Alex Ram

The cancer specialist Karol Sikora is Dean of the School of Medicine. The School offers postgraduate MD programmes for qualified doctors in a range of specialisations, but is not approved by the General Medical Council as it does not yet offer an undergraduate medical qualification (Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery).

The School had an association with the alternative medicine community via a Diploma course in integrated medicine. This was later withdrawn under pressure from alternative medicine campaigner David Colquhoun. Karol Sikora is a Foundation Fellow of Prince Charles' now-defunct alternative medicine lobby group the Foundation for Integrated Health and Chair of the ''Faculty of Integrated Medicine'', which is unaffiliated with any university but also includes Drs Rosy Daniel and Mark Atkinson, who co-ordinated Buckingham's "integrated medicine" course. Daniel has been criticised by David Colquhoun for breaches of the Cancer Act 1939, regarding claims she made for ''Carctol'', a herbal remedy.

Sikora is very critical of cancer care available on the National Health Service. During President Obama's campaign for healthcare reform, he appeared in a Republican Party attack ad in the United States criticising the NHS. The ad led Imperial College to seek legal advice to stop Sikora from claiming to be a professor of cancer medicine at Imperial; a claim that he had made repeatedly over the previous five years.

Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the school is Bruce Charlton, controversial editor of the journal Medical hypotheses, who has recently been dismissed as editor by publisher Elsevier over the publication of a paper by AIDS denialists claiming that HIV is not responsible for AIDS and concerns over the lack of peer-review at the journal.


Adapted from the Wikipedia article University of Buckingham, under the G. N. U. Free Documentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki