic” courses. Sadly, no one is really watching this, despite the fact that non-traditional treatments are attributed to charlatan methods. They mislead even scientists and regulatory authorities that monitor medicine. The British Department of Health is confused whether or not to ban such alternative medicine courses at universities, despite numerous requests to do so.
The only organization that has achieved anything on this issue is the British Advertising Standards Committee (ASA). Advertisements for homeopathic medicines cannot indicate the diseases that this drug is intended to treat. If the “drug” on the package does not match the actual content of the “drug”, the ASA severely reprimands and then solves the problem in more radical ways.