BSc (Alternative Medicine)
Let’s assume for argument’s sake that (1) I was the type of person to got to an Alternative Medicine Practitioner (AMP) and (2) it was important to me that the AMP had had some sort of formal tertiary education or training.
If the AMP’s business card read: “Holistic healer Extraordinaire B.Sc.”, what would I want that BSc to be in? Would I be unreasonable to be sceptical about her healing powers if she had a BSc in geology or applied mathematics?
The first thing that I would like to say is that in order for it to be credible, it must definitely not be a “soft option”: I don’t want someone who is in this, because they failed medical school. The person must have been taught what ailments are absolutely definitely better treated by “conventional medicine” – it would be stupid e.g. to die of something that could be cured using antibiotics. And they must had done a first aid course/refresher course recently – dying in an AMPs consulting room would just be too humiliating.
I would want the person to have learned about clinical trials and have the tools to understand the results in medical journals. One of the criticisms regarding alternative medicine relates to the pausity of “positive” clinical trial data. This might mean that the treatments don’t stand up to too much scrutiny, but it also might mean that people have yet to find good solutions to the “unique” problems e.g. the difficulty in getting good “placebos” for acupuncture treatments.
There are a lot of conventional science courses that exist that would be appropriate in an Alternative Medicine BSc. e.g. Anatomy, Physiology, Chemistry, Statistics, Clinical Biochemistry. That is, it could be a real BSc. There are a few special subjects that this person might need to do that are not in a normal BSc, like ethics, legal considerations and the history and of course the practice of their specialty, but I could envision a curriculum requiring an extra year of study plus a year of “supervised practical experience” that I would still consider deserving of the title BSc and fulfilling the requirement of preparing the person for practicing their chosen profession.
The question of whether a person needs a BSc to comfort a patient through a difficult period of their life which is producing psychosomatic symptoms is obviously a different thing completely.
There’s something of a parallel with thinking about the qualifications you need to write about science. I regularly get emails addressed to ‘Dr. Clegg’ and have to admit to humbly having nothing more than a couple of MAs (though in natural sciences and operational research respectively, so in both cases the ‘Arts’ in ‘Master of Arts’ is in the medieval sense).
This has led to questioning of my value as a science writer. A most scathing customer review of one of my books at Amazon.com (see the Amazon page for the full, venomous attack – it’s quite a long way down) says of me ‘Mr. Clegg is not a practicing scientist. He appears to be more of an entrepreneur and this shows in the quality of the book.’ Maybe I should start practising alternative medicine instead?
Well… There isn’t really anything wrong with being an entrepreneur is there? And you do have a lot of good reviews.
There are hordes of people who have more experience with referee reports than I do, but I have seen a few pretty scathing ones saying things to the effect of “no self-respecting scientist would need a protocol to do this” failing to realise that there are lots of people who have yet to learn the technique in question.
There are a lot of interesting ideas relating to “the qualifications required” to do things. For example: How much emphasis is placed on learning to communicate in a science course? And yet two of the main requirements to succeed as a scientist are the abilities to write and speak effectively.
Do scientists have to do an ethics course before starting their research? No… So, can we trust scientists to make ethical decisions? One would hope so, but if you have never been taught how to think about it…?
And it goes on. Is a scientific “grown-up” re-trained when he moves from basic to translational research? If not, how can we be certain that he/she will not miss things that are really important? One would hope that they would ask for and listen to advice… but we have all heard of expensive mistakes that have been made.
I suppose my blog post was really a little rant against the idea that Alternative Medicine BSc courses are by definition not “proper” science degrees.