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Hawley Harvey Crippen (1863-1910) was an American homeopath who was born to Andresee Skinner and Myron Augustus Crippen. He trained as a homeopath and joined a homeopathic pharmaceutical company. In 1910, he emigrated with his second wife, Cora Turner , to England where he was unable to practice as a Doctor as the authorities would not recognise his credentials. Turner was a music hall singer who openly had affairs. The [read more…]

Amanda Hamilton, the Queen of Detox, is the emerging, good looking face of daytime, lifestyle, detox TV. She is a self described homeopath and expert in nutritional therapy, iridology, yoga and Ayurveda. If we were playing quack bingo, I would be shouting ‘house!’ Amanda has appeared regularly on the BBC, GMTV and UKTV, runs a number of detox spas in Spain and Turkey, writes books and sells home detox kits. [read more…]

Don’t forget to watch Channel 4 on Monday 13th. Richard Dawkins is delivering his documentary ‘Enemies of Reason’, with the first part entitled, ‘Slaves to Superstition’ The blurb says, There are two ways of looking at the world – through faith and superstition or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence – in other words, through reason. Reason and a respect for evidence are precious commodities, the source of [read more…]

Bored Bored Bored. So, I have been doing some anagrams. Here goes… Dr Andrew Wakefield – Flawed Ink Rewarded Dr Gillian McKeith – Kill Charming Diet Electrosensitivity – Risen To Selectivity homeopathic remedy – Here Hypo-Atom Medic Food for the Brain – Brother Of ION Fad Institute of Optimum Nutrition – Nut Into Tummies Tuition Profit Patrick Holford – Fork to Chip Lard Dr George Carlo – Roger Goldacre (shame [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…]

Well, I’ve had a bit of time to put some effort into the Quackometer, and now it has a few new features and improvements. 1. First – ‘Am I a Quack or Not?’ will allow you to type in a name and see how Quacky that person is. More on this later… 2. Secondly, we have some tables ranking web sites and suspect quacks to give some highlights for the [read more…]

I promise I will write about something else other than nonsense in the Daily Mail, but today’s story requires a comment or two. Their headline story on the on-line edition proclaims: Early cannabis abuse ‘does lead to heroin addiction’. Now a headline like that is crying out for some investigation. Taking cannabis as a teenager really does pave the way to heroin addiction in later life, say scientists.Researchers have found [read more…]

As you can see, I have signed up this blog to the Bloggers Against Torture campaign as part of the torture awareness month. I will keep this short. To compare the act of torture to the banalities of quackery will do the victims a dishonour. However, I would venture that both the justification of torture and various quackeries are based on the same misguided logic: What we wish to be [read more…]

After having an argument on a message board about whether Cellular Memory could really exist (see last post), I was offered that the following expert would back up these strange theories of Dr Gary Schwartz. His name is Dr Paul Pearsall and you can see his impressive home page here. Paul Pearsall, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychoneuroimmunologist. Try saying that drunk. Now, the quackometer gives this result to Dr [read more…]