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…]
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…]
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…]
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…
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…]
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…]
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…]
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…]
I’m going to stick my neck out here. I could be horribly wrong. But that is science; come up with a hypothesis, see if it fits with evidence from the real world. If so, create a powerful explanatory theory, if not, then shut the hell up. This contaminated petrol thing. For non-UK readers, thousands of motorists have been reporting their cars breaking down due to dodgy fuel. What has this [read more…]
Following on from my last post about whether the people that run quack web sites are deeply deluded or just plain old frauds, I had to share this gem with you. For all aficionados of quackery, this is truly a collectors item to be savoured. Thanks to whoever entered the healingbroom.com web site into the quackometer. It is a treat and scores a perfect 10 canards. The healing broom looks [read more…]
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