Professor Edzard Ernst: Why do people respond to ineffective treatments?

Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit Invited Speaker Series, 2012/13

Abstract
As a researcher who has spent the last two decades investigating alternative medicine, the above question has become an all too obvious one for me. Why, for instance, do so many patients and clinicians swear by homeopathy when it is quite clear that homeopathic remedies are pure placebos? In a nut-shell, the answer is that non-specific effects of a therapy can make even an ineffective treatment appear to be effective. If this is so, is it not helpful and humane to use such an ineffective treatment in clinical routine? In my view, the answer to this important question is NO, and in my lecture I will try to explain why.

Biography
Professor Ernst qualified as a physician in Munich, Germany in 1976. In 1978 he completed his MD thesis and in 1985 his PhD. He was appointed Professor in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (PMR) at Hannover Medical School (Germany) in 1989. Eighteen months later, he accepted the post of Head of the PMR Department at the University of Vienna (Austria). He came to the University of Exeter (UK) Postgraduate Medical School in October 1993 to establish the worldwide first Chair in Complementary Medicine. In 1996, he founded the Department of Complementary Medicine at this University’s Postgraduate Medical School and, in 2002, his unit became part of the new Peninsula Medical School, Universities of Exeter and Plymouth.
Professor Ernst has ‘hands on’ experience of a range of complementary therapies, including herbal medicine, homoeopathy, massage therapy, spinal manipulation, acupuncture and autogenic training. He has contributed extensively to medical literature in several areas: Haemorheology, Angiology, PMR and Complementary/Alternative Medicine (CAM). In total he has published more than 1000 papers (>600 in CAM) in the peer -reviewed medical literature, about 500 primary research contributions and 48 books (translated into well over a dozen languages, including 1 science book of the year). He is founder/ Editor-in-Chief of two medical journals (FACT [‘Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies’] and ‘Perfusion’) and is on the editorial board of more than 20 medical journals. He is a regular reviewer for many publications including the Lancet, BMJ, JAMA,AIM and the Archives of Internal Medicine. His work has been awarded with 14 scientific prizes/awards and he was a Visiting Professor at Roy Coll Surgeons, Canada (1999) and at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles (2005). He served as an external examiner for the Universities of Berlin, Bombay, Derby, Dublin, Hannover, London, Manchester Metropolitan, Munich, Oxford, Sydney, Ulster, Zürich and others. He has supervised ~50 MD or PhD theses and given about 600 invited lectures worldwide. He served on the ‘Medicines Commission’ of the British ‘Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’ (1994 – 2005) and on the ‘Scientific Committee on Herbal Medicinal Products’ of the ‘Irish Medicines Board’. He is patron of two British CAM organisations and honorary member of several dozen others. He has served as an expert witness to the UK High Court and the British General Medical Council. In 1999, he took British nationality. In 2000, he was got an entry in the “Who’s Who”. He writes [or wrote] regular columns for ‘The Guardian’ (2003-), The Chemist Druggist, The Pharmaceutical Journal, Independent Nurse Magazine, Münch Wed Wschr and Stern (Gesund Leben), SonntagsZeitung (Switzerland); currently, he writes three blogs: BMJ, Pulse and Guardian.

APRU Invited Speaker Programme

Dates & times

Date	Time	Add to calendar
6 Nov 2012	6:00pm - 7:30pm	apple google outlook

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