{"id":5971,"date":"2013-10-04T08:15:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-04T12:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/?p=5971"},"modified":"2013-10-04T08:15:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-04T12:15:00","slug":"cam-research-be-careful-what-you-wish-for","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theness.com\/neurologicablog\/cam-research-be-careful-what-you-wish-for\/","title":{"rendered":"CAM Research – Be Careful What You Wish For"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edzard Ernst is the first professor of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). He began 20 years ago as a CAM enthusiast, and a trained homeopath, and genuinely wanted to point the critical eye of science onto CAM. Many CAM proponents claim this, but Ernst was different in a key respect – he wanted to use rigorous scientific research to find out if<\/em> CAM worked, not to prove that it does.<\/p>\n

He recently wrote about his 20 years of CAM research<\/a>, and eloquently makes this point. He writes:<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, we also had a few co-workers who, despite of our best efforts,\u00a0proved to be unable\u00a0of critical thinking, and more than once this created unrest, tension and trouble. When I analyse these cases in retrospect, I\u00a0realise\u00a0how\u00a0quasi-religious belief\u00a0\u00a0must inevitably get in the way of\u00a0good science<\/strong>. If a person is deeply convinced about the value of\u00a0his\/her particular alternative therapy and thus decides to become a researcher in order to prove his\/her point, serious problems are unavoidable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Problems are indeed unavoidable. There is a problem with researcher bias<\/a> and publication bias<\/a> in medical research. Science magazine also reports<\/a> on a “sting” operation in which an author submitted a hopelessly flawed paper to 304 open access journals, with more than half accepting the paper for publication. There are plenty of places to publish terrible research that proves whatever point you wish to make.<\/p>\n

Researchers need to have a sincere desire to find out if something is really true, not just confirm their biases. They also need to have the technical knowledge to conduct rigorous research. This includes critical thinking skills and detailed knowledge of all the ways in which science can go wrong. Ernst came to his CAM research career, apparently, with these attributes.<\/p>\n

After 20 years and more than 1000 papers published in the peer-reviewed literature, Ernst has come to the following conclusions:<\/p>\n

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