The chiroprats strike back

Coming into this story as late as I am, I don’t have much to add, other than to draw attention to the far more erudite offerings of others. If somehow you have not heard that chiropractors would rather issue legal threats than solid evidence for what they do, here’s a quick summary.

Misleading students – and not even courteous

My good friend David Colquhoun alerted me to the bizarre material being taught to science students at Thames Valley University. So in my capacity as a science writer (perfectly true) I asked the Vice Chancellor Professor Peter John for a statement.

The cheque book is mightier than the pen…..

Science publishing is big business. Ask Robert Maxwell – or rather you should have asked him when you had the chance. He started his business empire by siphoning off Germany’s scientific discoveries after World War 2 and publishing them in a stable of journals under his newly acquired Pergamon Press banner. The world is hungry for knowledge, and people who discover what they think is new knowledge are desperate for an audience. I am of the opinion that however ludicrous your claim, you can get it published somewhere in the world, and probably in a `peer reviewed’ journal.

Michael Dixon caught red-handed!

I’m not sure if people with bizarre beliefs sometimes go out of their way to make an exhibition of themselves, or if they just don’t care. Here we see Dr Michael Dixon OBE, resting his hand on an invisible hat worn by another man.

These Boots were made for walking…….

I know I’m not the first to criticise Boots for its shameless exploitation of health fads and fancies, but I happened across what it calls its `Corporate Social Responsibility’ policy. With regard to `Our Marketplace’, they say that:

Central to the success of our Group is the trust in which Alliance Boots is held by our customers and wider stakeholders. We aim to reflect integrity and stewardship in everything we do.

Here’s a good game……

The game is to see how long it takes to get banned from an alternative medicine or other irrational site. I tried it with www.mercola.com. I have been monitoring the site for some time, and the other week decided to see how tolerant Joe Mercola would be to someone telling the truth.

A university so open its brain fell out

There has always been a virtually seamless interface between the Open University (OU) and the BBC, as anyone watching the two Kathy Sykes TV series on CAM will have been reminded. A friend pointed me towards the OU website, and especially the pages that viewers were directed to for further information. I have copied below my email to the OU/BBC, in which I commented on the choice of links to external sites. The OU website text is in quotes.

The Wounded Homeopath

The other day, in a social context, I got into a conversation with a very nice chap who turned out to be a homeopath. You know how it is, he asked me what I did, and I explained that I am a freelance clinical science consultant. He said he is a retired GP who spent his whole professional life practising and researching homeopathy. I suppose I could have expressed horror at how someone could waste their professional life, but I restrained myself.

How to catch malaria

One of the best ways I know is to follow the advice of a homeopath. But one such source has been at least partly spiked, the infamous Neal’s Yard Remedies. Many of you will know about the BBC South West TV sting, which resulted in embarrassing footage of an interview and the withdrawal of the product Malaria Officinalis from the market. I can do no better than to refer you to the excellent Quackometer for the details of the story, although I can’t resist reproducing here the following weasel words from Neal’s Yard:

Neal’s Yard Remedies has not advertised or sold the remedy, Malaria Officinalis 30c, as a prevention for Malaria. It has been supplied on request by practitioners working in Neal’s Yard Remedies stores, and in fact, practitioners have been trained to always explain that the remedy should not be considered as a guarantee of prevention of malaria. The name of the remedy is based on its Latin name and not on its claim to cure or prevent an ailment.

This actually isn’t true, they supplied it to various people who walked into the shop. Anyway, my main purpose here is to enlarge on the role of our esteemed guardian of public health the MHRA.

Integrative medicine – cat herding for the uninitiated

I confess to having quite a bit of fun by writing letters to medical and scientific journals. The web of course has opened up huge opportunities for this – indeed it was originally designed for scientists to exchange information. One online journal I rather like is MedScape, edited by George Lundberg who previously edited the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). MedScape has recently carried a number of articles about CAM, and seems to be scrupulously fair in giving all sides a crack of the whip. A recent topic has been `integrative medicine’, which triggered two letters which epitomised the intellectual gulf that exists between the evidence based approach and most CAM supporters. So I bashed in a letter highlighting this.