Do universities ignore science? Evidence based medicine is the benchmark for medical training at Sydney & Newcastle Universities; students are required to argue positions based on evidence. Is the author suggesting students at such places suddenly accept alternative medicine because a lecturer says so? The courses at those institutions do not work that way.

Is science based medicine without blemish? Assessment of new chemical compounds for the treatment of diseases do not cross test to a range of existing compounds to assess relative efficacy. It is a business designed to maximise profit first and foremost. If science is desired then apply science fully; don’t allow science to enable ever greening chemicals into different mixes to improve profits.

Universities are profit centres; they are no longer altruistic institutions seeking the public good. The move to training full fee paying foreign students is a sign of Universities turning into businesses concerned with bottom line performance first and foremost. There is an inherent drive to “get bums on seats” as there are dollars attached to those bums. At photovoltaic courses the common game is pick the Australian.

Despite that drive to filling seats teaching neither forms a criteria for appointment or promotion at places such as CSU, recent appointments in their Business School have made clear the only criteria that matters is publications, not teaching.

Within the mix of charlatan and saint teaching that takes evidence as being mandatory and students as the primary focus of a University has to re-emerge. 85%+ of budgets comes from teaching.

Universities should have budgets cut till they prove teaching expertise is weighted as being as significant as the proportion of funding coming from teaching with that teaching being required to be based on evidence not ideology. Great teaching changes the lives of many students over life times, few publications are more than an anecdote 'on the footpath of history'.

Teach alternative medicine, but require the same discipline as Sydney and Newcastle require of their students – evidence. Lecturers are there to serve, not be self indulgent.

Well said Professor!
Once you have cleaned out the medical training duck pond you might like to turn your attention to a few other putrid ponds of 'academic endeavour'. Teacher Education and Sociology wouldn't be a bad place to start and then there are the geese in the 'Climatology' departments.
But beware, the postmodernists will say any opinion is a good opinion, if the right people hold it, and you only need the enlightenment if you want to see where you are going.

Unis should NOT be offering these courses. They have consistently failed to provide verifiable proof that their course offer ANY help to patients. Indeed, there are numerable clases where they have caused great physical damage.

Unis run these courses to make money. They are market opportunists. I can't blame them for that but it does no one any good mixing it up and selling it from the back of a wagon.

John,it must be pointed out that some of the academic disciplines that are taken/assumed to be scientifically sound are anything but. Take psychological science,for eg. Academic Psychology is a pseudoscience, on the basis that it conveniently sidesteps dealing with the central issue to do with the mind- the nature of consciousness. Psychology merely confines itself to the physical mechanisms, and their behavioural implications, of the brain yet does not directly deal with the nature of the psychological phenomenon these processes give rise to. The so-called "objective" science practiced by experimental psychologists is a hoax on the basis that the theoretical explanations they offer up, in their attempts to account for the data they observe, are riddled with cultural artifacts and metaphors(mostly of a western kind). For eg, in short term memory studies of serial (word) recall experiments the most commonly accepted explanation for the observation that people tend to recall, on average, 7 words is the "phonological loop" theory. That a human being's short term memory is akin to the length of ribbon on a tape cassette. Huh? This is just as speculatively pseudoscientific as Freud's psychic determinism.

John, nobody doubts the fact homeopathy and acupuncture are in their elementary stages of credibility within the current paradigm of scientific discourse, but what you should be focusing on more is the subtle yet major aspects of pseudoscience operating within the so-called psychological and behavioural sciences. The fundamental assumptions that underpin empirical observations in these fields are extremely underdetermined and therefore warrant more critical investigation. But of course, the head body - APA (australian psychological association) would not be very happy about this at all now would they?

Time you read (or re-read) the Duhem-Quine thesis, John, then you may realise that all scientific enterprises, medicine included, contain significant amounts of pseudoscience. Medicine is, after all, merely a thin veneer over the terror of uncertainty and that all science can ever be is a process not a collection of a-historical facts. Science likes to think that it produces certainties but the best it can and does deliver, epistemologically, is approximations and metaphors.

Groan - how boringly predictable.
I am a "scientist", a true believer in the doctrine/religion of scientism, therefore what I say is therefore true, and no correspondence will be entered in to.

Meanwhile why not Google: Is modern medicine scientific.

And why not check out the work of Doctor Rudoplh Ballentine MD via his Radical Healing book. Ballentine actually bothered to do his homework like a TRUE scientist would. And found out that "alternative" systems of healing do actually work.

And the work of Doctor Andrew Weil MD.

Vibrational Medicine by Richard Gerber

Planet Medicine by Richard Grossinger and his publishing company North Atlantic Books which publishes some far-out stuff, ALL of which is thoroughly researched and based on empirical evidence - what they do actually works.

The major difference is that all of the various North Atlantic authors (plus Ballentine/Gerber etc) operate from radically different EPISTEMOLOGIES, or sets of presumptions about what is real and possible.

My wife & I have a standing joke. She says she has an appointment, & I ask if it is mumbo jumbo. About half the time she says yes. They even have a supper group that discuss this stuff.

I have noticed some of it really does work. The best is her hairdresser, she always comes home happy from her, although sometimes, I don't know why from the hair set.

Then there's the lady who does her nails. She is a real mood lifter, with results that can last days. I don't know much about the rest of it, not discussing these things is a recipe for harmony I have found.

The fact that she had to give up mumbo jumbo, & have an operation on her eye, does not seem to have weakened her faith.

Still John you really must admit most people get over the complaint that sent them to a doctor, quack or otherwise. I believe the treatment most of them use is natures ability to heal us of most ailments. How often have you heard a doctor say, "take this, & if you're not better in a fortnight, come back & see us".

Like my mate says, the doctor can usually cure you in 14 days, otherwise nature will take a fortnight.