One of the main problems in the UK is that there is no joined up approach to dealing with the type of fraud and issues posed by quackery. If a claim is made in print media then you can complain to the Advertising Standards Authority. But if it is on the web then you may have a little more difficulty. Trading Standards operate within local councils are are primarily set up to deal with dodgy builders and fly-by-night tour operators. The web crosses these boundaries and finding a trading address may be hard. If you are worried about multi-national operations then you really have problems. Respectable companies like Google or e-Bay flout anti-quackery laws in the UK with impunity.

Take Bionetics: a company run from Camberley in Surrey. The company sells a hair testing process and claims to be able to diagnose and treat the underlying causes of many illnesses from a few strands of hair. We have seen Patrick Holford, with his Food for the Brain ‘charity’, make similar claims, but Bionetics take it one stage further into deep quack land by claiming they are measuring the ‘energies’ in the hair follicles and can measure ‘toxins’, pathogens, food allergies, and nutritional needs. It is the same scam as Hair Mineral Analysis but ‘new-aged’ up a bit with talk of applied kiniesiology and that old black box of nonsense, radionics.

The American Medical Association condemn similar practices as just a fraudulent way of selling mineral supplements. And so we see Bionetics offering a load of food supplements to correct your imbalances with some magic herbal and homeopathy pills. Customers using the service get doubly fleeced: first, on the test fee (£48-£78); and then on the subsequent course of useless pills you are supposed to take. If you are unfortunate enough to be ‘diagnosed’ with a food intolerance or allergy then you may be advised to take unnecessary and potentially harmful dietary changes.

Last year, someone complained to the ASA about Bionetics and they were found to be making untruthful and unsubstantiated claims,

The ASA noted the positive customer testimonials and the training undertaken by the supervising practitioner. Nevertheless, we considered that, without robust clinical evidence to support them, the claims that Bionetics methods of hair testing could “establish whether or not your body has become intolerant to 123 of the most common problem foods and ingredients” and “report on … accumulations of toxins, problem pathogens and nutritional deficiencies” were not justified. We concluded that testimonials alone were not sufficient to substantiate the efficacy of the testing methods and told Bionetics to consult the CAP Copy Advice team before advertising the test again.

Well, that told them. The action that had to be taken by Bionetics was that ‘the ad should not be repeated in its current form.’ Whilst this is obviously the right finding, the decision makes essentially no difference to what Bionetics can do with their business. They can still advertise in print, but just have to be little more careful with their wording in the future, and of course the ruling makes no difference to what they can claim online. In short, Bionetics are free to carry on trading with a untruthful and unsubstantiated business that sells gobbledygook and nonsense to the public.

If you want an idea of the nonsense that Bionetics are peddling then their ’science’ page is a good start,

The birth of Newtonian physics heralded a change in conventional medical thinking. Newton’s laws related only to physical matter, and ignored the “energy” factor. Opinion of the day backed Newton’s theories and modern medicine as we know it was born.

Therapies that could not easily be explained by reference to Newton became portrayed as quackery.
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First, is the now generally held view that the cause of many of today’s most common medical problems can not be explained by conventional Newtonian theories.

So, Newton had nothing to say about energy? That will be news to physicists. And medical therapies that do not use F=ma are quackery? Utter gobbledygook.

And, the best bit,

First fact – scientists have now proved that the basic component of the universe is energy, and not physical matter. Quantum physics has replaced the Newtonian belief that the smallest building blocks of all matter are physical objects – protons and neutrons, and proved that spinning energy vortices are actually at the source. Everything is based on energy.

Second fact – scientists have proved that collections of atoms (molecules) all radiate their own energy patterns or vibrations. Everything, living or not, including our bodies and everything in them, radiates a unique energy pattern.

Third fact – scientists have proved that the body constantly communicates both internally and with the outside world through the interaction of these energy patterns. Experiments have shown that protein receptors on the cell membrane pass signals to the nucleus (DNA) when stimulated by external energy signals.

I wonder who wrote all of that? Its only intention can be to bamboozle since it is just comic book physics, innacurate and unrelated to anything medical whatsoever.

Since trading in nutritional supplements, homeopathy and herbal remedies is legal, the problem with this site revolves around the claims made regarding their diagnostic techniques and their ability to tell you which of these ‘remedies’ you ‘need’. (Answer: none). Most trading standards officers find this whole area totally alien to them. They are much more likely to be clued up on the ins and outs of extended warranty or the return of faulty goods. A ripped off pensioner with a badly tarmaced drive is an obvious injustice. Quackery is a more insidious form of harm and more difficult to pin down.

If someone was to pay me to police the quacks of the world (where are you Big Pharma and World Government when I need you?) I would set up a Minority Report style control room and I would wear a techno-glove to move quackometer screens around my transparent display wall. I would mash up my quackometer scan results with Google Earth and direct black helicopters full of elite troops into the homes of quacks, arrest them and force them to work as orderlies in the laundry rooms of large hospitals for the rest of their natural lives. Mwa ha ha ha.

In the meantime, we must rely on Consumer Direct.

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In addition, the quack explanation can expect to be long and superficially plausible, backed up with many obscure references and valid science. Checking this lot is often tedious and time consuming, and can be very hard if you are not familiar with the underlying science anyway. Giving up straight away is usually a mistake as the first dib into examining the explanation usually reveals a castle in the air.

We saw abuse of quantum theory in my last blog entry, where life after death was being ‘proved’ by recourse to ‘complex’ quantum ideas. Anyone who has really studied physics will know that links between the microscopic world of quantum theory and big chunks of matter (like people) are riddled with difficulties, but fortunately for the quack those people are few and far between.

Occasionally, more obscure areas of science are recruited to explain a piece of quackery. I was recently debating the merits of Reiki (healing by the ‘energy’ in hands) and had a ‘proof’ thrust upon me. I was told that Toni Bunnell was a lecturer in physiology at Hull University and had written a paper on A Tentative Mechanism for Healing. (10 Canards)It was difficult to know where to start with this tentative mechanism, but one area caught my attention. Here are a few important bits…

Studies have also shown that during healing the healer’s alpha brainwaves synchronise with those of the healee, so both will be resonating at the same frequency (sympathetic resonance). In other words, channeling energy through the healer and to the healee involves both being in the a state.

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Alpha is also the home of the window frequency known as the Schuman Resonance, which is the vibrational frequency of the earth’s electromagnetic field (emf). This means that the brain waves of a person in the alpha state will resonate in sympathy with the earth’s emf producing constructive interference which amplifies the vibration. This might explain how healers (having tuned into the healee) are able to draw on energy (universal energy source?) from outside themselves i.e. channel energy through them to the healee.

What was this Schuman Resonance? Could there be anything in this? I had never heard of this resonance before. So a quick google returns some startling results – thousands of quackery pages all going on about amazing things like the Earth loosing its magnetic field as predicted by prophesy. However, despite the mumbo-jumbo, the resonace is real and describes the way the Earth’s atmosphere between the ground and the ionosphere acts like a huge cavity where standing radio waves can be set up. The frequency of the resonances depend on the height of the ionosphere on any particular day.

So what has the Schumann Resonance got to do with Reiki? Well nothing as far as I can see. Bunnell’s mechanism only works if the radio-wave resonances really area ‘universal energy source’ that has real healing affects on the human body, and any suggested evidence or theoretical reason for this to be true is completely absent. The reader, as far as I can see, is just supposed to be impressed with all the talk of alpha waves and resonances and ‘tuning in’ and not to appreciate that all this is just random scientific words strung together meaning nothing.

The whole article is full of such stuff and could keep a blog going for weeks. One of my other favourite passages was,

As the body is thought not to consist of dense matter but rather vortices of energy spinning continuously, the boundary between the physical body and the etheric body becomes less distinct.

Spinning energy vortices? They ought to be easy to detect! And how does this ‘fact’ make my ‘etheric’ and ‘physical’ body boundaries less distinct? No idea what that means.

I also have no idea whether Dr Toni Bunnell PhD knows this is nonsense or is sincerely trying to explain something she is interested in. No responses to my email.

I hope Dr Toni uses slightly more conventional techniques than Schumann enhanced reiki on her main passion – the healing and rehabilitation of injured and sick wild hedgehogs. I wish reiki really could be used here – a hands-off approach to healing hedgehogs is surely going to reduce injuries from those nasty prickles.

Time to shnuffle off.

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