“[U]sing essential oils to treat minor pain. This is now a new front on the struggle against the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine. Similar to acupuncture, it represents a fundamental failure of medical education.
The goal of any science-based system, which medicine should be, is to have clear and valid procedures for reliably answering basic questions – in the case of medicine, questions about safety, efficacy, and fundamental issues of biology and mechanism of action. In short we need to be able to adequately address the question – is this phenomenon real, and what exactly is it?
Promoters of snake oil (whether naïve or intentional) fail at this basic task. They have also discovered the weak points in the medical system where they can infiltrate. This is where the failure of medical education comes in, because it should be obvious to any trained health professional that these interventions are not scientific. We should be holding the line against pseudoscience, and then educating the public about what is legitimate and what isn’t. Instead, far too many health care providers become deceived themselves and then promote pseudoscience. Then the entire system starts to crumble as we see a proliferation of specialists, journals, products, and services in the mainstream based on bad science.
…Doctors should know enough science to see through all this, and many do, but unfortunately many cannot. They combine terrible science with personal anecdotes and then use their professional status to lend credence to pseudoscience, and become the gateway for the infiltration of this pseudoscience into our profession.”
The full article is here.
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