Dr Wendy Denning: Diat Doktor [sic]

UPDATE 8th February 2007

Well, six months after first posting this entry, the complementary IT team at Dr Wendy’s support organisation have made a few spelling corrections. I thought this might happen soon, as this entry became the most widely read entry on the site. I guess it was being passed round a bit – thousands of times.

So, it looks like, after much speculation, Wendy’s services are not complimentary, or free, but indeed complementary. Looks like the team also believes the word ‘complementary’ deserves capitalising, whereas ‘medicine’ does not. Read into that what you may. Anyway, for posterity, the wayback machine has preserved the original site here. And you can compare it with now.

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I’ve just had a comment pointing out that Dr Wendy Denning only scores 1 Canard on the quackometer. Strangely, I had just flicked over to her new Channel 5 series, “The Diet Doctors”.

The person leaving the comment said that Dr Wendy deserved a much higher score. In addition, anyone describing themselves as a ‘nutritional expert’ also needs a good look over just to see what quackery they are up to. (More on that in later blogs). Dr Wendy was also apparently responsible for pushing that useless Christmas-cracker piece of tat, the QLink pendant, on the poor, hapless Daily Mail reporter, Sarah Stacey, who wrote the all time highest scoring newspaper quack article ever. Also, Dr Wendy got her nutritional qualifications from Patrick Holford’s Richmond based, made-up college, the Institute of Optimum Nutrition.

So, I decided to investigate a little further. Why had the Quackometer scored Dr Wendy so low?

Well, I found the answer rather quickly and it has opened up a whole new field of organic broccoli for the quackometer to sort out. It appears that Dr Wendy is not into complementary medicine (medicine that complements real medicine) at all. Her web site tells us that she is into complimentary medicine – repeatedly – some seven times at least. Is that going around paying her patients compliments and saying how nice she thinks they would look in her green jacket? Or does complimentary mean she is giving away her nuggets of ‘holistic’ medical wisdom for free?

Apparently, No. A quick check of her web site reveals she charges £225 for 90 minutes in her clinic, of which, she will guarantee to show up for half-an-hour, obviously to pay all the right compliments to you for handing over your credit card.

So, the answer is obvious. The quackometer only scores those practitioners into complementary medicine. Those who just pay flattering tributes to their patients do not deserve scores on the quackometer.

An insight to quacks then. To get around the quackometer, the answer is simple. Spell everything wrong. Learn a tip from the email spammers: e.g. _V_I_A_G_R_A. Just how many spelling variations of osteopathy, acupuncture and gullible can you come up with?

It looks like I am faced with a big task. To catch the Dr Wendys of this world I am going to have to expand the quack dictionaries enormously with every possible spelling variant. Hell. There is so much good telly I am going to miss over the next few weeks.

Ho Hum.

Just what do they teach them at medical school these days?