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.

An interesting evening

I have a bit of catching up to do, so I am going to tell you about a presentation I was invited to give last October. This was a meeting of Café Scientifique, a network of local science clubs. We had over 100 attending, a full house. People sit around tables café style, with drinks from the bar, and the idea is to have debate and interaction on scientific topics. I was asked to talk about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM – I won’t define this term again in this blog as most readers will know what I mean).

Hello World

I have resisted writing a blog for quite a while, mainly because I was searching for a theme. My interest is in critical thinking, science, and scepticism, but there are many such resources on the net and I wanted this to be different. I didn’t want it to be another outlet for railing against the tide of irrational thought that is the hallmark of this age. Such sites are valuable, as we have to stand up and be counted, but I wanted this to be of practical value. So I will try to make this somewhere you can come to find tools that you can use to redress the balance in favour of truth and especially science.