Seventeen years after S.K. lost his thyroid gland to cancer, he was promised a miracle by Kyung Chun Oh, an acupuncturist based in the Toronto area: acupuncture could regrow the vital organ. Oh told his patient it would only work if S.K. stopped the thyroid medication he’d been on since his surgery in 2003.
Within just a few months the patient had to be admitted to hospital with a life-threatening case of hypothyroidism. His thyroid had not regenerated. “It was fortunate that the patient did not die,” a college panel wrote in a disciplinary decision, suspending Oh’s license for 12 months. “Telling the patient that he should not take his thyroid medication was irresponsible and had disastrous repercussions.”
The panel found that Oh had engaged in professional misconduct in multiple ways:
- he had provided unnecessary treatment,
- he had failed to advise his patient to consult a medical doctor when he learned that S.K. was suffering
from symptoms that he knew or ought to have known indicated an urgent medical problem, - he had treated a condition that he ought to have known that he did not have the knowledge, skills, or judgment to treat,
- he had failed to keep records in accordance with the standards of the profession,
- he had falsified a record relating to his practice,
- he had made a claim about a treatment that could not be supported by reasonable professional opinion (the claim that acupuncture combined with cessation of thyroid medicine could regrow a surgically removed thyroid gland, and the claim that S.K.’s thyroid gland was regrowing).
This is clearly an extreme incidence of misconduct and one would hope that such cases occur only rarely. But looking at the points listed above, I get the feeling that similar yet less severe cases of misconduct happen regularly in the practices of SCAM practitioners:
- most so-called alternative medicine (SCAM) treatments are unnecessary,
- SCAM practitioners refer patients only rarely to doctors,
- SCAM practitioners often treat conditions that they fail to understand adequately,
- SCAM practitioners frequently make unreasonable claims.
One Response to Professional misconduct by practitioners of so-called alternative medicine (SCAM)
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May I suggest this addition to the list of misconduct and incompetence that are rife in SCAM:
“SCAM practitioners misdiagnose health problems more often than not.”