Skip to content


Completely unbiased parental opinion

My son, the rugby player

Obviously as a parent I am utterly unbiased in my opinion opf my children. The fact that they are fine human beings and an asset to the human race is objectively verifiable fact, and I can call witnesses (e.g. Mike’s girlfriend) to support this.

I am, of course, immensely proud of them. However, Mike has recently become a bit of a problem. Put simply, his poor old dad no longer has the ability to wrestle him to the ground. This unacceptable state of affairs is the result of the influence of rugby.

Here’s mike running with the ball. He plays on the wing. I am 6’1″ tall and weigh over 13st – Mike is an inch shorter and weighs a stone more than I do, none of it fat. And the trouble is, when he shoulder charges you, it feels like you’ve collided with a tree.

Still, he’s a fine young man when he’s not stealing my chocolate.

Posted in Stuff.

Tagged with .


NHS: The wrong kind of inequality?

Change is the only constant in the NHS. Whether it’s the ludicrous private finance initiative, whereby a government hands over assets to companies who pay far more for capital in order to provide infrastructure at a cost many times greater than that of direct provision but which looks better in pre-election balance sheets; any one of a grab-bag of initiatives labelled “choice” whose main effect is to centralise services, thus reducing choice; or the introduction of “professional managers” (i.e. people who know sod-all about health care but understand the profit motive) into a non-profit enterprise for which they are ill suited – no lesson is too obvious to be learned the hard way, no activity can be left untouched.

The current furore centres on the NHS bill, which all but the starry-eyed idealists must realise will be hammered through one way or another despite the fact that pretty much everybody outside the parliamentary Conservative party recognises is atrocious in every way. It seems to be founded on a recurrent theme with Tory governments: that the US model is “better” because it provides “more choice”.

Looking at some figures from 2007 we see the obvious and well-known fact that  US health spending is, in fact, the highest per capita in the world. Part of that is the cost of choice – for which read overprovision and redundancy, part is down to the lawyer culture, and part is down to factors such as direct advertising to consumers, which leads to people demanding brand-name drugs instead of generics. There are other causes too.

What the Government seems to be trying to do is to introduce some of these additional costs without providing actual, meaningful choice, in the name of saving money. Of course the NHS is one of the cheapest healthcare providers in the world and most of its budget is people costs, so the only real way to save money is to squeeze the pensions and pay of the people who make up the NHS – nurses, for example.

Why would any government do this mad thing?

I have a theory. The NHS is known to result in some inequalities, informally known as the “postcode lottery” but in fact the inevitable result of the way the NHS is run. It’s easier to provide services to densely populated areas than to rural areas, so if you are an MP from rural Cheshire, South Cambridgeshire or Oxfordshire then your constituents will be bleating about it. The solution proposed, is to swap this inequality for a different kind of inequality, where those with the means and resources get choice and those without… don’t.

It’s a bit like pressing for removal of the “unfair” 50p top tax band while doing your level best to resist tax cuts for the working poor.

In other words, I think this is just another case of the Tory Party looking after its own at the expense of oiks.

Posted in Politics.

Tagged with .


A small wager

There are many recurrent themes when debating with apologists for homeopathy; one of these is their repeated assertion that if we (the skeptics) were to read and understand this long list of scientific studies, then we would understand that it works.

I am willing to risk a small wager: I bet I know more about how homeopathy works than the people who make this claim.

Here’s what I know:

  1. There has never been any credible generalised proof of the fundamental law of homeopathy, the so-called law of similars. I have asked many homeopaths to cite any such proof and none has ever been provided. All they do is link (again) the same long list of “scientific studies”, to which I will return in a moment. I am willing to go double or quits on this one: I bet no homeopath actually has in their possession anything which amounts to a proof of this fundamental tenet of their belief system, other than the word of Samuel Hahnemann – a word which, it turns out, is based on a generalisation from a single data point. I do not think there is any even remotely rigorous proof of this. It is this reliance on the word of one man, taken as unchallenged truth, which marks homeopathy out as a religion and not a scientific endeavour.
  2. There has never been any credible generalised proof of the homeopathic principle known as potentisation. I have asked many times and have been offered a veritable smorgasbord of unconnected and often conflicting pieces of work cherry-picked from sources of wildly varying credibility. Of these a few notable examples are:
    • The work of Luc Montaigner, which is self-published not peer reviewed, and describes an effect which even it it were replicated independently (which it has not been) would be restricted to certain classes of compounds, to the extent that Montaigner himself says it cannot be extended to cover the materials used in homeopathy, and in any case has a duration measured in picoseconds. Homeopaths love Montaigner because he is a Nobel laureate. Science does not recognise the Nobel prize as conferring infallibility; even Einstein was wrong when he famously said that “God does not play dice“.
    • The work of Jacques Benveniste, which purported to show a water memory effect, but which was finally shown to have been the result of deliberate error on the part of his assistant. Benveniste always disputed these findings, denouncing measures such as taping labels to the ceiling to prevent fraud, and homeopaths continue to accept them without question, but the scientific consensus is that his implausible results were down to error, deliberate or not.
    • Some effects of nanodomains in water; nanodomains are real enough but their supposedly extraordinary properties in water are almost exclusively the province of pseudoscience (cf. polywater). No homeopath in my experience understands what nano means in this context, and none has ever shown any proper understanding of the difference between 10-9 and 10-30, which homeopaths call 15C. There’s a nice demolition of this line of argument at “Water Cluster Quackery“.
    • Arm-waving references to “quantum” or even “quantum entanglement“, which any physicist will tell you is not observable at the macro scale. There is no explanation why these supposed effects are not visible in other contexts such as semiconductor fabs  where scientists routinely control the placement of individual atoms. There is no recorded instance where this effect, supposedly achievable by any backyard homeopath using nothing more specialised than plain water and a leather cushion, has been objectively measured by the most sensitive instruments known to man.
    • Papers such as “Domains of Water Molecules Provide Mechanisms of Potentization in Homeopathy” which begins: “In homeopathy, high potentization means such high dilution that there is no longer even one molecule of the original active agent per gram of the mixture. Nevertheless such high dilutions apparently remain effective. We develop a possible mechanism for homeopathic potentization to explain this phenomenon.” This is the logical fallacy of begging the question: to start by assuming that the effect you are investigating exists, without citing any credible source for that claim, is to head down the path of tooth-fairy science. In this case a question tot he editor revealed that he values an “open mind” above rigorous peer-review, which would never allow such sloppiness.
  3. No paper has ever convincingly refuted the null hypothesis of placebo effect plus observer bias. Meta-analyses such as that by Shang et. al. show that the more carefully you control for bias, the more likely you are to end up showing that homeopathy = placebo. Lining up all the data points which underpin this conclusion – for example by listing large numbers of poorly designed studies which show effect beyond placebo – only reinforces the conclusion, as does the occasional well-conducted piece such as “Homeopathy has clinical benefits in rheumatoid arthritis patients that are attributable to the consultation process but not the homeopathic remedy: a randomized controlled clinical trial” (scientists do come up with such catchy titles!).
  4. Homeopathy cannot and does not self-correct. I have asked many times for a single concrete example of homeopathy self-correcting for error. Not one has ever been advanced. And it won’t be, I think, because of the way homeopathy operates. It can’t self-correct because it has no mechanism for self-correction. If two homeopaths disagree they simply form different strands of homeopathy (such as those who accept versus those who reject remedies based on nosodes or ephemera such as the light of venus or “shipwreck”) or – bizarrely – accept both conflicting versions as equally valid. Here again there is more of religion than of science. Christianity finds space for those who believe in transubstantiation and those who do not, but science only accepts one or the other when two possibilities are mutually exclusive, and only one mechanism for establishing which is which, the scientific method. One of the longest-running and most closely fought battles in science was between the wave and the particle theory of light, and even now physicists are vexed by the fact that it is not fully settled, only nailed down tot he point that we know which will work in any given situation. Imagine what would happen if scientists, like homeopaths, could not even agree on whether you have to take a strictly measured centessimal dilution, or whether you can just pour everything down the drain and refill (the Korsakovian method). Homeopathy can only survive because it is subjective and lacks any empirically verifiable principles, or any proper mechanism for weighing competing claims. The scientific method is a negative feedback system, where measurement of the results is used to correct the input, and homeopathy is a positive feedback system, where each result is accepted as implicitly valid and new results built on it. Negative feedback systems are inherently stable, positive feedback systems are inherently unstable. The former converges on the correct output, the latter drives away from it.

Now, I do not claim to be omniscient, or a great scientist, or utterly certain of anything, but I know that these four things are true: there is no proof of the fundamental homeopathy principles of similars and potentisation, no homeopathy study has ever convincingly refuted the null hypothesis, and homeopathy, unlike science, lacks a mechanism for self-correction. These foru things are my form conclusions based on the evidence I have read.

What’s interesting here is that in understanding these things, within the limits of an interested non-specialist anyway, I think I can show greater understanding of homeopathy than most if not all practitioners, because I have yet to encounter one who can offer satisfactory proof of similars or potentisation, who can understand why the null hypothesis is important and how their cherry-picked collections of anecdotes fail to refute it, or the importance of self-correction and the implications of its absence in homeopathy.

Posted in Science, Woo.

Tagged with , , , , , .


Mercola is a side-effect of modern medicine: discuss

This week Chicago magazine posed the rhetorical question Dr. Mercola: Visionary or Quack? - the answer is, of course “quack” (more at the Joseph Mercola Wikipedia article).

But there is an irony here. It is noticeable that there is an anti-science cult promoting “natural” remedies (natural like flowers and sun, of course, not natural like cholera, typhoid, dysentery etc) and that this cult has grown in strength over the last couple of decades. It encompasses all manner of crackpots and loons, from the anti-vaxers to the homeopaths, but all of these people have one thing in common.

They owe their existence to the success of modern medicine.

To understand why this is so you need to think back to the 1950s and early 60s. This was a time when two things coincided: pictorial mass media, and the rapid advance of medicine. Consider for example poliomyelitis: this was a disease that had frequent epidemic outbreaks, which paralysed and killed. The picture at right is not a factory flor, it’s a hospital ward. Rows of iron lung machines keeping polio victims alive.

Polio was almost eliminated in the West through the use of an effective vaccine, and uptake of the vaccine was by and large an easy sell as few communities  were untouched by the disease. Two famous polio victims are President Harry S. Truman and Michael Flanders.

Today, the antivaxers and alt med loons make hay because the diseases that were a vivid part of everyday life prior to modern medicine – measles, smallpox, polio, typhoid, cholera and so on – are no longer part of the public consciousness.

Worse, they claim that modern medicine is causing diseases, and they base this in part on the fact that modern medicine now allows humans to live long enough to die of diseases which become more prevalent the older you get. Kalahari bushmen generally don’t die of cancer because they die of something easily preventable by modern medicine long before cancer can take hold.

The minds of the baby boomers and Gen Xers are also fertile ground for conspiracy theories. People who grew up with Vietnam and under the shadow of the Bomb are easily persuaded that government and science are evil.

But in the end the necessary condition for the success of alternative-to-medicine cranks like Mercola is that modern medicine has made us so healthy that disease prevention is no longer a dominant theme in public debate.  If science-based medicine wants to regain the upper hand all it has to do is sit back and wait until people are once again dying of preventable disease in large numbers. Unfortunately many of these people won’t themselves be the dupes of profiteering alt-med cranks but instead be innocent victims of loss of herd immunity, a choice the antivaxers make on their behalf without consent.

Posted in Science, Woo.

Tagged with , , .


Sad now

This is Ruben, one of two guinea pigs that were an unexpected gift in September 2008 – my guinea pig turned out to be pregnant on purchase.

Ruben has been a source of delight, an affectionate little man who would always come to the bars of the cage or run for a food treat, would jump up onto your hand to be picked up and loved snuggling in if you were wearing a woolly jumper.

He’d been  a bit off colour but not so we suspected anything serious, though he had been losing weight.

Last night our little piggy friend gave up the ghost. I do so hope the poor little man was not suffering pain.


Posted in Stuff.


The diet secret They don’t want you to know

Dieting is big business. For example, Weight Watchers (NYSE: WTW) has a market capitalisation of over $5.5 billion. That’s a lot of people trying to lose weight. And the entire diet industry is built on a dirty little secret: there is no magic diet.

Virtually every diet falls into at least one of two categories: you eat fewer calories, or it’s a scam. And quite a few (e.g. the 500-calorie HCG diet) fall into both. Where do you think they get the cash for all those celebrity endorsements? They sure as hell aren’t doing it out of altruism.

What they don’t tell you is that there is only one tried and true way to lose weight, and to buy into this scheme costs you nothing. Not a penny.

I’m going to tell you this secret. You probably already suspect it. The tried and true method to lose weigh is the ELEM programme.

The ELEM programme

ELEM stands for Eat Less, Exercise More.

Eat less and you will lose weight, or at least stop gaining it so fast. Forget miracle plans like Atkins or food combining, they are just window dressing – ways of distracting you from the fact that you are, in fact, eating less. All the fad diet books are the same. You spend so much time thinking about the diet plan, you lose sight of the fact that the underlying mechanism is that you’re just eating less food. It’s a distraction. Look up a plan that’s available free on the internet and follow that instead, or combine with some friends for mutual support (don’t call yourselves weight watchers, that name is trademarked, but group therapy and selling expensive meal replacements is what they do). Educate your stomach to expect less food, don’t graze, cut out lattes and sugar in tea and coffee. Keep a cup of Earl Grey by your side, lemon, no milk and definitely no sugar – that sort of thing.

Exercise more and you will keep the weight off. The most reliable way to keep weight down is to go for active travel – cycling or brisk walking instead of the car or bus. The average British commute is 8.5 miles and takes 45 minutes. I can ride 8.5 miles in 45 minutes, so can you. Even if it took an hour, you’d be getting two hours of exercise per day for the cost of only half an hour out of your day, and no gym fees. Again, mutual support helps: bike buddies and local cycle groups.

So there you go. The magic weight loss secret They (the diet industry) don’t want you to know. Eat less, exercise more, there’s no known way round it.

Posted in Stuff.

Tagged with , .


Congestion charging: licensed extortion

I have discovered an interesting fact about the congestion charging system in London. As you probably know, the system is run by a commercial operator. The rules are as follows:

  1. If you enter the zone, your must pay the charge, £10 on the day, £12 next day
  2. If you do not pay the charge, you will be liable for a £60 penalty charge
  3. The operator refuses to tell you if you are liable for the charge on a particular day
  4. The operator refuses to refund any payment made for a day when it subsequently transpires you were not liable
  5. The operator refuses to transfer payment from one day to another – if you pay for the wrong day you get the £60 penalty and they keep your money paid for the wrong day.
  6. The operator states that there is a £10 administration fee for any refund that is made
  7. The operator charges £10 per year to set up automated payment to get around this problem

I can’t think of any other example where a commercial operator is given this much liberty. I cannot think of any other debt where it would be considered appropriate to refuse to inform you whether the debt was due, refuse to refund payments made where no liability exists, and yet charge a massive premium – five times the original debt – if you don’t pay.

It’s the closest thing to a protection racket I can think of, and yet it is not only officially sanctioned but legally enforceable.

I do not have a problem with congestion charging. I do have a problem with handing it to an operator who will take your money when there is no liability, refuse to refund it, and then send you a fine for not paying.

Posted in Uncategorized.


The “HCG Diet Council”

The HCG Diet Council is a society of miracle diet scammers researchers committed to proving (forty-odd years after it was convincingly refuted but without, of course, stopping the relentless drive of sales) the Simeons protocol for weight loss using human chorionic gonadotropin, aka hCG.  HCG is a pregnancy hormone. It’s only properly licensed medical use is in injected form as part of infertility treatment. The hCG diet scam stems from work by a single individual, Albert Simeons, a British endocrinologist. Although his work appeared to show that hCG plus an extremely low calorie diet (500 calories per day) led to sustainable weight loss. The weight of scientific opinion is that this is refuted and that randomised double blinded studies and review stuides show no evidence that hCG promotes weight loss or reduces hunger during dieting.

But dieting is big business and of course the fact that it’s bullshit has never stopped anyone selling a miracle health product (just look at the homeopaths).

Fast forward: the HCG Diet Council is essentially a trade body for hCG diet vendors, placing it in the same category as professional associations of any other unevidenced health intervention.

It’s run by Beth Golden, who claims a PhD and a doctorate in naturopathy, but neither appears to be from an accredited institution. Use of unaccredited degrees, especially higher degrees, is one of the number one hallmarks of a quack. Are the rest of the advisory board similarly suspect?

Edward Sigh, John Silva, Ken Kilgore and Andy Nelson are all listed as “DC” – that’s Doctor of Chiropractic, probably the second highest profile form of quackery after homeopathy. There are two sorts of chiro: “straight” and the rest. “Straight” chiros believe that health is governed by the body’s “innate intelligence” and this is disturbed by “vertebral subluxations” which can be adjusted, therefore curing all manner of diseases; there is no credible evidence to support any of this of course. The rest – the non-”straight” chiros – play down this heritage but are still alarmingly prone to the “bait and switch” of CAM, where people are sucked in for one purpose (there is some evidence that spinal manipulation offers some relief in persistent back pain) and once they are reeled in they are sold unnecessary whole-spine X-rays and the trademark chiro killer: cervical spine manipulation, which has a known association with cerebral artery dissection causing stroke and occasionally death. The scientific consensus on chiropractic is that vertebral subluxations don’t exist and chiro has no indications other than for lower back pain and that cervical manipulations are actively dangerous and offer no demonstrable benefit in return. It’s not clear which sort of chiroquacktor these four are, it hardly matters.

Peter Holyk, on the other hand, is an MD, from an actual medical school. However, in his practice he offers “practice that includes many alternative therapies such as: hyperbaric oxygen chamber; chelation; nutrition; a brain Real-Time EEG to help heal the injured brain; German Electromagnetic therapy known as the Ondamed; Pulsed Electro-Magnetic Field therapy for injuries; and weight loss programs using detoxification and hCG” – hyperbaric oxygen and chelation, for example, are expensive treatments with extremely limited medical indications, routinely sold by quacks for unverifiable complaints and syndromes. There is a strong association between chelation and the anti-vaccination movement. Detox is pure nonsense, as is most “electromagnetic therapy”. The guy appears to have gone over to the dark side.

The real puzzle is Cynthia Elliott. Although she specialises in cosmetic medicine, she does appear to be a proper doctor and not a pedler of woo. I wonder what she’s doing in this company?

 

Posted in Science, Woo.

Tagged with , , , , , .


Who is Beth Golden?

Beth Golden PhD ND is the owner and apparent prime mover of the “HCG Diet Council“, which means bugger all, I could call myself the president of the Flying Carpet Council, that would still not make flying carpets a reality (though as a mate pointed out, “they have them in aeroplanes” so actually flying carpets are more real at this point than the hCG diet, at least as far as objectively testable reality goes).

That Golden is a quack is apparent from the title “ND” – which, as @DrRachie always points out, stands for “Not a Doctor”. Actualy it stands for “doctor of naturopathy”, a cass of doctorate only awarded by quackademic institutions.

Her LinkedIn profile lists her education as coming from St. Luke Medical School and Trinity College of Natural Health. The latter is an unaccredited institution in the US (i.e. its qualifications are worthless in the real world) and Quackwatch also lists St Luke as unaccredited.

This looks, then, very much like a textbook case of a quack’s obsessive use of quackademic credentials to give a veneer of credibility. It means about as much as the honorary PhD I was offered by Bircham International University (for “services to the university” which made me laugh, I was pleased to see that the guy who runs it apparently has a sense of humour).

As a “scientist” her major medium of publication appears to be PR Newswire. Her description of her work on website has a registered trademark symbol after every other word, links to her books, but no list of publications and no references to her actual education.

So, who knows the actual details behind this – dates of awards, which of the two or three St Lukes this might be and so on?

 

Posted in Science, Woo.

Tagged with , .


Neck pain: home exercise or quackery? You choose…

Another NCCAM-funded trial, another weak result trumpeted by True Believers as supporting quack therapies, this time chiropractic.

http://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/newsarticle-content/-/article_display_list/13254843/spinal-manipulation-and-exercise-best-for-neck-pain

But wait:

A 12-week course of spinal manipulation had a statistically significant advantage over medication in reducing self-reported pain after eight, 12, 26 and 52 weeks, according to the study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Home exercise with advice gave similar results to spinal manipulation.

OK. That tells us something rather important.

The efficacy of spinal manipulation, according to this trial, is on a par with home exercise and advice (and at a remarkably low level, too – less than one fifth of the number of contacts required for manipulation). Given that manipulation carries a known documented risk of carotid artery dissection, if this study proves anything it’s that home exercise is vastly preferable to manipulation for neck pain, being a much safer, much cheaper intervention with apparently equivalent results.

But of course the quacks won’t present it like that.

Posted in Science, Woo.

Tagged with , .