Eisenberg’s annual CME conference at Harvard was designed to allow quack advocates to promote whatever they do, including spinal manipulation and acupuncture, without facing critics, so that they could bolster their CVs with entries that might, on the face of it, sound impressive and build trust. Indeed, Eisenberg must be credited with being largely responsible for Harvard Medical School’s descent into pseudoscience (here, here, here, here and here) as illustrated e.g. by the Harvard Complementary and Integrative Medicine Course he directed and which according to (more reason-oriented) participants“was more like a political rally or a religious revival than a scientific conference”. Here is Eisenberg waxing lyrical about chiropractic, inadvertently giving almost perfect descriptions and illustrations of how quackery works in the process – such as praising chiropractors for “never failing to find a problem” and thereby validating the concerns of their patients while being eminently billable.
Eisenberg has also written a large number of articles on complementary and integrative medical therapies. His 1993 article on “Unconventional Medicine in the United States”, for instance, has for a long time been widely cited since ‘quack treatments are very popular’ is a commonly useddefense of the legitimacy of quackery among those who promote ‘alternative’ techniques– and even for that study, Eisenberg’s research design was abhorrently shoddy: for instance, to reach the conclusion that “[o]ne in three respondents (34%) reported using at least one unconventional therapy in the past year”, he and his coauthors defined ‘unconventional therapies’ as “medical intervention not taught widely at U.S. medical schools or generally available at U.S. hospitals”, thus including self-help groups and commercial relaxation and/or weight-loss programs. Later surveys conducted and promoted by Eisenberg similarly inflate (in a manner very popular by alternative medicine proponents) the numbers by rebranding all sorts of standard, medically justified methods as ‘alternative’. And whether the alternative therapies included are effective or even plausible is of less concern to Eisenberg; although he is careful to avoid making significant positive claims, his list of techniques that “warrant further investigation” and funding includes homeopathy (including “homeopathy as distinct from placebo”), distanthealing and intercessory prayer. What matters to Eisenberg and requires a response from clinicians, is that“[t]he market for complementary and integrative medicine is vast and shows no sign of diminishing” – yes, the market; not medical needs.
Here is a discussion of an article by Eisenberg and Ted Kaptchuk on “Establishing an Integrative Medicine Program Within an Academic Health Center: Essential Considerations”. It is … revealing: there is much about how to develop an optimal product delivery model; the question of whether the product works, however, are at best an afterthought. Here is a discussion of an article by Eisenberg with naturopaths Patricia Herman and Beth L. Poindexter on the alleged “cost-effectiveness” of CAM treatments that completely misses the point by strenuously avoiding the awkward point that the fact that the CAM therapies under discussion are not effective matters to discussions of how ‘cost-effective’ they are.
Diagnosis: Yes, Eisenberg is all about how to solve practical obstacles to market and deliver alternative medicine, in an effective manner, to as many people as possible. And he’s admittedly good at it. What he seems clinically unable to recognize, however, is the importance of the rather basic question: does it work? We really don’t think he means harm; he just genuinely doesn’t recognize that there might be a gap between believing that something works and whether it actually works that ought to be bridged by evidence.