Dr. Wallace Sampson is a CSICOP Fellow, a member of the Bay Area Skeptics in San Francisco, and a frequent speaker on medical research, “alternative” treatments and medical scams. He will be in Oregon as a faculty member for the Skeptic’s Toolbox conference in Eugene.
Sampson has spent thirty years in private practice, specializing in hematology and oncology in Sunnyvale and Mountain View, California, and taught at Stanford and the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, San Jose. He left practice in 1991 to become Interim Chief of Medical Oncology at Valley Medical Center until his retirement in 1997. He is Clinical Professor of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine where he developed the first course on analyzing aberrant medical claims of holistic, and later “alternative,” medicine. The course is entering its twentieth year.
In 1997, Sampson was a co-founder of the National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF), also known as the National Council for Rational Health Information, and served as the Chair of the Board of Directors from 1990 to 1998. He is so Chair pro tem of the State of California’s Cancer Advisory Council, serving on that body since 1983. He is a frequent expert witness for the Medical Board of California and the California State Attorney General.
Sampson recently founded and is now editor of the new research journal The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine published by Prometheus Books. He developed the idea after finding that accurate information about anomalous medical claims was difficult to find in the vast array of medical journals; he felt accurate information should be available in one place.