This mass participation turned a near hopeless case for Singh under the absurd English libel system into a victory and a total humiliation for the chiropractors. It was a great example of what Clay Shirky describes in his book Here Comes Everybody of how the internet can bring together like minded people to collaborate on creating previously unthinkable change.

It is likely that a US company called Doctor’s Data (DDI) is going to be facing similar scrutiny as it is has decided to sue the website Quackwatch for libel. Stephen Barrett has been very critical of DDI and has written that the diagnostic health tests it provides are used to defraud patients. One test in particular stood out for his criticism where patients are given a “provoking agent” that flushes out heavy metals into the urine. A urine test is then analysed by DDI and the concentration of heavy metals is compared with standards. Except the standards used are for patients who have not had the provoking agent. The levels of metals are going to be much higher than normal and this ‘elevated result’ is then used to sell expensive and unnecessary treatments. These tests are particularly popular with doctors in the US who advocate chelation for the treatment of autism. It is a bogus treatment and such laboratory tests provide an artificial sense of urgency and validation.

Doctor’s Data asked Stephen Barrett to remove his articles discussing these urine tests as they were “false, fraudulent, defamatory or otherwise not truthful”. Dr Barrett replied asking for clarification as to what specifically he had written that was not correct or fair opinion. Doctor’s Data did not respond but instead has now simply filed suit.

This is tragically familiar. When the Society of Homeopaths threatened me, I asked them to detail their concerns. I got no response. The chiropractors also asserted they had a ‘plethora’ of evidence to back up their claims when they sued Simon Singh. They withheld the plethora – and when it was finally released, it was quickly shown to be worth nothing.

Pursuing a court case rather than discussing evidence does not make Doctor’s Data look the good guys in this episode. Quackwatch would appear to have some very serious concerns about how their tests are used to mislead people into expensive and unnecessary treatments. If DDI could defend the selling of these tests against these complaints then it is surprising that they do not. Looking at their web site, Doctor’s Data would appear to be a respectable laboratory and yet they happily promote a number of bogus tests.

I can confidently label these treatments as bogus because I have researched and written about some of them before. DDI also offer Hair Analysis as a way of assessing nutritional status. This is simply not possible to do in any meaningful way. As I have explained, to measure the mineral content of hair and then draw conclusions that lead to intervention recommendations (such as supplementing with pills) is not possible given the state of knowledge we have about how hair mineral levels relate to possible deficiencies. And yet, this is precisely what nutritionists do. They use these tests to give scientific plausibility to their recommendations and their customers purchase expensive supplements ‘tailored’ to their ‘nutritional status’ as revealed by the tests.

And if we in the UK think this a peculiar US phenomenon, we should note that DDI operate in Europe too. Their testimonial page for their “comprehensive testing for the treatment of autism” offers some feedback from “luminaries in this field of medicine.”

One such “luminary” is Dr Jean Monro, MB, BS, MRCS, LRCP, FAAEM, DIBEM, MACOEM, Medical Director of the  Breakspear Hospital in Hemel Hempstead.

Dr Munro is not unknown to the Quackometer. We have seen how the private hospital treats people with ‘electrosensitivity’ (a condition where people falsely attribute symptoms such as headaches to the presence of mobile phones and mains cabling) by subjecting them to strange  Eastern European magnetic therapy devices and using unreliable diagnostic tests to see if things are ‘working’. I have also documented how Breakspear  treats allergies with special injections on the basis of bizarre, pseodoscientific and homeopathic reasoning.

Breakspear also offers treatments for autism. Part of this expensive programme is chelation to remove supposed high levels of heavy metals. Breakspear states that it regularly tests urine during chelation to look at metal levels – precisely the sort test that is at issue here. Breakspear tell us that the test is “evaluated at independent accredited laboratories”.

In Jean Munro’s testimony on the DDI web page she says,

Breakspear Hospital and its antecedents have been practicing in the field of environmental medicine, allergy and nutritional medicine since the late 1970s. Throughout this entire period we have worked with Doctor’s Data Inc. Stool tests and investigations for heavy metals through urine tests have been the mainstays of our management of patients. The service we receive is excellent with results set out superbly and with expert advice available from Doctor’s Data’s scientific advisors whenever requested. Having had this experience and backup, we can now provide a service to any practitioner in the UK, including practitioners helping to treat children on the autistic spectrum and patients with Aspergers syndrome who will benefit from this laboratory service.

Munro does not hide the central importance of urine testing in the “management of patients”.

In 1990 Granada Television’s ‘World in Action’ programme produced a documentary that focused on the activities of Dr Monro and the Breakspear hospital. The programme alleged that the Breakspear Hospital in Hertfordshire has been “the subject of allegations of wrong diagnosis, useless treatment and a death following the failure of treatments. It is run by Dr Jean Monro who charges extortionate fees for bizarre treatments.”

Munro sued.

The programme makers had to apologise for stating that Munro took “wrongful advantage of her patients’ vulnerability”. Their other charges stood.

The problem with many libel cases in the UK is that you are often as a defendant pushed into proving a state of mind, much as Simon Singh nearly had to. To show that Munro deliberately misleads and defrauds requires an impossible peering into her soul to understand her motives. An aggrieved party can always claim that they are honestly going about their business, even if the subsequent analysis of the science or facts may prove them wrong. Being wrong but honest is not the same as being fraudulent.

And that is the problem that Quackwatch may face, if any. Barrett has stated that these tests are used to defraud patients. But it is quite possible, and indeed we must assume for the moment, that all people involved are acting with what they believe to be honesty. The laboratory may well be offering analytical tests to the best of their ability. It is not up to the laboratory to dictate how doctors use the data. The doctors and nutritionists who use the tests may be mistakenly using them to spot deficiencies, excesses and problems that need correcting. They may well have been trained to interpret the tests in inappropriate ways. The end result, however, is indistinguishable from fraud. Patients are being falsely led to believe they have a problem that needs expensive intervention to correct. They may hand over thousands of dollars as a result of being misled.

Patients are being badly let down by regulatory authorities and governments that allow this chain of deception (intentional or otherwise) to take place.

We can see another clear UK example from the Doctor’s Data web site where. One other “luminary” is a Nutritional Therapist called Antony J. Haynes BA(Hons), Dip ION from London. Haynes says of the lab,

In my professional opinion, Doctor’s Data, Inc. (DDI) not only offers an excellent service, but also has the finest and most up-to-date scientific laboratory assessments available anywhere. DDI’s elemental, amino acid and comprehensive stool analysis test results have proven invaluable in helping offer the most appropriate therapy to those with ASD. I’d recommend DDI to colleagues and patients alike.

Haynes appears to work for a nutritional supplement company, lectures in many undergraduate colleges and has had over 11,000 ‘patients’. He states that he is registered with the Complementary & Natural Healthcare Council (Ofquack) although I cannot find his name on their list. (Although to be fair, I have little faith in Ofquack’s IT skills). He was trained at Patrick Holford’s ION where hair mineral analysis is taught as a legitimate technique for assessing nutrient needs. Haynes is not alone. It is quite possible to find people on Ofquack’s register who do undertake such tests and then sell pills on the back of these meaningless results.

And here is where the real failure is. Ofquack does not see such misleading claims as an impairment to fitness to practice. As Simon Perry uncovered, it appears to be acceptable for such claims to be made if they have been trained to do so and that no deliberate attempt to mislead has been made. The best that the government can do in protecting people from dodgy tests is to set up a voluntary registration body that feels it cannot tell someone off if they have been told to do the tests by bigger boys and girls.

It is a failure in the US too. As Kimball Atwood puts it on the Science Based Medicine blog,

Yes, it is true that very few people or places provide the type of information that [Barrett] does. That’s why I linked to so many of his articles from my own recent post. You can’t find that kind of information on virtually any mainstream website that claims to give reliable information about “complementary and alternative medicine”: not on WebMD, not onInteliHealth, not on the NCCAM website—even though most people would probably expect to find it in those places, if they were aware of it at all. You won’t find on any of those sites, for example, that being “a CLlA-certified company in full compliance with all state and federal regulatory and CLlA standards” is no guarantee against peddling bogus diagnostic tests.

It is a scandal that Quackwatch has had to highlight these concerns nearly alone. Barrett is now paying the price of speaking out. And he is one of the few voices warning the public to be aware. Stephen Barrett deserves to be supported. You can donate here.

More importantly, let Doctor’s Data know that deciding to sue without addressing the science is not a risk free and low cost option for shutting up critics. Write about the case. Examine its merits. Blog. Tweet. Comment. These tests are a menace and largely unregulated. Perhaps DDIs actions could shine some unexpected light into this murky world, and maybe, just maybe, someone will be watching.

Related posts:

1. The Breakspear Hospital and Antigen Vaccines Let’s jump off the deep end again with the Breakspear Hospital. Previously, we saw Dr Jean Monro using unproven allergy tests with highly questionable electromagnetic ‘therapies’ to treat food allergies....
2. A Carnival of Bogus* Chiropractic 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...
3. Pulling My Hair Out or, The Role of Mineral Hair Analysis in the Sale of Food Supplements initially posted on Holford Watch. Patrick Holford has set up a charity. Not poorly, fluffy kittens or...

Next up, a way of ‘treating’ allergies with their neutralising vaccines. I’ll use their own words to describe what this is all about:

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1. The Breakspear Hospital and Electromagnetic Therapy The development of new forms of quackery continues with the publication of the latest research from the University of Essex showing yet again that mobile mast radiation was unlikely...
2. The Quackometer: Banned! At last, the Quackometer has been banned by the Net Authority. I feel justified and vindicated. This website has been investigated by Net Authority, and has been found to...
3. "Hands-off" Healing of Hedgehogs Quackery is often accompanied with grand associations with complex science, the harder the better. Usually, quantum theory is the science of choice: it has plenty of counter-intuitive results, is riddled...

This is generating quackfusion – a smog of confuddled quackery, obfuscation and confusion that allows the quacks to move in and take advantage. The quackometer has been following the growing list of dodgy products and services entering the market, and its getting bigger week by week.

The web site electrosensitivity.org, run by Troy Knight, has its own theories about cause.

Troy says,

There is a strong link between chemicals toxicity [sic] and electrical sensitivities, i.e. that the latter may well be a by-product of the former. The UK based Breakspear Hospital reports that when one removes the chemical sensitivities from the body, the electrical sensitivities disappear also.

It looks like the Breakspear needs a little investigation by the quackometer.

The Breakspear is a private hospital based near Hemel Hemstead in the UK. It is run by Dr Jean Monro and specialises in ‘allergies and environemental illnesses’. The hospital boasts a pharmacy full of vitamin pills, which you can, of course, order online. It claims to treat autism spectrum disorders, food allergies and ME. It offers nutritional therapy, chelation therapy and single MMR jabs (with the option of a pre-injection detox). It will remove your dental amalgams, give you antigen vaccines (which we will have to look at later) and offers something called electromagnetic therapy.

Now, these sorts of conditions and treatments are often associated with quackery. For example, chelation therapy has been seriously criticised as a dangerous quack remedy for autism. An electrosensitive self-refering themselves here could risk dishing out thousands for absolutely worthless treatments. Is the Breakspear Hospital just a quack hospital? Let’s look at one of the therapies on offer in a bit more detail.

The Breakspear gives details of a therapy is offers, unique in the UK by all accounts, called Electromagnetic Therapy. It is, of course, ironic that electromagnetic fields both cause all sorts of illness as well as cure all sorts of illness. But, Monro is quite specific about a number of conditions that she claims to be able to treat.

The web site starts off,

It is believed that pulsed electromagnetic fields are able to rectify the abnormal responses that people have to everyday food and chemical encounters. This is critical in the management of patients with chronic inflammatory disorders.

Now, the first sentence is noticeable for its use of weasel words. ‘It is believed…’. We obviously have to ask, ‘Who is it that believes?’ Looking in the Cochrane Library fails to yield the ‘believers’. In fact, we can quickly find a lot of unbelievers. Quackwatch considers such therapies to be dubious and it is easy to see why. Just as there is little reason to believe that low intensity, non-ionising electromagnetic radiation can cause significant harm to you, nor can it magically cure you of illnesses. Breakspear give a long list of things that ‘it is believed’ can be cured by the therapy.

But hold on, Monro appears to offer her own evidence on the site. The Breakspear hospital has conducted its own studies. I will repeat their study in nearly its entirety,

At Breakspear, we undertook research into electromagnetic field therapy using pulsed electromagnetic fields. Our small scale test was to assess whether patients, after undergoing pulsed magnetic therapy, would react to foods with the same intensity as previously experienced.

The first step was to conduct the ALCAT blood test for sensitivities on each of the 5 patients. This involved taking a blood sample and sending it to the AMTL Corp laboratories for evaluation on the 100 foods on the food panel. We then exposed the 5 patients to 1 hour’s treatment on our Magnoter D26 and conducted a second ALCAT test on each of the 5 patients. We continued to treat the patients with the pulsed magnetic therapy for 1 hour per day for 1 week and then repeated the ALCAT test for the third and final time.

Of the 5 patients tested, the results for Patient E were not able to be interpreted. The results of the panel of 100 foods for the 4 interpreted patients are as follows:

Patient A— initially reacted to 25 of 100 foods. After 1 hour’s treatment, the number of reactive foods was reduced to 22. After 1 week of therapy, the number of reactive foods was reduced to 11 out of 100.

Patient B— initially reacted to 30 of 100 foods. After 1 hour’s treatment, the number of reactive foods was reduced to 21. After 1 week of therapy, the number of reactive foods was reduced to 7 out of 100.

Patient C— initially reacted to 22 of 100 foods. After 1 hour’s treatment, the number of reactive foods was reduced to 14. After 1 week of therapy, the number of reactive foods was reduced to 9 out of 100.

Patient D— initially reacted to 11 of 100 foods. After 1 hour’s treatment, the number of reactive foods increased to 12. After 1 week of therapy, the number of reactive foods increased to 16 out of 100. We hypothesise that Patient D had developed a viral infection between the post and final tests, which may explain
the lack of improvement measured.

The results clearly show that 3 of the 4 patients show a remarkable improvement on the ALCAT results after receiving electromagnetic therapy.

Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha. Stop it. You are killing me.

Calm down. Let’s pull this apart. It won’t take long. Firstly, there is no control group. We have nothing to compare these patients against. How do we know any ‘improvements’ were due to the therapy? Next, drawing conclusions from four patients is extremely risky. Drawing conclusions from such small numbers might even make Andrew Wakefield blush. If the ALCAT diagnostic test is not good, then we might just be seeing random noise. The ALCAT test might just be giving out random results for all we know.

To claim that 75% of patients might show ‘remarkable improvements’ just cannot be justified from this study. It is nonsense and it is difficult to believe that it is serious. This study is marketing blurb designed to pull in punters.

What is interesting is the device used to do the treatment, the impressive sounding Magnoter D26. At first glance, it looks like a typical hospital gurney with a wide plastic hoop stuck on top. Plug it into a box with some dials on it and you have a complete healing system. The device has visual echoes of certain diagnostic imaging kit found in hospitals. It might look the part, but is it actually doing anything?

The device appears to be manufactured by a Polish company called MARP Medical Electronics Ltd. The company makes devices that claim to offer ‘electrotherapy, magnetictherapy and laser therapy’. There are no claims on their site for what conditions these therapies may be appropriate. Magnetotherapy is listed as an ‘unnaturalistic method’ by Quackwatch. I have said before that magnetic therapies are almost undoubtedly quackery. So, what is this device doing? A Google search reveals a lot of Polish web sites with the Breakspear featuring prominently in English search results. Not widely used then. The whole concept of magnetic therapy is highly doubtful. Since we have little idea of what any biological mechanism might be for healing, then any therapy protocols applied (field strength, frequency, duration etc.) are just plain guess work. With the sort of ‘clinical trials’ mentioned above as our best evidence, then the therapy is being given arbitrarily. No wonder it is considered plain old quackery.

But what about the ‘results’ above where food intolerances appear to decrease in 3 patients? The ALCAT machine needs looking at. Well, an NHS web site says that ‘no study has ever shown the test to be accurate’. A published article from the University of Zurich concluded ‘results are not reproducible when subject to rigorous testing and do not correlate with clinical evidence of allergy’. Those South African vitamin pill pushers, Bioharmony, recommend it and say that the ALCAT is recommended by Patrick Holford. I think that is all the evidence we need to know that the technique is utter rubbish.

So, we have a therapeutic technique that is widely associated with quackery, treating illnesses that are not always widely recognised, using diagnostic techniques that are unreliable and based on laughable clinical evidence of efficacy. Its difficult to call it anything other than quackery.

Breakspear themselves give an excuse as to why there is no better evidence,

Since most of the patients fund their own treatment, it would not be appropriate to provide placebo treatments or other comparative treatments that our medical team do not consider to be the most appropriate clinical management for their patients.

In other words, clinical trials might interrupt the flow of cash from patients and risk proving the technique inadequate.

I am not the first to question the treatments on offer at the Breakspear. The University of Birmingham Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility (ARIF) have their own concerns and I will discuss these in a later post.

Interestingly, in 1990 Granada Television’s ‘World in Action’ programme produced a documentary called ‘the Allergy Business’. It focused on the activities of Dr Monro and the Breakspear hospital and said,

The Breakspear Allergy Hospital in Hertfordshire has been the subject of allegations of wrong diagnosis, useless treatment and a death following the failure of treatments. It is run by Dr Jean Monro who charges extortionate fees for bizarre treatments.

The programme was so damaging that the hospital shut down for a while. Dr Monro sued Granada and they had to apologize four years later for suggesting that Dr Monro took “wrongful advantage of her patients’ vulnerability”. Their other charges stood. I guess that attributing motives is always hard. Dr Monro might truly believe that her treatments work and are in the best interest of her private patients, even if others find that view is hard to support.

Nearly twenty years later, the Breakspear is still offering the same sort of unorthodox treatments to privately paying customers. Some placebo effect might be forthcoming for placebo responsive conditions. But is this worth thousands of pounds? A new class of prospective customers is now emerging in terms of electrosensitivity sufferers. Without any clinical diagnosis available for this condition, any understanding of what might relieve it and the best evidence to date suggesting it is psychological in origin, it is the perfect condition where you might take wrongful advantage of a patients vulnerability.

Related posts:

1. The Breakspear Hospital and Antigen Vaccines Let’s jump off the deep end again with the Breakspear Hospital. Previously, we saw Dr Jean Monro using unproven allergy tests with highly questionable electromagnetic ‘therapies’ to treat food allergies....
2. Doctor’s Data and Bogus Tests This week in The Lawyer, Robert Dougans and David Allen Green wrote about the emerging phenomenon of ‘wiki litigation’ where there is large scale scrutiny and participation in legal...
3. That’s It for Tunbridge Wells Homeopathic Hospital Reported today in Pulse, Campaigners look to have lost their fight to save a leading homeopathic hospital, in a landmark case that accelerates the treatment’s deepening crisis over NHS funding.West...