Dispatch: Quackademic Medicine Infiltrates NEJM

By ACSH Staff — Aug 03, 2010

Respectful Insolence's pseudonymous pro-science blogger Orac this morning rightfully laments the appearance of an acupuncture case study in the ostensibly evidence-based New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). The offending case study, which appeared in the Clinical Therapeutics section, describes the case of a construction worker suffering from back pain who asks for acupuncture. The consensus of the discussion ultimately recommends its use for the patient based on National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) clinical trial results. Orac, however, aptly points out that results of the cited non-randomized clinical trial could easily be accounted for by bias, and shows that acupuncture from a licensed practitioner works no better than a sham treatment. He concludes:

What I find so disturbing about this NEJM article is that the peer reviewers did not spot the obvious [NCCAM] abuses of language designed to obscure the fact that acupuncture is no better than placebo. The editors of the NEJM should be ashamed of themselves. The peer reviewers who reviewed this article should be ashamed of themselves. Those of us who rely on the NEJM for evidence-based findings and assessments of various treatments should be afraid.

After all, if quackademic medicine can infiltrate the NEJM, there's nowhere it can't go.

ACSH’s Jeff Stier agrees, adding that “there should be no place for such pseudoscience on the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine.”

ACSH’s Dr. Gilbert Ross, while agreeing that acupuncture lacks scientific merit, points out that the NEJM article is a case study, and therefore is not meant to be seen as an endorsement. “I wouldn’t use this clinical discussion to discard the whole NEJM forever,” he adds. “I often imagine doing so, however, when I read their political and reflexively anti-pharma diatribes masquerading as science, which have frequented their issues over the past decade.”