Showing posts with label "pseudoscience". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "pseudoscience". Show all posts

Thursday, January 12, 2017

Troubling examples of ‘pseudoscience’ at the Cleveland Clinic; Washington Post, 1/11/17

Daniel Summers, Washington Post; Troubling examples of ‘pseudoscience’ at the Cleveland Clinic

"People will understandably look for their own answers. Unfortunately, when no less than the president-elect is among those promulgating dangerous misinformation about vaccines, medical providers have to deal with a lot of false, misleading stuff their patients may find.

One way I deal with this is to give patients a list of resources that generally provide good, evidence-based advice. Though I can’t vet every single article they may publish, knowing a few sites that typically give clear, sound information is a valuable resource when patients ask.

Sadly, no matter how glowing its reputation or how superlative the care it routinely provides, I can’t include the Cleveland Clinic on that list. Knowing it promotes treatments that have no grounding in science, or that a patient could stumble upon a fearmongering article that makes baseless claims about the unspecified dangers of environmental toxins on its website, I can’t direct patients there in good faith. Considering its prominence as a renowned medical establishment, that’s a terrible shame.