society for integrative oncology
oracknows | May 1, 2017"Integrative medicine" is a term for a form of medicine in which pseudoscience and quackery are "integrated" with real medicine. Unfortunately, as Mark Crislip puts it, when you mix cow pie with apple pie, it doesn't make the cow pie better; it makes the apple pie worse. Unfortunately these days, there's a lot of cow pie being mixed with apple pie. Worse, it's gotten to the point where integrative medicine is subspecializing. For instance, there is now a specialty known as "integrative oncology," which particularly burns me. Indeed, supportive care oncology has been very susceptible to the…
oracknows | November 14, 2016The Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) doesn’t like me much. I understand. I haven’t exactly been supportive of the group’s mission or activities. So it wasn’t surprising that SIO wrote letters trying to rebut a Perspectives article on “integrative oncology” that I published in Nature Reviews Cancer two years ago. What depressed me about that encounter was that one of the complaints the SIO had about my article was that it spent too much verbiage discussing homeopathy as one pseudoscientific treatment that “integrative” oncology “integrates” with science-based medicine and no one uses…
oracknows | June 1, 2016With a bill to license naturopaths (HB 4531) wending its way through the Michigan legislature supported by supplement manufacturers, its current status being in consideration by the full House of Representatives, periodically I feel the need to provide ammunition to the bill’s opponents, because we need to protect the patients in the state of Michigan from the naturopathic quackery that would be unleashed if this bill were to be passed into law.
If there is one area that naturopaths have been invading with a vengeance and even gaining enough seeming legitimacy to propose what they risibly…
oracknows | April 1, 2015It's no secret that I don't have a high opinion of naturopathy. Just enter the word "naturopathy" into the search box of this blog, and you'll quickly see what I mean. Indeed, when last I mentioned the topic a couple of weeks ago, I was discussing the revelations of Britt Marie Hermes, a former naturopath who realized what a load of pseudoscientific quackery she had bought into, unfortunately, after having finished naturopathy school with a quarter million dollars of debt and having practiced for a while. Her account confirmed my impression of naturopathy as a veritable cornucopia of quackery…
oracknows | December 7, 2014
Last week, I discussed a monograph published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monographs entitled Clinical Practice Guidelines on the Use of Integrative Therapies as Supportive Care in Patients Treated for Breast Cancer. As you might remember, I was completely unimpressed. However, those guidelines were not the only thing in that particular JNCI monograph. There were lots of other articles, and, given that some of them show just how deeply quackery has insinuated itself into oncology in the form of "integrative oncology," I thought it was worth revisiting one more time.…
oracknows | December 1, 2014It should come as a surprise to no one that I'm not exactly a fan of "integrative oncology"—or integrative medicine, or "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), or whatever its proponents want to call it these days. After all, I've spent nearly ten years writing this blog and nearly seven years running another blog dedicated to promoting the scientific basis of medicine, and just this year managed to publish a lengthy commentary in a high impact journal criticizing the very concept of integrative oncology. Unfortunately, it seems to be the equivalent of the proverbial pissing in the…