Quackademic medicine

Quackademic medicine is a pejorative term used in the science based medicine community for the infiltration of alternative medicine (quackery) into academic medicine, or attempts at “diverting research time, money, and other resources from more fruitful lines of investigation in order to pursue a theory that has no basis in biology”. The term was coined by blogger R.W. Donnell.

For example, David Gorski critiqued Brian M. Berman, M.D., founder of the Center for Integrative Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine and the holder of multiple NCCAM center grants, and other institutions, for having written "There was nevertheless evidence that both real acupuncture and sham acupuncture were more effective than no treatment and that acupuncture can be a useful supplement to other forms of conventional therapy for low back pain", and castigated editors and peer reviewers at the New England Journal of Medicine for having allowed it to be published, since it effectively recommended deliberately misleading patients in order to achieve a known placebo effect.