More Harm than Good?: The Moral Maze of Complementary and Alternative Medicine by Kevin Smith & Ernst Edzard

Author:Kevin Smith & Ernst, Edzard [Kevin Smith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Published: 2018-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

4 Cults and CAM Education

‘Educating’ students to believe in the sorts of pseudoscience described above arguably amounts to indoctrination. By attempting to make students believe in fantastical notions, this kind of instruction cannot help students to develop a deeper scientific understanding: rather it is likely to shut down their desire to seek the truth. Attempting to make students believe in palpable nonsense, and follow a career based upon it, is akin to the brainwashing of recruits that occurs within religious cults. All this is deeply concerning in and of itself from an ethical perspective, because such indoctrination violates the autonomy of the student, and can only be harmful, foremost to patients.

Worryingly, CAM has some of the qualities of a cult. One characteristic of a cult is the unquestioning commitment of its members to the bizarre ideas of one single person. Homeopaths, for instance, very rarely question the implausible doctrines of its 19th century founder, Samuel Hahnemann . Similarly, few chiropractors doubt the assumptions of their founding father, D.D. Palmer . Such cult-leaders are idealised and cannot be proven wrong by logical arguments nor scientific facts. Proper education, however, must be open to new ideas and thrives on questioning established principles.

Cult members tend to be on a mission and often operate on a political level to support and popularize their cult. They cherry pick evidence, argue emotionally, adopt conspiracy theories, ignore arguments which contradict their belief system, and tend to assume that there is little worthy of their consideration outside the cult. Therapies, concepts and facts which are not cult-approved are systematically ignored or defamed. Education of cult-members thus takes the form of brain-washing, where concepts and ideas can never be scrutinised but must be accepted unconditionally. Opposition is not tolerated and critics are ousted; to belong to the cult, one must believe in its tenets, and those who fail to fulfil this criterion will be excluded from the cult.

Cult members blindly adhere to what they have been told. The effects of such pseudo-education can be dramatic: the powers of discrimination of the cult member are reduced, critical thinking discouraged, and no amount of evidence can dissuade cult members from doubting what they have learnt.

We are not suggesting that all CAM practitioners are members of a cult. However, the evidence we present below suggests that the education of CAM practitioners is frequently woefully deficient and has features in common with a cultish brainwash.

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