Name Kimball Atwood | ||
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Education Harvard Medical School (1979) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada | ||
Kimball Chase Atwood IV, M.D. is an American doctor and medical scientist from Newton, MA, who is currently an assistant clinical professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, as well as an anesthesiologist at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, where he has worked since 1993. He is an active skeptic and is associate editor of the journal Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, as well as the co-editor (along with Stephen Barrett) of Naturowatch, one of Quackwatch's affiliated sites. Atwood is an outspoken critic of naturopathy, with a paper he published on the topic in 2004 which was understandably unpopular with naturopaths. He has also written a report for the Massachusetts Special Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medical Practitioners arguing that naturopaths should not be licensed to practice in Massachusetts.
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Education
Atwood completed both his internship and residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is board certified in both anesthesiology and internal medicine.
Chelation therapy criticism
In 2008, Atwood told the Associated Press that the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy, which had been approved in 2002, "should never have been approved." In 2009, Atwood was one of the authors of a journal article that called for the termination of an ongoing clinical trial of chelation therapy, on the grounds that it was "unethical, dangerous, pointless, and wasteful". The piece attracted both criticism and support in published exchanges which followed.
When the trial results were presented at an American Heart Association meeting in 2012 Atwood described its output as "equivocal as predicted" and reasserted his view that the trial had been unethical.