featured – Page 2 – The Quackometer Blog

Dame Shirley Porter Funded Prince Charles’ Political Report on NHS Alternative Medicine

6th April, 2010 26

After writing about how Prince Charles’ charity, the Foundation for Integrated Health, is now under police investigation for possible fraud, it has become clear how I have missed one of the most shocking aspects of the Smallwood Report. The report has proved to be very controversial because it was commissioned by Prince Charles and was sent directly to government ministers in an attempt to influence them to fund the provision [read more…]

The Meaning of the 10:23 Homeopathy Campaign.

18th January, 2010 49

In the last few days, a new campaign has been launched with the aim of showing that homeopathy is an ‘absurd pseudoscience’ and that Boots the Chemists should not be selling these sugar pills to the public as if they were genuine medical products. The ‘10:23’ campaign, as it is known, has a very flashy web site (http://www.1023.org.uk) and states that it has been set up and organised by a [read more…]

John Wesley and The Origins of the Natural Health Movement

14th November, 2009 41

Examine the discourse of any alternative medicine and you will encounter a surprisingly homogenous set of themes: that their methods are natural, simple, available to all, and are based on ancient and traditional knowledge. Cures for disease are freely available from nature and we do not need the intermediation of a medical elite to provide us with them. These cures have been known for generations and we have lost sight [read more…]

Top Ten Tips For Creating Your Own New Alternative Medicine

29th March, 2009 29

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 recently. [read more…]

Is Chiropractic X-raying Illegal?

29th January, 2009 24

Chiropractors have achieved a status amongst practitioners of alternative medicine that is almost unrivalled. In the UK, they have achieved a level of mainstream acceptance, regulation and recognition that must be the envy of homeopaths and herbalists. Such is their standing that I suspect that many people would not even consider them as part of the alternative medicine scene. Chiropractors, like their close cousins the Osteopaths, are statutorily regulated in [read more…]

Neal’s Yard Ethical Bullshit Remedy

28th April, 2008 252

Neal’s Yard Remedies has announced that it is withdrawing is Malaria Officinalis 30C homeopathic remedy from sale. This is the absolute minimum it could have done given that its Exeter Branch was recently caught out by the BBC South West programme Inside Out selling this remedy as protection against malaria. (I wrote about this staggering event recently.) What reason do Neal’s Yard give? Let’s look at their press release in [read more…]

Hopi Ear Candling – Removing the Grey Goo Between Your Ears

27th March, 2008 183

Quacks like to tell us that their healing arts are thousands of years old and based on ancient principles that have withstood the test of time. Like most things in their advertising spiel, it is a canard and does not bear any resemblance to the truth. Reiki, Reflexology, Osteopathy and Chiropractic are around a hundred years old. Homeopathy is about 200 years old and even acupuncture as we know it [read more…]

The Vets Who Make People Feel Better

22nd March, 2008 43

Some years ago, a well meaning but utterly deluded friend gave me a book entitled Natural Remedies For Your Cat by Christopher Day. It is a slightly disturbing tome that appears to recommend homeopathic remedies for pretty much everything – from fleas to gunshot wounds. Rational cat lovers might find this book pretty disturbing. In many ways, it is a classic homeopathy text. It sees homeopathy as verging on the [read more…]

Should Cochrane Call for More Research Into Homeopathy?

1st March, 2008 14

The Cochrane Collaboration is an independent network of volunteers, funded only by donations, that collate systematic reviews of the evidence base for healthcare interventions. You can go online and view for yourself the current best thinking on how effective various treatments are. It is an important resource. (And you can help making it free throughout the EU by signing here.)Cochrane does not just cover conventional treatments, but also reviews alternative [read more…]

A Simple Challenge to Homeopaths

7th December, 2007 288

Homeopaths are feeling under threat at the moment and are scrambling around wondering what to do about it. I think there are a number of things they could do: most importantly, they should better manage their own business by showing that they respect the boundaries of what they can reasonably assume is good practice, e.g. stop the dangerous nonsense of believing that they can do anything about dangerous conditions such [read more…]