Just a few days after Psychic Cancer Healer, Adrian Pengelly, appeared on the BBC consumer affairs programme, Watchdog, he was the subject of a particularly glowing report in the Daily Mail. Pengelly had been accused of giving dangerous suggestions to people with cancer. Not only did he say on film that he had a 60-65% success rate with his healing hands, he also said that the chances were better if [read more…]
Just a few days before Andrew Wakefield appears before the GMC disciplinary body on charges of misconduct, a front page article in the Observer makes fresh claims of links between the MMR vaccine and autism. In a separate interview in the same newspaper, Dr Wakefield says that he ‘told the truth all along’. He rather remarkably compares himself with Vaclav Havel, ‘As Vaclav Havel once said: “Follow the man who [read more…]
Those of you who have read my last blog entry might be under the impression that I believe the Daily Mail is a deeply ignorant and offensive paper that panders to its bigoted readers’ prejudices and does nothing but promote its right wing individualistic nonsense. Furthermore, I may have left the impression that the Daily Mail is little more than a conduit for alternative medicine fraudsters who use the rag [read more…]
The Quackometer has been up and running for just about a year and has seen some serious traffic increases over the past six months. Starting off with just a few hits per day, the daily unique visits now stand in the many hundreds, with a peak recently of several thousand. Cripes! What started off as a bit of a bored joke has now grown into a proper web site. So, [read more…]
A criticism often levied at the quackometer is that it is very broad brush. Fair enough. It is often quite general in what it says, but it is only a bit a web script after all. The quackometer is intended to be a spring board into the exploration of health claims. Improvements in the new year should make this easier. However, the central premise behind the quackometer is that when [read more…]
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 [read more…]
Copyright © 2024 | MH Magazine WordPress Theme by MH Themes