Blog Archives

Quack Word #12: ‘Organic’

August 25, 2006
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I believe that organic food is a con, is not necessarily more healthy for you, tastes no different, and is damaging to the environment. There, I have got that off my chest, but unfortunately I now feel like I have just admitted to being a child murderer, a racist or even a supporter of George Bush’s foreign policy. Let me explain… The word organic is now synonymous with everything good, healthy and caring. To be against organic is to be seen to be almost evil. Organic food has huge sections devoted to it in our supermarkets, and its not just food – our shampoos, clothing and beer can all be marketed as ‘organic’. What does the word mean? Its original meaning was a scientific one. The chemistry of carbon-based...

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The Guild of the Gullible?

August 17, 2006
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I think that this may be a story of despair. It may be a story about the mountain that has to be climbed if we are to live a society where quacks find it hard to profit from their lies, misinformation and delusions. At present it is a story about how newspapers contribute significantly and fundamentally to the environment in which people are swindled out of their money by quacks and how illness and suffering may be prolonged by irrational thinking. The story is not over yet, but let me tell the first part. The story starts with my newspaper quack story alert engine that I have been working on recently. It is beginning to settle down now, and has spotted some interesting departures from reality in our esteemed...

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Quack Word #37: ‘Holistic’

August 11, 2006
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As you know, the quackometer works by counting words, or combinations of words, that strongly suggest the web site is full of quackery. I thought I would write about a few of those words and why they are dead give-aways. So, ‘Holistic’ – not in itself necessarily anything to do with medicine, but this word is often used with medicine when quackery is at work. Why is this and what do quacks mean by it? Why is almost exclusively used by quacks? Spot this word and you spot a quack. The word was coined by Jan Smuts, the South African statesman, in a work entitled “Holism and Evolution” and defined it as “the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts”. Holistic...

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RSS Quack Alert Feeds Now Added

August 9, 2006
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You can now subscribe to RSS Feeds to get all the Quackiest Stories direct to your browser without scanning the news sites and papers yourself. The News Alert Engine is still being thoroughly tested and handheld. Expect a few technical glitches and bad matches for a few days yet. The biggest problems have been keeping down the false positives, that is, stopping stories being flagged as quacky when they are probably quite reasonable. Up to now, the tuning of the engine has really focused on making sure quacky stories were always flagged. With the scanning of huge numbers of newspapers stories, my effort is going into keeping good stories off the quackometer site. Also, I need more ideas for other news sources to scan – especially outside of the...

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Advances in Quackometrics – News Alerts

August 4, 2006
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Advances in Quackometrics – News Alerts

The latest quackometer functionality is now being tested on the quackometer web site. Throughout the day, the little black duck will be reading the news for you and creating alerts if quackery is found. Hoards of quackbusters around the world will be alerted to potential quackery in the newsapers before it starts hitting peoples’ doormats. Together we can expose the worst offending news sources. Daily lists of quack stories will be available on this site. As you are well aware, many so-called serious newspapers regularly publish quack health stories with little or no critical appraisal of their validity. Stories in newspapers are one important area where quacks can seek validation and advertising without too much trouble. The Quackometer intends to expose this laziness as as the ink is drying...

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Do Hedgehogs Give My Cat Acupuncture?

July 31, 2006
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Do Hedgehogs Give My Cat Acupuncture?

I thought my post on Reiki Healing for Hedgehogs was going to be a one-off. But a recent trip to the garden centre has opened up a whole new compost heap of prickles. Now, I live in hedgehog country. I have a hedgehog hospital within feather spitting distance of my pond, and I see them around me all the time. I am fond of them. My prickly, vespertine friends come out to see me on Summer evenings while I am enjoying a bottle of wine in the garden until it gets too dark to see. So, I open a book called ‘The Natural Hedgehog’ by by Lenni Sykes and Jane Durrant with a forward by Virginia McKenna (Born Free remake? Elsa the Hedgehog?). Lenni and Jane appear to run...

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The Quest For The Perfect Quack!

July 13, 2006
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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 day. This should change on a day-by-day basis. 3. I have also added the first of some analysis features to let you see why the quackometer has given the rating it has. I want to make this a useful tool for quackbusting, so if you have any ideas, let me know. So the challenge is this… It looks fairly...

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Trademarked Science Trade-Offs

July 10, 2006
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I have written before about my assertion that if you find someone saying that you cannot get all the nutrients you need through food, then you have also found someone selling food supplements. This is the basic scam behind so many nutritionists – they make the process of eating a healthy diet look so formidable and fraught that you had better hedge your bets and scoff a lot of pills – that they can provide for you for a small(ish) fee. I wish I could automate this rule in the quackometer. It is proving to be a sure rule in identifying quackery. Let’s look at a recent health story in the Daily Mail: You’re eating the WRONG fruit and veg!We’ve known for some time that eating five portions of...

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Can I See Your Working, Please?

July 5, 2006
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Can I See Your Working, Please?

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 that cannabis acts as a ‘gateway’ drug, because exposure during adolescence primes the system to crave the chemical stimulation of hard drugs. Now this is quite politically important right now. The UK has seen some slight softening in its stance towards cannabis with howls of protest being heard from papers like the Mail. A finding like this would indeed...

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Magnetic Migraine Miracle Madness?

June 22, 2006
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In today’s Daily Mail, Brendan Montague brings us the sensational story that Migraine suffers need not suffer much longer thanks to a wonder device about to be launched in the US and available for a paltry £1,000 (with a further £15 for each treatment). Millions of migraine sufferers have been given hope of a cure with the invention of a magnetic pain “zapper”… The handheld device is placed at the back of the head and uses a gentle pulse to disrupt the “electrical storm” which is believed to lead to migraines. Now the black duck’s beak tingles like mad whenever the words ‘magnetic’ and ‘cure’ are found in the same sentence. Quackery is sure to follow. Let’s look a little more. How does the device work? Gary Stroy, the...

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Events and Talks

Does Integrated Medicine Make Sense?
Great Hall, Dartington, Devon
I will be debating the role of Integrated Medicine with Simon Mills from the College of Medicine, Sarah Wollaston MP for Totnes, and Becky Simpson who used CAM when being treated for cancer.

Saturday 26 May, 2012. 6.00pm

A History of West Country Quacks & Rise of Evidence Based Medicine
Plymouth Skeptics in the Pub
The West Country, particularly in Bath, saw some the greatest quacks and also the greatest advances in evidence-based medicine. I will talk about how the two approaches fought each other in the 18th and 19th Century.

Tuesday, June 19 2012 at 7:00PM

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