Fringe medicine school looking for entrance into ivory tower

By Ofri Ilani

The Reidman Center for Holistic Studies has submitted a request to the Council for Higher Education for an approved academic track for holistic health studies. There is currently no official program in Israel for the studying alternative medicine, whose benefits are a subject of controversy among scientists.

The Reidman Center for Holistic Studies, which is connected to Reidman College in Ramat Aviv, now grants non-academic degrees in alternative medicine. If approved, the center will be able to offer an academic degree in Chinese medicine and naturopathy.

In the past, proposals have been made and rejected to consider alternative medicine a subject of study in the medical field. However, the current proposal connects holistic health to the behavioral sciences rather than to medicine.

There are estimated to be tens of thousands of practitioners of alternative medicine in Israel, including naturopathy, Chinese medicine, reflexology, crystal therapy, healing and channeling, numerology, various kinds of massage and even bloodletting.

Over the past decade it has been argued that alternative therapists must be regulated to keep out quacks and a number of committees have been established to study the idea of making the field academic. The Council on Higher Education stated that it would not discuss programs in the field until a committee appointed by the Health Ministry submits its recommendations on the subject.

Bad karma

Mainstream physicians and scientists argue that the benefits of alternative health treatments have not been scientifically proven, and that terms used by therapists in the field, such as "energies" and "karma," are meaningless.

Therapists themselves also oppose pushing the field into academics. According to Ophir Sela, a holistic psychotherapist, "There are interested parties who are trying to perpetuate the monopoly of conventional medicine over health, and the Council for Higher Education over education. But academia is unsuitable to the holistic realm. It requires empirical data and statistics that do not exist in the holistic world. We deal with mind-body links and human spirituality."

Ophir believes that to regulate alternative medicine it will suffice to have professional associations license the various therapists. According to Ophir, even a degree of the type Reidman proposes is useless.

"There are dozens of holistic treatment systems," he said. "But to receive academic recognition, all kinds of changes will have to be made that will betray the profession. To establish an academic institution a doctor or a professor will be needed, but there are no academics in these areas."

The Reidman Center declined to comment on its application to the Council on Higher Education.

Alternative medicine is not an academic field in most countries. According to Dr. Elad Schiff, an internist at Bnei Zion Medical Center (Rothschild) in Haifa and a member of the committee studying the regulation of alternative medicine, "it would not be right to force these fields into an academic mold. Alternative medicine has a different way of thinking than standard medicine."

Dr. Eran Ben-Arye, of the unit for complementary and traditional medicine in the Technion' family medicine department, said, "Clearly various kinds of magic will not enter the academe. But well-founded fields like homeopathy have already come in. As I see things, the direction is a Bachelor of Arts in these fields."

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