tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-258056592009-07-04T16:29:09.318+01:00not this little black duck...<br> experiments and thoughts on the world of quackery, health fraud and pseudoscience.Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.comBlogger271125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-52266951227614651002009-07-03T16:45:00.001+01:002009-07-03T19:37:27.385+01:00

So, a few days back from the Glastonbury festival, showered and variously recovered from vicious sun, torrential thunderstorms, lack of sleep and the magical outpourings of the cider bus. I had planned to twitter loads from the festival - I think I managed one - the festival is now many things, but a 'connected festival' it is not. Five days without any significant bandwidth was pretty tough

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-71392946742299880642009-06-19T20:30:00.001+01:002009-06-19T20:36:03.471+01:00

  Last March I asked, “Will the government bail out Ofquack?” when it was becoming very clear that the new government backed ‘regulator’ for pseudo-medical trades people (quacks) were running out of money  fast. It looks like at about the time I was asking this, the CNHC were running cap in hand to the Department of Health. In documents I have obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, it

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-91295266652773508842009-06-12T19:16:00.000+01:002009-06-23T13:22:20.741+01:00

Many people in the UK are unable to identify the location of their major chakras, a study warns. A team at the Institute of Magical Thinking found public understanding of basic alternative medicine has not improved since a similar survey was conducted 40 years ago. Less than 50% of the more than 700 people surveyed could correctly place the anahata chakra, Moonbat’s Holistic Drop-in Centre

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-3011216263679313772009-06-11T19:01:00.003+01:002009-06-11T23:41:35.064+01:00

Of Lordly acquaintance you boast, And the Dukes that you dined with yestreen; Yet an insect's an insect at most, Tho' it crawl on the curl of a Queen! Roburt Burns, The Toadeater In the UK, those who wish to challenge the beliefs of alternative therapy have a problem. The greatest exponent of alternative medicine is indeed our future head of state and King, Prince Charles. A

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-33248739625334069322009-06-10T08:45:00.005+01:002009-06-10T22:13:52.821+01:00

This letter has been issued from the McTimoney Association to all its members… Date: 8 June 2009 09:12:18 BDT Subject: FURTHER URGENT ACTION REQUIRED! Dear Member If you are reading this, we assume you have also read the urgent email we sent you last Friday. If you did not read it, READ IT VERY CAREFULLY NOW and - this is most important – ACT ON IT. This is not scaremongering. We

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com222tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-21781443861977421192009-06-09T23:02:00.004+01:002009-06-30T08:35:02.608+01:00

The British Chiropractic Association do not appear to be too hot on evidence. Given that they are suing Simon Singh, a science writer, for saying that they promoted treatments for children's ailments, such as asthma and colic, when there was no good evidence, you would have thought that they would have been quick to publish any evidence that existed. In fact, despite the BCA telling us that

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-69794548265959052882009-06-09T18:44:00.001+01:002009-06-13T21:57:30.693+01:00

Are you a journalist or presenter looking for someone to discuss Homeopathy Awareness Week? Then please get in touch. The Society of Homeopaths are promoting “Homeopathy - a natural approach for the symptoms of hay fever” Did you know there is no convincing evidence that homeopathy can help with hayfever, or for any other condition? Did you know that homeopaths do not just treat mild

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-17793173804452197832009-06-05T23:28:00.001+01:002009-06-06T12:31:29.216+01:00

The Simon Singh/BCA libel case is having the unintended consequence of the media being full of reports of the strange beliefs of chiropractors. They are a cult like body of people and are demonstrating that they are unwilling to discuss matters of evidence but very happy to call their lawyers to get at their critics. In this way they show behaviour more readily expected from scientologists than a

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-43436251660487909582009-06-04T00:01:00.000+01:002009-06-04T07:38:37.955+01:00

  “The law has no place in scientific disputes” Simon Singh is to appeal the absurd and astonishingly illiberal ruling made by Sir David Eady in the libel case brought about by the British Chiropractic Association. This is a brave decision by Simon, but an important one as there are issues at stake that go well beyond one case. Today, the charity Sense about Science is launching a campaign

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-69817709943460624982009-06-01T12:46:00.003+01:002009-06-03T23:15:47.584+01:00

Apologies…     There were two doctors in a bar, spending the evening moaning about the current state of the NHS, government interference, hospital managers, crap IT, abusive patients, litigious patients, rotas, paperwork, overwork, lack of time with patients who need it - you get the picture. The first says, “You know what? It has got to the state where I want to jack it all in and get into

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-60238941480532030832009-05-19T07:53:00.001+01:002009-05-19T07:57:10.045+01:00

One of the side effects of the BCA vs Chiropractic libel case is that there are a growing number of people who now realise that Chiropractic is bogus*. Even though Simon Singh may well have suffered a set back from a judge who according to the law can define words as he sees fit, we are now seeing increasing exposure to the bogus* practices of the chiropractic trade. One way to show the

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com51tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-776406052209798662009-05-15T18:39:00.002+01:002009-05-16T07:12:38.312+01:00

  The University of Oxford recent completed a report into the comparative costs of defamation proceedings across Europe. Its conclusions were that the costs of libel proceedings in England and Wales are about 140 times higher on average than those found across Europe. The reasons for this boil down the large number of lawyers that get involved, the length of the proceedings, the adversarial

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-7897036564251661542009-05-13T19:33:00.004+01:002009-05-14T09:00:06.419+01:00

Last night we held the first evening of the Oxford branch of Skeptics in the Pub. Come 6.15 and the bar we had booked was already filling up. By Seven o’clock it was packed and unfortunately not everyone could see or hear. And what had people come to hear? A talk by Ben Goldacre about medical statistics.  Yes. Let’s be clear. Over a hundred people, sat through several hours of discussion about

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-11612566185835778012009-05-06T00:01:00.000+01:002009-05-06T09:05:22.928+01:00

Prince Charles' company, Duchy Originals, has today been told by the Advertising Standards Authority to stop making misleading and untruthful claims in its advertising and to not make claims for its detox products that it cannot substantiate.   Earlier in the year, Duchy Originals launched three new herbal tinctures. The launch was met with derision, and claims that the Prince’s company was

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-47439987944913431432009-04-28T21:29:00.001+01:002009-04-28T21:29:23.433+01:00

Last night, a friend who I have not seen for a little while, asked me an important question. She was well aware of my blogging activities as my blog rss feed pipes through delicious and then twitter and onto my facebook account, or something. Why my fascination with criticising alternative medicine? A difficult question – and after a few pints and the energy for a one word answer, I responded “

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-35224686603406744402009-04-24T00:21:00.001+01:002009-04-24T08:20:52.640+01:00

Tonight, on BBC2, we were treated to Professor Regan’s Medicine Cabinet, where we were walked through the vast amount of quackery that we can find in a high street pharmacists. Homeopathy was given a thorough kicking and straightforwardly shown to be utter nonsense. I did love the Ainsworth’s Pharmacist trying to defend his batshit robotic dilution apparatus, the The Pinkus Potentizer, that

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-88704173631015936262009-04-22T00:37:00.002+01:002009-04-23T18:15:25.104+01:00

The stillborn homeopathy campaign, Homeopathy Worked for Me, that attempted to collect 250,000 signatures but managed just a few percent of that, has now resorted to producing a laughably daft critique of Ernst & Singh’s Trick or Treatment.William Alderson, a homeopath, has produced a 142 page response to the book that attempts to show that the book has “has no validity as a scientific

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-77259482864009660972009-04-20T22:22:00.000+01:002009-04-20T22:29:54.851+01:00

The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, Ofquack, is having an appalling start to its life. Needing 10,000 people to join its register in the first year to break even, it has collected less than 300 names. This should be put in context with a claimed “150,000 complementary healthcare practitioners in the UK.” Part of the problem is that, at the moment, Ofquack is only allowing

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-72634526843749814572009-04-14T21:30:00.003+01:002009-04-16T11:50:31.677+01:00

The Cochrane Library has published a new review of the effects of homeopathy on cancer patients**. Its conclusion is that “there is limited evidence that homeopathic remedies ease the side effects of cancer treatments, but they at least seem to cause no serious adverse effects or drug interactions.” The Quackometer’s response is “No shit, Sherlock!” Homeopathy is the application of

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-30570612745632938872009-04-11T19:45:00.001+01:002009-04-11T19:45:00.766+01:00

Some of the quackometer functionality has not been working too well over the past few months. The Am I a Quack or Not? function was very poorly and only working for a few searches per day. The reason being that the operation depended on some very old and unsupported Google technology that was about to be unplugged. So, I have now done the work to convert over to Yahoo search.For the interested, I

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-393845872329598982009-04-07T23:23:00.001+01:002009-04-08T22:57:47.654+01:00

Chinese Herbal Medicine could be seen as the acceptable side of alternative medicine. It does not suffer from the utter implausibility of homeopathy, nor does it appear to rely on supernatural mechanisms such as with Reiki. Indeed, herbal medicine appears to be nothing but a primitive form of pharmacology with the practitioner diagnosing disease and then prescribing the right chemicals: the

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-62741136876110274382009-04-06T21:38:00.003+01:002009-04-07T08:18:16.551+01:00

I was going to call this post “The Failure of IT at Ofquack”, but I think the failure is a little deeper than computers. The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council have recently put the following announcement up on their web site:Website HackersWe are extremely disappointed to have to share with you that we have had a number of unprecedented attempts by hackers to disable our website. We

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-60197383032511736322009-04-01T05:30:00.008+01:002009-04-01T12:57:54.185+01:00

My automated scans of the internet for all things about quackery have thrown up some interesting news today. The German newspaper Bild is reporting that an academic homeopathy journal is about to publish the discovery of fragments of a new edition of Hahnemann’s Organon. (translation here from "Die Entdeckung einer verlorenen siebte Auflage des Organon?") For those not familiar with the origins

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com73tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-10618457437455149262009-03-29T13:31:00.005+01:002009-03-31T12:29:01.383+01:00

The economic downturn may mean that you are thinking of retraining as an alternative healer. You might be tempted to invest your redundancy money or savings in training courses and equipment. Think again. It may be far cheaper and much more lucrative to invent your own brand new form of quackery. Most forms of alternative medicine are at most only a few decades old or have only become popular

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-25805659.post-14533999071234196692009-03-23T18:30:00.006Z2009-03-24T00:32:03.771Z

It does not take a lot of analysis to realise that the newly formed Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council is going to be in a desperate financial state quite soon. The CNHC, or Ofquack to its friends, was launched this year after being set up by Prince Charles' charity, the Foundation for Integrated Health, backed by funding of about £900,000 from the Department of Health.Ofquack is the "

Le Canard Noirhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07565056022495154803noreply@blogger.com15