Last week, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center issued a press releast touting its integrative oncology program. It’s a perfect example to demonstrate the formulaic nature of such press releases and the distortions behind them used to sell the “integration” of quackery into medicine.
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“Integrative oncology” involves “integrating” pseudoscience, mysticism, and quackery with science-based oncology and co-opting science-based lifestyle modalities as “alternative” in order to provide cover for the quackery. Unfortunately, my alma mater, funded by the National Cancer Institute, is running a course to indoctrinate 100 health care professionals in the ways of “integrative oncology.” The Trojan horse of “lifestyle interventions” and “nonpharmacologic treatments for pain” is at the gates. The quackery will leap out as soon as it’s in the fortress.
Dr. Michael Klaper advocates a plant-based “whole food” diet and water fasts as the cure for what ails you, with demonstrably overblown claims for the benefits of such practices and invocation of nonsense “detoxification”? Yet Penn Jillette gave him a friendly forum on his podcast. Where did the Penn of “Penn & Teller: Bullshit!” go? Here we examine Dr. Klaper’s claims and find them weak on science.
Naturopathic licensure is like The Terminator. It never, ever gives up. This time around, it’s back in Michigan. Worse, a bill licensing naturopaths has just passed the Michigan Senate and is moving on to the House of Representatives. Can it be stopped?
Last week, I commented on the inability of the Society for Integrative Oncology to define what integrative oncology actually is. This week, I note the proliferation of the quackery of integrative oncology in places that should be rigorously science-based, namely NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers.
