Wallace Sampson

Wallace Sampson is an American medical doctor and consumer advocate against alternative medicine and other fraud schemes.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

He is an authority in numerous medical fields, including oncology, hematology, and pathology. He is Emeritus Professor of Clinical Medicine at Stanford University. He was the former Head of Medical Oncology at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.^[2][3]

He is an international expert in exposing pseudoscience-based fraudulent schemes in medicine and other fields, such as alternative medicine, integrative medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Acupuncture, and Chiropractic. He publicized the expression "antiscience" to refer to the basis of belief in alternative medicine in his title for a peer reviewed paper published by the New York Academy of Sciences - "Antiscience Trends in the Rise of the 'Alternative Medicine' Movement".^[1] He taught the Stanford University School of Medicine Alternative Medicine course regarding "unscientific medical systems and aberrant medical claims".^[2][3] The San Francisco Chronicle quotes him as saying "We've looked into most of the practices and, biochemically or physically, their supposed effects lie somewhere between highly improbable and impossible."

He is a founding editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine. He is the former Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Council against Health Fraud, former Chair of the State of California Cancer Advisory Council (advisory board on health fraud schemes), and consulted on medical fraud and other fraud schemes for the Medical Board of California, Association of State Medical Boards, California State Attorney General, US Postal Service, multiple district attorneys, and multiple insurance companies. He is also a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.^[6] Sampson has published numerous academic papers in various medical fields, as well as popular works including for the Saturday Evening Post.^[2][3]

Publications on alternative medicine and other fraud schemes

The Need for Educational Reform in Teaching about Alternative Therapies

"The Need for Educational Reform in Teaching about Alternative Therapies" was published in 2001 in Academic Medicine, the Journal of the Association of Medical Colleges. In this peer reviewed article, Sampson defines complimentary and alternative medicine as "anomalous practices for which claims of efficacy are either unproved or disproved". He points to data that the attitude of medical schools has become unscientific in its approach to medicine, using political correctness and cultural sensitivity as standards replacing empirical evidence, in the spirity of cultural diversity replacing empirical evidence, or so as not to hurt anyone's feelings about their unwarranted beliefs being untested and scientifically implausible, or outright false according to empirical evidence. Claims of CAM treatments are often taught in a way that discourages testing them or even questioning them.^[7]

Antiscience Trends in the Rise of the "Alternative Medicine" Movement

Antiscience Trends in the Rise of the "Alternative Medicine" Movement was published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in 2006. In it, Sampson defines the basis of alternative medicine as being "anti-science", a faith-based belief in supernatural forces being involved in efficacy of alternative medicine treatments, or as their efficacy not being verifiable or testable by empirical means.^[1]

References