Here are a couple articles written by William T. Jarvis. I am wondering if anyone knows anything about him, I researched briefly and apparently he is retired. Any info on this person or his work?
In 1984, a subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Aging issued a report called Quackery: A $10 Billion Scandal [5], which recognized the noise made by quacks as a social menace. The report detailed numerous fraudulent endeavours including (a) clinics inside and outside the United States that provide bogus treatments for chronic and terminally ill patients using diet, drugs, and enemas for arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and other ailments; (b) foundations that encourage the use of unproven remedies; and (3) phony healers who use a religious healing image or claim powers generated by Satan or witchcraft.By 1991, our Congress lost sight of quackery both as a social menace and as a concept. It gave the methods promoted by quacks a new respectability. Largely due to the efforts of a Senator Tom Harkin, who believes taking bee pollen cured his hay fever [6] and who was influenced by Berkeley Bedell, a former congressman who believed that drinking milk from cow udders injected with his blood had caused symptoms of Lyme disease to disappear [7]. Congress mandated the creation of a so-called Office of Unconventional Medicine within the prestigious National Institutes of Health. In 1998 Congress passed legislation signed by President Clinton that transformed the Office into the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine with a $50 million budget and created a White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy. According to the National Center, "CAM covers a broad range of healing philosophies (schools of thought), approaches, and therapies that mainstream Western (conventional) medicine does not commonly use, accept, study, understand, or make available." [8] This definition, of course, covers all the dubious treatments that the 1984 report associated with quackery. The advisory boards to the Office and National Center have included promoters of unproven methods referred to euphemistically as "complementary and alternative."For almost ten years now, the United States government has provided funds for basic and applied research to study methods that fit the official definitions of "complementary" and "alternative." However, it remains to be seen whether funded studies will demonstrate that any of these methods are valuable. Even if some eventually prove useful, that is unlikely to outweigh the publicity bonanza Congress has given to irrational methods.Remarkably, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine even has funds available for research on practices such as so-called "energy healing," homeopathy, and therapeutic prayer, for which it acknowledges there is no plausible biomedical explanation of effect. The program that funds this research is called the Frontier Medicine Research Program [9]. Homeopathy is more than 200 years old, but our government calls it "frontier medicine" and worthy of funding.Meanwhile, I know of no federal funding program to support the study of quackery as a public health problem. The American Public Health Association has an interest group on "Alternative & Complementary Health Practices," but none on combating quackery.A medical society has invited a graphologist to present a workshop at its business meeting in May on "The Medical Implications and Uses of Handwriting Analysis." The program announcement indicated: "Handwriting analysis is available for a $20 charge payable at the door." [10]In American universities, proponents of postmodernist doctrine, who reject the notion that scientific methods are needed to separate fact from fiction in healthcare, and who celebrate personal subjectivity, refer to pseudoscientific and superstitious approaches to healthcare as "alternative" and "complementary."Many medical schools and other schools that train health professionals offers courses that take uncritical approaches to discussing methods of healing that allegedly involve manipulation of a mystical "life force" distinct from physical forces that operate according to the laws of chemistry and physics. One exception is Stanford University's medical school where Dr. Wallace Sampson, one of the founders of The National Council Against Health Fraud, has taught a course for many years on medical pseudoscience. Dr. Sampson is the editor-in-chief of The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, the only journal I know that is devoted to skeptical inquiry about "alternative" medicine.The large, influential American Cancer Society has published scientifically-based reports on more than 70 questionable methods of cancer management with help from its Committee on Questionable Methods. In the mid-1990s the committee's name changed to the Committee on Alternative and Complementary Methods, implying that such methods have earned legitimacy.Drs. Marcia Angell and Jerome P. Kassirer, former editors of The New England Journal of Medicine have pointed out: "There cannot be two kinds of medicine-conventional and alternative. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work." [11]