Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

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'.

This is a preview of subscription content

Access options

Buy article

Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube.

$32.00

Buy

All prices are NET prices.

References

  1. Colquhoun, D. DC's Improbable Science Page http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/quack.html.

  2. Barry, C. A. Soc. Sci. Med. 62, 2646–2657 (2006).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Editorial Lancet 336, 690 (2005).

  4. Holmes, O. W. Homeopathy and its Kindred Delusions http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/holmes.html (1842).

    Google Scholar 

  5. Goldacre, B. The Guardian 17 February (2007).

    Google Scholar 

  6. http://www.patrickholford.com/content.asp?id_Content=1778

  7. QAA Other Subjects Allied to Medicine http://www.qaa.ac.uk/reviews/reports/subjectlevel/q171_01.pdf (2000).

  8. Desmond, A. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London (Univ. Chicago Press, 1992).

    Google Scholar 

  9. Harris, M. Universities and the NHS: Partners in Care http://bookshop.universitiesuk.ac.uk/downloads/partnersincare.pdf (2003).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

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

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

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

    David Colquhoun

Authors
  1. David Colquhoun
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

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

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/446373a

Further reading

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing