Flexner Report: the report that set the agenda for the medical industry

Have you ever wondered why alternative therapies are seen as quackery, pseudo science or downright fraud?

Why do we dismiss acupuncture, homeopathy, or herbal remedies as unscientific?

It’s not random. It’s not even entirely based on evidence.

The origin of this belief can be traced back to a single document from 1910, known as the Flexner Report. Written by Abraham Flexner, it reshaped medicine.

But it also buried alternatives.

Flexner was an educator, not a doctor. The Carnegie Foundation hired him. His job was to evaluate medical schools in the U.S. and Canada.

Medicine was still evolving. These were the days before big pharma. Various forms of medicine competed.

You had allopathic doctors pushing drugs and surgery. Then there were others—naturopaths, chiropractors, and homeopaths offering alternatives.

His report slammed variety. He called alternative schools “unscientific.”

He pushed a rigid model—standardized, lab-based, drug-focused.

The schools of thought that did not fit lost funding. Many shut down. Within twenty years, the medical landscape was unrecognizable. Allopathy won, and the alternatives were branded quackery.

Of course, he was not completely wrong. If you take any stream of medicine, there will be some fraud. So some of the solutions were unscientific

But his bias was clear. He ignored evidence of alternative success. Homeopathy had followers—patients swore by it. Chiropractic adjustments eased pain. Herbalists knew plants better than pharmacists. But Flexner wanted uniformity.

So funding started to flow to what we now call modern medicine. Doctors trained in one system - surgery and medicine. Research followed. Funding went to pharmaceuticals starving the alternatives.

If you don’t study a subject, you can’t prove it works.

So for example, I am constantly amazed at the lack of studies in Ayurveda or naturopathy.

But Flexner had a narrow goal. Only that which met his standards of science would qualify. Everything else was pseudoscience with or without evidence.

That label stuck.

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