If you were a dodgy plumber or made misleading double glazing adverts, you could expect Trading Standards to fine you and the BBC to make a Rogue Traders programme about your mischief. Make misleading and inaccurate health claims about a ‘health’ drink and the same BBC executives will be forking out license fee money on the product for their expensed lunch with their rocket, cous-cous and feng shui salad. Sip [read more…]
Quackery in the UK has friends in the highest places. Despite constitutional restrictions on the monarch’s role in politics, our heir to the throne, Prince Charles, has decided to meddle most wholeheartedly in how public healthcare is provided. The main channel for this interference is the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health. This organisation claims not to promote alternative medicine, but instead to “offer healthcare which makes use of all appropriate [read more…]
Just a day after I write about Dr James Colthurst and the Fenzian device (see Turning A Pint of Tea Leaves into Pure Gold), The Telegraph publishes a business story about how Dr Colthurst plans to raise a pot of gold in pre-IPO cash to help develop the company. Dr Colthurst’s company, Eumedic, has developed a new treatment called Fenzian that uses painless electrical impulses to encourage the body to [read more…]
The advert begins… I’m Jen. I am a mommy. It’s what I love. It’s my job to make owies go away. Whether it’s a kiss or a big hug, the magic happens immediately. This is the power of placebo. Yes, ‘regular strength’ Obecalp, from placebostore.com, is the new wonder pill for stressed parents to give to their kids when they want them to stop screaming. Obecalp fills the gap when [read more…]
Dr James Colthurst and the Fenzian Machine No, I haven’t gone all Daily Express on you. There is a genuine Lady Di connection here. But first, the Daily Telegraph. We are told (May 10, 2008) how a man had a bad knee and how ‘laser acupuncture’ made it better again. Time for the Quackometer to investigate. So, why do alarm bells ring? The Telegraph reports, Last year I heard about [read more…]
The Society of Homeopaths have recently had their 30th Anniversary Annual General Meeting and Conference at Leicester University. Lots of pop and cake were undoubtedly consumed. Various guest speakers were there talking nonsense and various ‘breakout’ sessions allowed homeopaths to share their delusional experience with each other. One session will be on “Perils and pitfalls in practice” given by Patricia Moroney the current Professional Conduct Officer. She says, There will [read more…]
The Advertising Standards Authority is one of the few regulatory bodies in the UK regularly prepared to tackle the untruthful and unsubstantiated claims made routinely in the alternative health industry. It is also one of the weakest regulatory bodies in the UK. Nothing could highlight that more than how Life Healthcare (trading under the url http://www.reverseageing.com/) dealt with an investigation. Life Healthcare had made an advertising leaflet for a product [read more…]
Professor Jayney Goddard is the president of the Complementary Medical Association (CMA), “the world’s largest professional membership body for complementary medicine” and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine. She studied homeopathy at Imperial College for five years and has won numerous awards. According to various sites, she is “considered to be among the world’s leading experts in complementary and integrated medicine.” Impressive stuff. No wonder [read more…]
In a recent post, I described how Neal’s Yard Remedies had withdrawn their Malaria homeopathy pills. Their press release said, as this is obviously a contentious issue which is causing customer concern, we have decided to withdraw the product, Malaria Officinalis 30c from sale with immediate effect. I described this as bullshit, just like the rest of their press release. The much more likely cause was that they were being [read more…]
Edzard Ernst has accused practitioners of alternative medicine of lying to their patients. In last week’s New Scientist he gave an interview where he described his childhood experiences with homeopathy, and his subsequent medical and homeopathic training, and his work in the only German homeopathic hospital. His conversion to doubt has been slow and guided by the evidence. He now believes that homeopathy is nothing more than a placebo therapy. [read more…]
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