Comment and Opinion

National Institute for Integrative Medicine

Scammers gotta scam (23/7/2021)
Reminiscent of the fraud pulled using pretend clinical trials by archquack Stan Burzynski, a Melbourne operation calling itself the National Institute for Integrative Medicine has been charging people money to be part of a "clinical trial" of an unapproved (and unlikely) cancer treatment. In their favour, they only charge $850 to be a "participant" in the trial rather than the hundreds of thousands of dollars charged by Burzynski, but legitimate researchers do not charge people to be part of a trial.

Unfortunately nothing can be done by regulators to shut down this pretence at medicine, and the NIIM is up to its armpits in all sorts of quackery and charlatinism. The fact that leading proponents of alternatives to medicine such as Isaac Golden and Ian Brighthope are associated with NIIM should be enough of a red flag to warn off potential victims, but while ever respect is shown to homeopaths and other pushers of useless treatments and potions there is not much hope of the warning signs being observed.

You can read about this travesty here.

And a note about calling yourself a "cancer specialist" – the word "specialist" in a medical context is a protected term. This means you can't use it unless you are actually qualified to be called a specialist in a particular medical field. To do so without such qualification is a criminal offence. If you see a quack using the term you can find out how to report them to the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency at Reporting a criminal offence. Unfortunately AHPRA recognises chiropractors and other quacks as having some sort of legitimacy, but the world isn't perfect.