This is your occasion to meet some of the most influential and progressive people in health care today! An occasion too good to be missed! The future of medicine is integrated – we all know that, of course. Here you can learn some of the key messages and techniques from the horses’ mouths. Book now before the last places have gone; at £300, this is a bargain!!!
The COLLEGE OF MEDICINE announced the event with the following words:
This two-day course led by Professor David Peters and Dr Michael Dixon will provide an introduction to integrated health and care. It is open to all clinicians but should be particularly helpful for GPs and nurses, who are interested in looking beyond the conventional biomedical box.
The course will include sessions on lifestyle approaches, social prescribing, mind/body therapies and cover most mainstream complementary therapies.
The aim of the course will be to demonstrate our healing potential beyond prescribing and referral, to provide information that will be useful in discussing non-conventional treatment options with patients and to teach some basic skills that can be used in clinical practice. The latter will include breathing techniques, basic manipulation and acupuncture, mind/body therapies including self-hypnosis and a limited range of herbal remedies. There will also be an opportunity to discuss how those attending might begin to integrate their everyday clinical practice.
The course will qualify for Continuing Professional Development hours and can provide a first stage towards a Fellowship of the College.
Both Dixon and Peters have been featured on this blog before. I have also commented regularly on the wonders of integrated (or was it integrative?) medicine. And I have even blogged about the College of Medicine and what it stands for. So readers of this blog know about the players as well as the issues for this event. Now it surely must be time to learn more from those who are much better placed than I to teach about bogus claims, phoney theories and unethical practices.
What are you waiting for? Book now – they would love to have a few rationalists in the audience, I am sure.
13 Responses to A course in quackery for just £300: an occasion too good to be missed!
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Even this course is a scam.
I paid about $30 for my two doctorates.
I cost me nothing to create my Board, a Board created just for the purpose of Board Certification. My Board even has minutes to document certifications.
In most U.S. states, I can legally promote myself as a doctor, a Board Certified Nutritionist, a Board Certified Naturopath (more limits here), a Board Certified Homeopath, and a Board Certified Reiki Master. All one needs is a lack of ethics and the desire to take advantage of the ignorance of others.
For a tenth as much, my program can get you more!
I have business cards calling myself an Applied Nutritionist (hey I eat, how more applied can it get?) and a Behavioural Economist.
Somewhat scarily, I gave someone my Applied Nutritionist card and I thought they were going to hire me!
Where do we get the doctorates?
Universal Life Church offers many doctorates and they are all cheap. There are a few other sources, but I can’t remember them off the top of my head. I asked an attorney friend if I could list myself as “Dr.” once I had the diplomas for my honorary doctorates and he said “I’m not sure if anything was stopping you before you got them.” “Medical Doctor” is a protected term. “Doctor,” apparently, is not. So go an get yourself that honorary degree and have some fun. I only did it so I could speak from the same “perceived level of authority” as a local naturopath.
IM (Imaginative Medicine) is providing many folks with fun careers. The Rational College of Medicine (RCM) is watching developments closely.
It might be helpful if the RCM awarded a Fellowship, (FRCM or FRCMed if you are particularly sensitive about being confused with musicians).
Only £10.00 to all who declare they will abide by GMC ethical requirements (whether or not they are registered by the GMC), and will “Work in partnership with patients. Listen to, and respond to, their concerns and preferences. Give patients the information they want or need in a way they can understand. Respect patients’ right to reach decisions with you about their treatment and care.” (GMC. Good Medical Practice, 2013).
This does of course mean that practioners of the high status of FRCM must gain fully informed consent, and explain to patients that there is no plausible evidence that homeopathy and acupuncture have any effects beyond those expected of placebos, that no ‘vertebral subluxations’ have been identified by any professional other than chiropractors, that there are no chakras, auras, meridians or ‘vital forces’ and that herbal preparations may contain toxins and are certainly not regulated as ‘medicines’.
Good luck
Richard Rawlins FRCS FRCM
Science Monkey-
You could have saved me a lot of money here!
I was thinking of shelling out 300 notes, but your advertised bundle at a tenth of that price would save me a sizeable wad!
And as Viz says, you can recreate the experience of a visit to a homeopath by drinking a glass of water and setting fire to a 50 pound note.
I think we’re being conned by some of these people.
The sheer enthusiasm in this blog almost made me sign up #lol
This integrated medicine course appears to be dubious scientifically and ethically. Unfortunately, examples of abysmal ethics abound in what many on this site refer to as “modern medicine.” One of the foundations of modern medicine is the drug company. One must shake his head when we see the pharma companies, their representatives, and complicit “modern medicine” laborers(i.e. physicians) promote the repackaging of OTC supplements in the guise of (expensive) pharmaceuticals. Take Lovaza as an example. It is essentially nothing more than Omega 3 FA’s the likes of which patients can buy in a grocery store for a fraction of the cost of a Rx; talk about a grandiose “bait and switch” foisted onto innocent patients by medical doctors who care more for their monthly drug-rep-sponsored staff lunches than they do for their patients(and their patients’ finances). I wonder what Dicky Rollins might call this were the scheme being perpetuated by chiros and their nutraceutical suppliers?
by your habit of calling commentators silly names you very efficiently disclose your silliness; thank you.
Yawn……..I note there was no “silliness” descriptor affixed to the comments of a veteran poster to this forum who recently called me “detestable scum.” It appears that anyone who dares criticize modern medicine on this site is, according to you, silly. Thanks for clarifying what didn’t need clarifying.
Scalpel-happy, quackster spinal surgeons, pillars of our objective, science-based “modern medicine” system as promulgated by many of this forum’s “brilliant” contributors, appear to be unable to reconcile evidence-based treatment algorithms with their recommendations for spinal surgeries. Surgical Neurology International published a study in 2011 which revealed that 17% of 274 evaluated patients for whom spinal surgery had been recommended exhibited no radiographic or neurological signs which indicated that surgery was necessary. It obviously is of paramount importance to patients for modern medicine to ferret out the medical quacks who might tarnish the reputation of an otherwise fine profession.
Wait. Is there such a thing as mainstream alternative medicine, as opposed to non-mainstream alternative medicine? Which one is which?
I just received this advertisement for the course:
Have you booked for the College of Medicine Foundation Course yet? We still have a few places available for the course. It will provide an introduction to integrated health and care, please hurry as places are limited.
If you haven’t decided yet, check what the lead lecturers Dr Michael Dixon and Professor David Peters have to say…
Scary or what? Once embarked on this journey it is unlikely that you will ever turn back. Do you dare? –
Who is the Foundation Course for?
“Are you a clinician, possibly a GP or a nurse, who feels insufficiently equipped to face the mountains of symptoms and misery and problems and issues that simply don’t fit the medical model? Do you sometimes feel that your prescription pad and ability to refer to hospital are simply not enough? Are you looking for new answers?”
If the answer to these questions is yes then the College of Medicine Foundation Course may be for you. One of its lecturers (Dr Michael Dixon) was a burnt out GP, who felt all of these things ten years into a general practice career, when he discovered integrated medicine.
This course will enable you to look at patients and your work afresh. Provide you with new solutions and a new perspective and a means of discovering the reasons why you became a clinician in the first place. It’s not just first aid, it will be the beginning of a journey that will enable you to have a more enjoyable, satisfying and extended role as a clinician in an era, when medicine has lost it way and become hidebound by targets, guidelines, rules, which sometimes stop us putting the patient first.
This course is not only about a change in perspective and attitude but also aims to give you some very practical “tips” that will enable you to extend your “offer” to patients and restore your ability to heal beyond the prescription pad and referral letter. For many, this course will be the beginning of a journey that will change their lives as well as their professional perspective. Scary or what? Once embarked on this journey it is unlikely that you will ever turn back. Do you dare?
Dr Michael Dixon, Chairman, College of Medicine
Here is what Professor David Peter’s has to say about it. Complementary medicine is a misleading umbrella term for this cluster of unconnected theories and methods. Osteopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, herbal medicine, nutritional therapy, hypnotherapy? Their most obvious shared feature is their being absent from the medical curriculum.
Yet for the last twenty years or so years doctors – especially GPs – have had a growing interest in them. A decade or two ago as many as 60% of GPs surveyed responded positively when asked about complementary medicine, and quite a few GPs practice medical acupuncture themselves (or horrors! even homeopathy).
About 25% of the public have paid for a complementary therapy at some time, usually because of the kind of stress-related or painful condition that conventional medicine isn’t terribly good with, and usually after having tried first line medical treatment, which presumably hadn’t met their need. Back in the noughties these methods were on the rise in the NHS, but over the last ten years cash-strapped PCTs, influenced no doubt by high profile attacks on complementary medicine have reined back. This is frustrating not just for for patients but also for the substantial numbers of GPs who find these approaches may fill some of their ‘effectiveness gaps’. If complementary therapies are both clinically useful and popular with patients then ought their future integration into the avowedly patient-centred primary care-led NHS to be a no-brainer? But where’s the evidence-base you cry! It’s because the practitioner’s ‘human effect’ can play as big a part as an individual practitioner’s skill, that these subtle approaches are so difficult to submit to standard randomised controlled trials. Nonetheless, clinical commissioning, wellbeing services and orthopaedic service redesign are all great opportunities for pilot studies of a public sector role.
It’s interesting that it always seems to be GPs who are most likely to be persuaded to ‘come over’ to CAMistry. I guess they are often confronted with patients who don’t have any illness in the medical sense of the word, but whose subjective symptoms stem from a mixture of psychological problems, financial problems, domestic problems, marital problems, lifestyle problems and the like. Such patients are likely to visit the GP repeatedly, but they come away from a consultation less than satisfied and certainly not ‘cured’. They are grist to the mill of altmed practitioners, but also to practitioners of religious superstitions, psychics and others beyond the normal assumed definitions of CAMistry.
What these folk need probably comes under the heading of ‘effective counselling’, but the human psyche seems to be so obsessed with intuitive belief in miracles that someone offering to treat a person with magic potions, by sticking needles into them, by massaging their feet, by waving or laying-on of hands — pick your own favourite from the altmed and other menus — appears to be offering salvation unavailable from medicine.
I can envisage a situation in which GPs could reasonably refer people with no medical diagnosis to an altmed practitioner if only the latter would desist from making extravagant, overblown claims for what they do.