Thursday 11 December 2008

Enforced Quackery Days 3 & 4

I'll give a brief summary of day 3, and also the real reason I've finally gotten round to writing these posts. Basically, I don't really know what happened, my girlfriend was too ill to attend.

All I really know is that by the end of day 3 the students *still* hadn't seen any patients and that, when confronted with this fact the person in charge is reported to have said that this was because she was scared of what the students might say to the patients... Apart from this being a massive insult to the professionalism of the students, it is at least an encouraging sign that they have not been very effectively indoctrinated.

Day 4 consisted almost entirely of a 1/2 hour meeting with a patient (finally!) - details of which it would probably be inappropriate to publish - suffice it to say that it was rather a sad story.

Anyway, as I was saying, my decision to actually post this stuff (which I've been meaning to get round to for weeks) was prompted by an email I received this morning from a rather more prominent (and consistent) blogger than me, David Colquhoun (I hope I spelled that right), who has now picked up on the story. His email asked about how things have been going at the GNH, so I'm going to pass on the documents (when I find them) to him, and let him take the story from here.

Day 5 is this Tuesday, if there's anything interesting, I'll try to post sometime before Christmas...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Priceless.

Thanks for putting this out there. The medical school in question should be embarrassed (preferably publicly) for letting the CAMmers loose on the students without some kind of "critical thinking" debrief back at medical school HQ.

The "positive trials of homeopathy" document is an absolute classic, trying hard to look like scientific analysis while declaring its "cherry-picking", which you nailed so nicely, right in the title. You couldn't make it up.

Perhaps everyone who gets subjected to this should also be told to go and read Richard Feynman's famous lecture on "Cargo Cult Science"