Shares

Last Week’s Entry: Everyone’s a Winner!

The resounding total of 4 “translations” for the second W^5 entry might have been trying to tell me something…nah!

I gotta say that each of the four nailed the central point: the esteemed Institute of Medicine (IOM), a subset of the esteemed National Academy of Sciences, has decided that it’s just fine—no, it is “important” and even “required”—that when it comes to “CAM,” the medical profession dispense with ethics, law, and science. Otherwise we might mistakenly argue, er, against the “integration of CAM therapies with conventional medicine.” That, clearly, would be unacceptable.

Stephen Barrett and others have critiqued some of remainder of the text. Regarding our own group of translators: yeah, you are all winners, but Stu once again rose above the crowd. Whadizzy, some kinda ringer? If he keeps this up I might have to insist that he be tested for performance-enhancing substances.

Hoodathunk that the IOM’s opinions are for sale? They are: the language that you deconstructed was bought and paid for, as we clunky Americans are so fond of saying, by…you and me! Yup, our tax dollars, funneled through the NCCAM and some other government agencies, generated the very Pap that we Smeared.

This Week’s Entry

In order to encourage more participation, I’ll try limiting entries to a single paragraph each, for a while anyway. This week’s entry, which will be the first of several from the same treatise, is found on the website of the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) as part of its “CAM Education Initiative“:

EDCAM – CAM and Medical Education Report

Medicine today is experiencing a paradigm shift that involves the blending of two disparate philosophies of health and disease, the biomedical or scientific reductionist view and the clinical, experiential holistic view. While the biomedical model reduces disease to a disturbance in biochemical processes and relies heavily on the “curative model” of care, holistic medicine derives from a “healing model,” which emphasizes the complex interplay between multiple factors: biochemical, environmental, psychological, and spiritual.

Feel free not only to restate it in the Queen’s English (it’s already in the Prince’s), but to comment upon its assertions. Remember, you gotta week, and I’ll announce the lucky winners in 2 weeks.

Happy waluating!

The Misleading Language and Weekly Waluation of the Weasel Words of Woo series:

  1. Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Integrative Medicine’
  2. Integrative Medicine: “Patient-Centered Care” is the new Medical Paternalism
Shares

Author

Posted by Kimball Atwood