Over the last few years there has been a growing availability of university courses and degrees in Complementary and Alternative Medicine, CAM, but recently there have been moves to examine the content of the courses.
Dr David Colquhoun has been using the Freedom of Information Act to request information about the course contents from a number of universities and has been met with a blank refusal. But David Colquhoun, being the way he is, insisted, appealed, won, and has obtained some frighteningly irrational content.
The quacklash has awakened some of the university administrations who, although they want to exploit the revenue stream coming from low grade private institutes, by validating degrees in CAM, are now seriously embarrassed by course content that includes crystals, magnets, healing energy, and the like.
All UK universities have now stopped issuing BSc degrees in homeopathy - doubtless on the grounds that it is difficult to award a science degree to a non-science, and to examine something with no real content. Some others have halted enrollment into the CAM courses in recognition that there is an academic standards problem. But some shameless institutions are trying to shy away from scientific scrutiny by rebranding the degrees as BAs. As if it is possible to hide lack of content by calling them arts courses.
But what happens to the students, those well-meaning folks who thought they would build themselves a career helping people, students who accepted that if they obtained a degree from a university they could expect to have received a university education. Instead they come out with a piece of paper stamped by a university that has woefully compromised its academic standards for commercial reasons. They will have been taught unregulated content with no scientific basis whatsoever, sat examinations which were marked outside of the university, based on course materials that the university may not even have seen. Their qualifications are a testament only to their deception.
Nevertheless, they will go out into the world, opening businesses and treating people as if their training meant something. They will call themselves healers and therapists, they'll display their certificates on the wall, and start taking money off people who know even less about human biology than they do. The deception of pseudoscience is given commercial respectability by the woeful negligence of the university administrators.
Many universities subcontract both the teaching and the examining, charging for the university stamp. The University of Wales for example validates 34 outside institutions and collects over £5 million per year.
It is to be hoped that the very many principled scientists and others who teach in universities, will wake up to what is going on and start to publish the irrational course content of these pseudoscience courses. Maybe that will embarrass the universities into keeping up their academic standards and will stop them deluding paying students into believing that they have had a university education in pseudoscience.
