Publish or Perish: a gravy train

The world of medical science is awash with predatory journals, and they seem especially prevalent in the USA. You may have seen my previous interactions with Global Advances in Health and Medicine, a journal which publishes any kind of quackery you care to invent. Then last week, I received this puzzling email from The Gazette of Medical Sciences:

Appeasing CAM in the NHS

The UK’s National Health Service has made some progress towards embedding evidence based clinical practice in its service delivery. But there is still some fence-sitting going on. My attention has just been drawn to current guidance on complementary and alternative medicine which is less than definitive.

Selective Regulation

I have held off from posting about the Charity Commission for quite a while, because I wanted to give them enough time to fulfil the assurances they have given me and others about effectively regulating certain charities operating in the health space. But enough is enough. I have engaged with the Commission over the last eight years, and nothing substantive has changed. I don’t believe this is because it’s a basically useless regulator. Very detailed and professional-looking enquiry reports on a wide range of compliance issues in charities are published by the Commission. They know how to do the job, and have resources, but it looks as if there are bits of it they just don’t want to do.

Energy Medicine: Review of paper by Christina L Ross

I am indebted to Richard Rasker for the following critique of this paper:

Ross Christina L. Energy Medicine: Current Status and Future Perspectives. Glob Adv Health Med. 2019; 8: 2164956119831221

I have not included Ross’ list of references. Readers should refer to the original paper which is here. The original headings are used, and original text is italicised. The reviewer’s references are linked to sources, and listed at the end.

Infantile Chiropractic

I am posting this out of sequence, as the last topic made me so angry that I just had to get it up there. I have calmed down a bit now, so can return to another case of a weak regulator. This time, the General Chiropractic Council. It all kicked off in late 2018, when I was tipped off about a piece in a local rag, the Henley Standard. Here is the article in some of its glory.

Official Support for Homeopathy Persists

One thing leads to another, and with each step I am angrier. It started with a Twitter tip-off about a video on Facebook recommending homeopathy for coronavirus symptoms. Of course, homeopathic remedies are prescribed totally on the basis of symptoms, as homeopaths have no way of knowing any better, so nothing remarkable about that as such. But the video was made by Dr Elizabeth Thompson, a registered medical doctor, and apparently a consultant at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust. I am not on Facebook and have no desire to be, and the video may have gone now. But it popped up at the same time at the National Centre for Integrative Medicine. At this point I need to explain a bit of history.

Naturopathy – nonsense on stilts cashing in on COVID-19

The exploitation of the COVID-19 pandemic by unscrupulous quacks is such a burgeoning problem that the excellent Advertising Standards Authority has set up a very convenient online form for making a quick complaint. I used it yesterday to report the College of Naturopathic Medicine for the three videos they have online. I ran these past my very good friend (and HealthWatch colleague) David Bender, who is Emeritus Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry at UCL. Here are his findings, with his comments in italics.

Gerson Therapy and `toxins’

Last week I had a particular reason to have a look at Gerson Therapy. For the uninitiated, this is a draconian regime based on extreme nutrition and other bizarre interventions such as coffee enemas and vitamin megadoses. It is widely claimed to be able to treat cancer. It’s a favourite ploy of quacks to explain that, when the patient gets worse instead of better, it is a sign that the treatment is working. For homeopaths it’s the `aggravation’, and for the Gerson brigade it’s this:

How effective is the Advertising Standards Authority?

I should start this post with two big caveats:

1. My purpose is not to criticise the ASA, which in my experience is efficient and rigorous. If there are limitations, they may well stem from circumstances, which I hope to explore here.
2. This isn’t a particularly scientific analysis. It is not a prospective study, just a look at a large number of complaints and what happened to them.

The dataset comprises 74 complaints I have made to the ASA about misleading health-related claims, between July 2014 and January 2019. All but two related to advertisers’ own websites; one was a magazine ad, and another involved a paid-for ad by a chiropractic clinic on a local newspaper website. Here is how they were distributed (in no particular order):

The Bell Tolls for Quack Charities?

So after nearly five years of effort, I am rewarded with a response from the Charity Commission regarding charities which make misleading claims about the treatment of ill health. Is it what I wanted? The answer is “partly”, but it depends on how the Commission applies its new guidance.