The Canadian Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) has announced that it will launch Canada’s first bachelor’s degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Greenlit by the B.C. government to fill what it calls rising demand in the labour market, the new program marks a major step in Canadian recognition of TCM. However, skeptics of TCM and other so-called alternative medicine (SCAM) remain wary of movement in this direction.
TCM is regulated in British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador, with more than 7,000 licensed practitioners working in these provinces.
John Yang has worked for nearly a decade toward KPU’s bachelor’s degree, which will welcome its inaugural cohort starting September 2025. As chair of KPU’s TCM program, he hopes the new offering will boost its acceptance and encourage more integration with the Canadian health-care system. “The degree program can let the public [feel] more confident that we can train highly qualified TCM practitioners. Then there will be more mainstream public acceptance,” he said. “Currently we are not there yet, but I hope in the future there’s an integrated model.”
The degree will add topic areas like herbology and more advanced TCM approaches to the current diploma’s acupuncture-focused study, as well as courses in health sciences, arts and humanities, ethics and working with conventional health practitioners, says Sharmen Lee, dean of the B.C. school’s faculty of health. “You’re getting a much broader, deeper education that allows you to develop additional competencies, such as being able to critically think, to evaluate and participate in research, and all of those other things that a university-based education can provide.” Lee believes future graduates will be able to work alongside with biomedical professionals, with some becoming researchers as well — able to pursue post-grad studies abroad. “They start to understand the fundamentals of conducting research, of reviewing published studies and then … to critically analyze what that means so that they can apply that to their practice,” Lee said. “It’s going to help to elevate the practice of traditional Chinese medicine … in our province.”
With the World Health Organization (WHO) encouraging governments toward integrating traditional and complementary medicine into their health-care systems, there’s a need for researchers to develop strong evidence to guide policy-makers, says Nadine Ijaz, an assistant professor at Carleton University in Ottawa and president of the International Society for Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine Research. “Most Canadians at some point in their lifetime are using some form of what we call traditional and complementary medicine: that might be acupuncture, chiropractic, massage therapy, vitamins, yoga … people who are participating in Indigenous healing ceremonies within their own communities,” she said. “How are governments to make good determinations about what to include? What is rigorous? What is safe? What is effective and what is cost effective, in addition to what is culturally appropriate?”
More research and scientific inquiry is a good thing, but it depends on the type of research, says Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator for the McGill Office of Science and Society and co-host of the health and medicine podcast Body of Evidence. Jarry said many studies on SCAM are low quality: too few participants, too short in duration, lacking follow-up or a proper control group. It’s an issue that plagues research on conventional therapies too, he acknowledged. “I’m all for doing research on things that are plausible enough that they could realistically have a benefit, but then you have to also do very good, rigorous studies. Otherwise you’re just creating noise in the research literature.”
Ijaz and a group of colleagues around the globe are working toward determining strong research parameters without forcing alternative approaches “into a box where they don’t fit.” For instance, a randomized controlled trial is the gold standard of research in biomedicine and excellent for studying pharmaceutical drugs and their effects, because participants in the control group get a placebo, perhaps a sugar pill, that means they can’t tell if they’re being treated with medication or not. But it doesn’t work for studying acupuncture treatment, chiropractic or even psychotherapy, Ijaz pointed out. “If you’re getting an acupuncture treatment, you usually know that you’re getting a treatment…. It’s a little bit challenging to develop a placebo control for for those approaches,” said Ijaz. “When we apply that particular gold standard to researching all therapeutic approaches … it sort of privileges the issue in favour of pharmaceutical drugs immediately.”
“A randomized controlled trial is the gold standard of research in biomedicine and excellent for studying pharmaceutical drugs … but it doesn’t work for studying acupuncture treatment, chiropractic or even psychotherapy.” When I hear nonsensical drivel like this, I know what to think of a university course led or influenced by people who believe this stuff. They should themselves go on a course of research methodology for beginners rather that try brainwashing naive students into believing falsehoods.
One Response to Quackademia in Canada: the first bachelor’s degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Disgraceful. A lot of universities and colleges seem ever-poised to try to get woo-woo courses onto their books. Suits them if it reels in students. And it’s easily done where (as is commonplace) course approval procedures tend to be tick-box based and dependent on external ‘experts’ (ie (S)CAMsters) that are part of the problem themselves. I think new people come into institutions and think “I’ve got an idea for a course”. But why are such people in academia? One hopes that their manifest lack of critical thinking abilities would have precluded them, but sadly this is not always the case.