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Science degrees without the science

Nature volume 446, pages 373–374 (2007)Cite this article

Some UK universities offer science degrees in complementary medicine. David Colquhoun argues that these are not science but anti-science, and asks who is to blame.

The least that one can expect of a bachelor of science (BSc) honours degree is that the subject of the degree is science. Yet in December 2006 the UK Universities and Colleges Admissions Service advertised 61 courses for complementary medicine, of which 45 are BSc honours degrees. Most complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is not science because the vast majority of it is not based on empirical evidence. Homeopathy, for example, has barely changed since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is much more like religion than science. Worse still , many of the doctrines of CAM, and quite a lot of its practitioners, are openly anti-science. For example, Christine Barry, a medical anthropologist at Brunel University, is not unusual in questioning “the supposed objectivity of scientific, biomedical forms of evidence” when writing a paper1,2 on 'The role of evidence in alternative medicine'.

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References

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to P. Williams of the QAA for information and help.

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  1. David Colquhoun is in the Department of Pharmacology at University College London, UK.,

    David Colquhoun

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  1. David Colquhoun
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Colquhoun, D. Science degrees without the science. Nature 446, 373–374 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/446373a

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