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.

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.

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):

More Cherry-Picked `Evidence’

Some of you will have seen an email that went out the other day to subscribers to the `What Doctors Don’t Tell You’ website. Here it is:

Would you like to be featured in a future issue of What Doctors Don’t Tell You (WDDTY) magazine?

Cash for Honours – again?

I am not conducting a campaign against the Royal Society of Medicine. I have attended lots of very nice meetings there, and the restaurant is excellent. So this second post about its rather seamier side must be read in the context that it isn’t a wholly bad organisation. I am indebted to my good friend Zeno for bringing to my attention a nice little earner which the RSM has had going for a while – the Wall of Honour.

Bending over backwards to mislead…..

Sadly I am a pretty sporadic blogger (classic car ownership is to blame), but again I am driven to add my feeble voice to the case brought by the British Chiropractic Association against Simon Singh. I have known Simon for a couple of years, and been impressed not just by his searing intellect, but by his rock solid integrity.  As half the world seems to know, the BCA is suing Simon for the following article which appeared in The Guardian newspaper last year.

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.