California Alternative Medicine School Gets Criticized After Receiving $200 Million

California Alternative Medicine School Gets Criticized After Receiving $200 Million
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Susan and Henry Samueli have donated $200 million to the University of California, Irvine in order to have a program for integrative medicine. But as unproven therapies have reached the mainstream medicine, doctors critic this initiative. For 50 years unproven therapies have been considered a fraud.

The donation might legitimize invalid practices such as ‘energy healing’, mineral infusions and so on.

The initiative will be led by two physicians that have a lot of years of experience in research and in traditional medicine. They want to approach new and alternative therapies and focus on their patients’ safety but will never use an approach that hasn’t been proven or hasn’t had any evidence behind.

The center offers treatments based on Chinese herbs but very rarely. They also use acupuncture in order to treat blood pressure. The integrative healthcare is a mix of conventional and alternative medicine along with lifestyle and wellness changes. The treatments will also use genomic analysis and blood tests to treat patients individually.

But critics don’t trust these methods, considering them a waste of time and money on untrusted therapies with homeopathic pills for example. Don’t they see the meaning of ‘integrative’ medicine and what’s its aim: to integrate something that doesn’t work in medicine? If it would have worked, it would have been part of that system already.

The billionaires Susan and Henry Samueli have been funding and promoting alternative medicine for a lot of time. They’ve founded an Institute for Information Biology in Alexandria, bearing their name. The institute studied whether prayer and homeopathy would protect soldiers in case of biological attacks. These treatments were regarded as nonsense, and faith healing.

Dr. Steven Novella has criticized the University of California, Irvine for accepting $200 million for a department that isn’t focusing on modern medicine. He added that this was the final line which was crossed, causing academia to massively fail.


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I am a pop culture and social media expert. Aside from writing about the latest news health, I also enjoy pop culture and Yoga. I have BA in American Cultural Studies and currently enrolled in a Mass-Media MA program. I like to spend my spring breaks volunteering overseas.

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