2007 – Page 9 – The Quackometer Blog

Electrosensitivity: Caused by Wi-Fi and Mobiles?

27th April, 2007 54

The Daily Mail brings us the story of Sarah Dacre who suffers terribly from a range of symptoms including “hair loss, sickness, high blood-pressure, digestive and memory problems, severe headaches and dizziness. ” Sarah believes the symptoms are caused by the effects of the ‘electrosmog’ in our environment, the electromagnetic radiation (EMR) given out by mobile phones and Wi-Fi networks. She is so troubled by these devices that she resorts [read more…]

Pulling My Hair Out

26th April, 2007 35

or, The Role of Mineral Hair Analysis in the Sale of Food Supplements initially posted on Holford Watch. Patrick Holford has set up a charity. Not poorly, fluffy kittens or unwanted donkeys, but a charity dedicated to helping kids do better at schools with better ‘nutrition’. The charity is called Food for the Brain. Being against such a venture would appear to be like being against sunshine or trying to [read more…]

Teachers’ Union Demand Meteorite Shields For Schools

23rd April, 2007 6

Quackery thrives on fear. Cancer, infection and injury are rightly things to be concerned about. Despite the near doubling of our expected life span in the last hundred years or so, scientific medicine will eventually let us all down and we shall eventually succumb to the final inconvenience of death. In the meantime, the fear of suffering creates opportunities for quacks to exploit. The entrepreneurial quack will fan the flames [read more…]

Google ‘Sees no Evil’

17th April, 2007 4

Once upon a time, back in the olden days, that is, before 1996 or thereabouts, your typical quack was faced with a big problem. Just as with producing software, the manufacturing stage of the quack business is straightforward. The software firm used to ‘record’ software onto ‘floppy disks’ and the quack could press ‘nutrient pills’ in huge numbers, or fill bottles or make pills with ‘homeopathic water’ straight from the [read more…]

Watch Holford Watch

17th April, 2007 0

Just to let you know that I am proud to be able to contibute a little to a new blog, “Holford Watch”, a site about ‘top media nutritionist’ Patrick Holford. This site aims to provide a counterpoint to much of what “Britain’s best-selling author and leading spokesman on nutrition and mental health issues” has to say as there are very many people who would consider that much of what he [read more…]

Homoeopathic Clothing Range

2nd April, 2007 4

Le Canard Noir is in development with a new range of complementary and alternative clothing. A sneak peak is now available for a new ‘homoeopathic cleaning only’ range of t-shirts. Clean your clothes in a more gentle and more holistic manner allowing your clothes to take advantage of their own inbuilt cleaning capability and treat emotional stains as well as physical dirt. The care label looks like this…

Tiny Magnets, Tiny Minds

22nd March, 2007 4

Just when I thought the Daily Mail was reducing the number of stupid health stories that it was publishing, it comes up with a classic. Once again, the Daily Mail has been duped into advertising quack products. The story entitled, “Tiny magnet that soothes the misery of menopause” is a full on bit of brainless reporting of a marketing press release issued by a company that makes questionable magnet healing [read more…]

Beauty and the Quack

20th March, 2007 11

Quackery is not just found in ‘alternative’ medicine and the high street homeopathic practice. Quackery exists wherever claims for health benefits are made that do not stand up to scrutiny. Today I want to look at the claims of a billion dollar business, one of the top 20 household products sellers outside of the US, Clarins. Are they guilty of quackery? This is a bit of departure for the quackometer [read more…]

Hideous Quackery?

9th March, 2007 0

It pains me to write this, but I have a nasty feeling that Kate Winslet might have been to visit a quack. I guess I ought to be careful as she has just won a ‘substantial’ settlement from Grazia magazine after they printed outrageous allegations that she had been to visit a ‘diet doctor’. Now to be fair to Kate, she has been outspoken, and rightly so, over the media’s [read more…]

The Dilemma of Finding Reliable Health Advice Online

7th March, 2007 4

A press release today from the Economic and Social Research Council talks about recent research on how the public evaluates the information on health websites. The concluding message is simple: When searching for health advice online, consumers often reject websites with high quality medical information in favour of those with a human touch. This is not good news for NHS sites, drug company sites and other sites that might try [read more…]