Details here.

But, the big event will take place in London, Saturday 30th of January where I will be proud to share the stage with Simon Singh and Professor John Garrow, founder member of HealthWatch. I think tickets will need to be booked, see details below on how to do this.

Really looking forward to meeting you all soon.

CFIUK/SPES PRESENT

TRICK OR TREATMENT:

ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE ON TRIAL

Saturday, 30^th January 2010

11am-3pm

A day discussing alternative medicine, with speakers:

11am SIMON SINGH, author of Trick or Treatment?: Alternative Medicine on Trial, currently being sued by British Chiropractic Association.

12pm ANDY LEWIS, runs Quackometer on the web.

2pm PROFESSOR JOHN GARROW, founder member of the charity “HealthWatch” which promotes proper testing of the health claims of all therapies, alternative or orthodox.

Venue: Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, Holborn, London WC1R 4RL – Main Hall. Lunch 1-2pm. Sandwiches can be bought on site.

£10 on the door. Free to Friends of CFI UK, PLUS GLHA, SPES, BHA, NEW HUMANIST SUBSCRIBERS.

To book go to www.cfiuk.org and hit button “support cfiuk” and follow instructions. Credit and debit cards welcome. Alternatively send a cheque payable to ‘Center for Inquiry London” to: Executive Director Suresh Lalvani, Center for Inquiry London, PO Box 49097 Centre for Inquiry London N11 9AX, and include names of those coming, phone number, return address, etc.

Related posts:

1. We would be the Sceptics answer to Jedward, if I had any Hair.   Thanks to Stephen Law at the Centre of Inquiry for posting this video of myself and Simon Singh, just after our talks at Conway Hall. The day started with...
2. Simon Singh to Appeal Bogus Decision   “The law has no place in scientific disputes” Simon Singh is to appeal the absurd and astonishingly illiberal ruling made by Sir David Eady in the libel case...
3. MHRA accused of “clothing naked quackery” Last Wednesday, I gave a talk at the newly formed Coventry Skeptics in the Pub on the ‘Persistence of Delusion’ – why some alternative medicines appear to thrive. One of...

It was something of a shock then to see Randi write an article on his site that questioned the scientific consensus that man made activities are responsible for climate change and that dramatic intervention is required. Such views, we tend to think, are the preserve of the ‘denialist’, loon or vested interest. How could Randi do such thing?

Firstly, of course it is perfectly respectable to cast a skeptical eye over the apparent consensus of global warming. There are indeed undoubtedly inflated claims around, and we need to be on our guard. The activities of lobby groups, such as Greenpeace, have done much to damage the scientific credibility of the green agenda over the years. However, the science community has acted independently of these groups and the consensus has emerged from within rather than channeled and gilded by the usual environmental loud mouths.

However, it was not that Randi questioned the science so much, as that his article was full of so many quite obvious logical fallacies. The Master of Spotting a Phony Argument from a Hundred Paces appeared to fall for his own flawed rhetoric. He appeared to use, astonishingly, arguments from personal incredulity, and arguments from popularity. But, we must not be too harsh here, for there are very important differences between the style of Randi’s arguments and those of the more foaming end of the climate discussion. We see plenty of places in his argument where he lays forward his own lack of knowledge, low expertise and his undoubted capacity to be wrong. I do not believe for a moment that his mind is made up and that he is quite capable of receiving arguments that would show him he had “erred in coming to a certain conclusion”.

But this does leave us with a rather interesting question. How can we, as non experts, but sceptics, come to sound beliefs about areas where we do not have the training, experience and qualifications? Must we remain silent outside of our own fields, or are there reliable ways of coming to good conclusions? This is not an academic exercise as it is precisely what we are asking our politicians to do if we want them to act over issues like global warming.

Looking at Randi’s arguments, he appears to place significant weight on the fact that a group, the Petition Project, has created an online petition that has attracted “some 32,000 scientists, 9,000 of them PhDs” attacking the consensus position. Against this he weighs his distrust of academics who “are strongly influenced by the need to be accepted, to kowtow to peer opinion, and to “belong” in the scientific community.” Randi has previously made his contempt clear about many academics – and it is quite understandable. His exposing of Uri Geller was in the face of people with PhDs who had concluded he was for real. He was used by John Maddox of Nature to investigate the spurious homeopathic experiments of academic Jacques Benveniste. Indeed, as Ben Goldacre has so succinctly put it as his first law of bullshit dynamics: “There is no imaginable proposition so absurd that you cannot find at least one person, somewhere in the world, with a PhD or professional post, who is happy to endorse it.” His distrust of the academic is deep – and rightly so.

But that, of course, does not mean that all academics cannot be trusted and that all expertise is flawed. As Ben Goldacre might say, having a PhD is just a risk factor for being correct. Randi is faced with two camps, both who appear to contain plenty of academics. How do we decide who is the most credible?

The philosopher Bertand Russell wrote a very famous essay, On the Value of Scepticism, on just this problem. Russell too was concerned about how we should evaluate the opinion of experts when we have no direct understanding of their field. His basic ‘radical’ idea was that “that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true”. But he saw the problem was that we must on many occasions bow to the opinions of experts. How can we do that without falling foul of an appeal to authority – a basic no-no of any good sceptic?

He came up with the following rules of thumb:

The scepticism that I advocate amounts only to this:

(1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain;

(2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and

(3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend his judgment.

These propositions may seem mild, yet, if accepted, they would absolutely revolutionize human life.

The problem of who to believe has now shifted to one of how to recognise true expertise and how to understand the degree of unanimity between them. Perhaps, Randi’s mistake was to ignore the obvious expertise of climate scientists and to weigh too heavily the inferred ‘expertise’ of a group of ‘scientists’ some of whom just happened to have PhDs (in what, we do not know.)

For me, as a non climate scientist, I have to recognise that condition (1) appears to all intents and purposes to be fulfilled on the issue of climate change. When I hear people challenging the consensus, it is almost invariably from people who cannot truly be counted as experts. We are left with a few mavericks outside of the consensus and they do not look like enough to challenge position (1) to me.

Now, as with all rules of thumb, this does not mean that the experts are right. We still have to guarded and watch the scientific process as it gathers new data. It is quite possible for a consensus to be wrong. As sceptics, we must not drop our guard. But for now, it does indeed look as if we must accept that global warming is real and that we must act, given the very strong unanimity of experts in this field. Russell’s rules would compel us to accept that the challengers of the climate consensus cannot be treated as if they are right and that we should proceed (with due sceptical caution) with the experts.

And as sceptics, we must treat Russell’s rules with the full application of thought. Scepticism does not lend itself too well to rules of thumb as it is the exceptions that can catch us out. Should I accept the total consensus of homeopathic experts that their sugar pills are an amazing panacea? No of course not. I must think about what it means to be a ‘homeopathic expert’. Do these experts have coherent and consilient theory of what is happening? No. Do these experts have a reproducible and rigorous data set that shows a homeopathic effect? No. Homeopaths are pseudo-experts with few of the attributes of genuine experts. They lack academic credibility and look more like a group of similarly deluded individuals whose arguments cannot withstand a moment’s scrutiny.

For me, evaluating the claims of homeopaths, chiropractors and the like is useful because it provides a sandpit where we can learn how to spot flawed reasoning and faulty logic without getting too hurt. These skills are valuable in all walks of life; scientific, political and personal. But we must recognize that our sceptical ninja skills are most honed in our domains of comfort. As we step out of those zones, we have to be doubly on our guard that we are not succumbing to the same logical fallacies that we are so usually critical of.

Related posts:

1. Scepticism is the New Rock’n’Roll Last night we held the first evening of the Oxford branch of Skeptics in the Pub. Come 6.15 and the bar we had booked was already filling up. By...
2. George Vithoulkas Makes a Fool of Himself This is a minor one but it is worth a brief post: George Vithoulkas is considered to be one of the top intellectuals in the homeopathic world. Revered for...
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John Grant has written a trio of great books cataloguing various forms of pathological science. The final part of his trilogy was published a few weeks ago: Bogus Science (or, Some People Really Believe These Things) wades through dozens of bizarre ideas that masquerade as science but could not be more divorced from reality. The book kicks of with a history of flat earthers and how such beliefs have persisted though the centuries despite ample and obvious evidence to the contrary.

We are treated to the fascinating story of how Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of evolutionary theory with Darwin, got himself into a nasty tangle with a flat earth fanatic, John Hampden. A public wager of £500 was set by Hampden that challenged anyone to prove the Earth was not flat by showing that a 10km stretch of canal in Cambridgeshire exhibited a curvature. Wallace, being broke at the time, decided to take the candy off the baby. With referees appointed, Wallace placed stakes along the length of the canal with markers placed at identical heights. By looking through a telescope, it should be possible to see the differences in height. After a frustrating start, Wallace was indeed able to show a pole in the centre of the stretch appeared to be higher than poles at each end. Despite the conclusive demonstration, Hampden’s referee, another staunch flat earther, refused to accept this as evidence, blaming the telescope cross-hairs and distorted optics.

What appeared to have been an easy way of getting Wallace out of financial difficulty with a swift  £500 (a lot of money then) began to turn into a complete nightmare. Hampden took Wallace to court and the judge ruled that since wagers on the flatness of the earth held no place in law, then Hampden could have his money back. It then got worse. A campaign of hate was started against Wallace with death threats, libellous letters and circulars aimed at his friends and neighbours. Despite being sent to jail and losing libel cases, Wallace was unable to recover his losses owing to Hampden declaring himself a bankrupt.

The book is full of the idiocies and obsessivenesses of people who believe in the irrational, from Atlantis to faked moon landing, aliens building pyramids, antigravity devices, werewolves, yetis and quantum nonsense. There are, of course, many themes in common: unquestioning self belief, the allure of the mysterious, special knowledge and a refusal to engage with evidence – the themes we see so often in the world of quackery.

But Bogus Science does not cover the whacky world of alternative medicine. For that, we must go to John Grant’s first book in the trilogy: Discarded Science (Ideas that seemed good at the time.) The last chapter gives us a walk through the discarded ideas of medicine, including both the great bogus sciences of chiropractic, acupuncture and homeopathy, but also the lesser known ideas of thanatology, iatrochemistry and focal sepsis.

Most of the book though covers defunct science – stuff that might have been right, but has been superceded, to the more obsessional theories where individual researchers cling to ideas that others cannot replicate, such as the idea that Mars has canals, or the infamous French obsession with N-rays.

  To complete the series, you will also have to buy Corrupted Science (Fraud, ideology and politics in science). This is perhaps the most disturbing book where we find science undermined by ideology, fraud and hoaxes. Here we find religious creationists, military and political ambition, and even just plain deception by scientists unwilling to abandon cherished hypotheses.

Together, these three books make a very comprehensive survey of the world of pseudoscience. The only areas missing, by the authors own admission, are the paranormal and psychic sciences but fortunately Grant hints that a Spooky Science might be on the way.

One of my favourite books of the year, tackles in depth an area covered by Grant – that of cryptozoology. Chris Lavers, wonderful book, The Natural History of Unicorns, looks at the evolving belief in these strange beast over the centuries. Various candidate animals are explored as the source if the myth, from rhinoceroses and narwhals to various species of antelope, cattle and donkey.

The book contains the fascinating story of how the medieval allegorical iconography of the virgin and the unicorn came about. It is well known now how our current ideas of how Mary was a virgin may have been a mistranslation. It is also likely that references in the Bible to unicorns may have come about from Ptolemaic scholars In Egypt  translating the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. When they encountered the horned animal called a reem, they had little idea what this middle Eastern creature was. Unable to come up with a candidate they placed the monoceros there as the closest they could come up with. Translated into Latin, the monoceros became the unicornus. Much more recent attempts to translate the Greek have decided that a reem was probably a wild ox or even an auroch.

Behind many of the myths of the unicorn is a common thread of the medicinal properties of the horn of the beast. A thriving trade existed in Europe with many different species being passed off as a unicorn. The horn could detect poison and so protect its owner from harm. We see that the bones and horns of goats, horses and whales were used to create Unicorn horn. Unfortunately, Lavers concludes that the source of the horn was unfortunately an ape’s runaway brain. But for so long, so common was this trade in medicinal horn that belief in unicorns persisted well into the 19th Century where explorers in Tibet were always told that the beast lived in the next valley on. The constant search into the ‘next valley’ continued well beyond the time when it should have been obvious that no such creature existed.

We see the same story on these pages as homeopaths perpetuate the quest for the source of their magic water. The conclusive experiment is always just one trial away.

One book that is compulsory reading over the coming month is the wonderful Ariane Sherine’s compilation of sceptical writing about Christmas. Far from being a soulless and joyless book, it is a real treat of personal thoughts and experiences of what Christmas now means in a largely secular and almost atheist Britain. Wonderful stuff. Ariane is speaking in a week or so at Oxford Sceptics in the Pub. Can’t wait. Proceeds from the sale of this book go to UK HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust.

All these books (and more) are available by clicking on the images, or going to the quackometer bookstore. A few pence will go to me if you buy one and keep me in mince pies over the festive season.

Related posts:

1. 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...
2. The Depths of Ms McKeith’s Anti-Science It’s been a bad week for Gillian. The anti-quackery blogging brigade have been partaking in bouts of the great British pastime of uncontrolled Schadenfreude (why did we leave it to...
3. The University of Wales is Responsible for Enabling Bogus* Chiropractic Claims to be Made The Simon Singh/BCA libel case is having the unintended consequence of the media being full of reports of the strange beliefs of chiropractors. They are a cult like body of...

Advocates of alternative medicine frequency position themselves against ‘conventional’ medicine by describing it as narrowly focussed on a scientific view of people, lacking in a personal approach and corrupted by the status, money and greed of physicians and drug companies. Such views would appear to be recent reactions to the often dehumanising experience of modern medicine where people appear to be treated like machines, and where doctors are accused of neglecting their patients’ spiritual and emotional needs. Alternative medicine is a call for a more human and personal medicine. However, these themes are not new. Such accusations have deeper roots in history and date back long before the emergence of current medical practice.

John Wesley is best known for his theological activities and the founding of the Methodists. He gave rise to a religious movement with tens of millions of followers. However, his best selling book was not a religious book. He was not just concerned with saving people souls; he also had keen interests in healing their bodies. In 1747 he published a book, Primitive Physic, that listed the ‘easy and natural cures for most diseases’. His medicinal beliefs followed quite closely his religious beliefs. He rejects the authority of the medical ‘priests’, the doctors, and embraces the authority of Nature, just as he called for people to seek a personal understanding of their faith through scripture and not the priesthood. As his theology taught that the Bible was the one reliable source of truth and that we could individually understand it through personal experience, his medicinal approach stated that nature was the source of healing remedies and we could understand what was effective through direct experience of such treatments.

The book is a list of ailments and their corresponding cures, listed in priority. Try the first, and only if that did not work, move onto the second and third.  The emphasis is on cures that could be readily available to most. So, we have honey as a cure for bee stings and, most delightfully, holding a puppy against the stomach as a cure for stomach pains. We find nettles, and cinnamon and onion as staples of the first aid kit.  There are prunes, lemonade and liquorice. A few cures stand out as having many uses – most obviously Wesley had a belief that cold water baths were a near panacea.

For consumption, or TB as we would call it now, his highest priority cure is ‘cold bathing’. Then he advised patents to drink nothing but water and eat nothing but white bread. If that fails, drink milk and sugar candy, or boiled sorrel. Then try milk and beer, ivy leaves, ginger, or even breathing the smell of fresh cut turf. Frankincense next, or beeswax, honey and water cress.

And finally we are told,

In the last stage, fuck a healthy woman daily. This cured my Father.

What more marvellous natural cures could we wish for. And from a Methodist. Wesley does not state if this cure applies to female consumptives too.

(* See comments below for how we might interpret this quote.)

His preface to the cures, evolved through many reprints of the book, outlining his general philosophy of health. Illnesses existed because of our fall from grace. Primitive peoples did not suffer as they had natural cures for all ailments. The newly discovered Americans lived in harmony with their surroundings,

Their diseases are exceedingly few; nor do they often occur by reason of their continual exercise, and (till of late) universal temperance. But if any are sick, or bit by a serpent, or torn by a wild beast, the fathers immediately tell their children what remedy to apply. And ’tis rare that the patient suffers long; those medicines being quick, as well as, generally, infallible.

Wesley is keen to emphasis that a correctly led lifestyle is crucial to a healthy body. Avoid seasoned food and drink lots of water. Avoid coffee and tea, but you may have a small beer. Get plenty of exercise and fresh air. Eat  more vegetables than meat. Read standing up, not sitting down, and do not wear too many clothes.

To John Wesley, the medical elite of the day had gone astray. They were rejecting the natural cures and instead embracing new theories of the mind, body and illness. They were embarking on unfruitful enquiries to find out how the body worked,

As theories increased, simple medicines were more and more disregarded and disused, till, in a course of years, the greater part of them were forgotten, at least in the more polite nations. In the room of these, new ones were introduced, by reasoning, speculative men, and those more and more difficult to be applied, as being more remote from common observation. Hence rules for the application of these, and medical books were immensely multiplied, till at length physic became an abstruse science, quite out of the reach of ordinary men.

And then the accusations of arrogance and profiteering are bound to follow,

Physicians now began to be held In admiration, as persons who were something more than human, and profit attended their employ, as well as honour, so that they had now two weighty reasons for keeping the bulk of mankind at a distance, that they might not pry into the mysteries of their profession. To this end they increased those difficulties by design, which were, in a manner, by accident. They filled their writings with abundance of technical terms, utterly unintelligible to plain men.

Those who understood only how to restore the sick to health, they branded with the name of Empirics. They introduced into practice abundance of compound medicines, consisting of so many ingredients, that it was scarce possible for common people to know which it was that wrought the cure— abundance of exotics, neither the nature nor names of which their own countrymen understood.

Is this the first recorded tirade against Big Pharma? Wesley continues,

Experience shows that one thing will cure most disorders, at least as well as twenty put together. Then why do you add the other nineteen? Only to swell the apothecary’s bill: nay, possibly, to prolong the distemper, that the doctor and he may divide the spoil.

And he then accuses the doctors of producing mixtures of medicines that become useless through their opposite interactions that “joined together destroy life”.

These are strong accusations of corruption and deliberate harm from doctors to their patients in pursuit of profit.

Similar philosophies and views can be found today on many leading alternative health sites and discussion boards. Prince Charles espouses a philosophy healthy lifestyle and personal responsibility with his Foundation for Integrated Health. He tells us,

Responsibility for our health isn’t something we can simply delegate to doctors and medicine.

Factors like fulfilling work, strong communities, the buildings we live in, our relationship with the natural world and the food we eat directly affect our wellbeing.  So the first step in integrated health is helping people to make choices that keep them well and out of the healthcare system. But once somebody is ill, treating their problem with an integrated approach means bringing together mainstream medical science with the best of other traditions. Complementary interventions may range from stress reduction techniques to therapies like acupuncture or nutritional therapy.

Devonshire GP, Dr Michael Dixon,is  one of the main advocates of Charles’s views, and says we must ‘return the soul to medicine’. The “biomedical model based upon stringent definitions of evidence-based medicine” has a  focus on

rapid treatment of symptoms and diseases and identification and treatment of risk factors. However this approach is often not patient-centred and takes little account of the patient’s background, culture, and health beliefs.

The Foundation calls for a ‘Natural Health Service’ and says that “Evidence is at hand to suggest that healthy natural environment around us is as important as drinking pure water and breathing clean air.”

What is quite fascinating is how both Wesley and his modern counterparts quickly appear to undermine themselves with some of the treatments they actually espouse. Natural, they are not. Availability to the common man takes a back seat.  And safety is questionable. Wesley’s favourite treatment, and one he recommends for many ailments, is the process of electrifying patients. Electrification is said to be able to cure a host of problems, including blindness, deafness, gout, leprosy and and the “King’s Evil” (scrofula). Wesley says,

Nor have I have yet known one single instance, wherein it has done harm; so that I cannot but doubt the veracity of those who have affirmed the contrary.

So, it would appear that this was a controversial new therapy based on the recent discoveries of electricity. Obviously a few people had been hurt by this method, a fact that Wesley tries to deny. It is not unsurprising that people were getting hurt by electrifying, as,

The best method is to give fifty, or even hundred small shocks, each time; but let them be so gentle as not to terrify the patient in the least.

Electricity was a new plaything. Quite how a person could control the amount of shock with such limited equipment and understanding is unclear. But, importantly, it is difficult to see how using the latest electric shock treatment on one hand and turnips on the other can both be described as ‘natural’. Natural must be defined in such a way so not as to reflect some sort of ‘state of of natural world’ but merely in opposition to what conventional doctors do.

We see the same thing going in in today’s “Natural Health” movement. The Alliance of Natural Health campaigns for what they say is the right for people to have access to natural remedies,

The use of nature in healthcare is one of our fundamental human rights and we argue that governments should not be able to deprive us of this right.

Our healthy survival depends on us having nutritious foods, clean water, healthy working environments and the ability to take adequate exercise. On top of this we need to manage stress and have good quality social interactions with the people around us. These are the key requirements for good or optimal health – not pharmaceutical drugs

Behind the rhetorical force of the call for healthy lifestyle, it quickly becomes apparent that the Alliance of Natural Health is really a lobby group for the manufacturers of vitamin supplement pills who fear legislation will restrict their rights to sell pills with huge doses of vitamins in them. It is difficult to see how vitamin pills can be described as natural. They are undoubtedly the most highly processed and manufactured way of getting vitamins into people. The campaign tries to frighten people into believing that real natural diets, say consisting of turnips, are not enough for people to get the unnaturally high levels of vitamins the pill sellers say we need.

The Foundation for Integrated Health, again despite its wholesome lifestyle rhetoric, is again a lobby group that has the payload of attempting to deliver a whole range of disproven and nonsensical treatments into the public health care system. The Foundation lobbies for the unnatural theories of homeopaths, acupuncturists and vitamin sales people to be provided at tax payers cost.

It would be tempting to dismiss John Wesley and his Primitive Psychic as just one more form of Eighteenth century quackery, railing at the newly emerging professionalism of the medical world that is embracing enlightenment thinking and rejecting superstition in medicine. It is not that straightforward though. It would be simplistic to see the ‘natural philosopher’ doctors as the fathers of modern medicine and the Empiriks as the unenlightened quacks.

Indeed, it is quite possible to defend Wesley as embracing his own vision of the enlightenment and to be one of the proto-practitioners of evidence based medicine. Strip away the theology and natural rhetoric and you are left with a pragmatic medicine based on a commitment to empirical verification. Wesley is keen to present cures that have been proven in some way. In his preface to the 1760 edition, he adds the word Tried to those cures that he has found to be ‘of the greatest efficacy’. Whilst we may see with our modern eyes little attention to the the many ways that simple observation may deceive us, we should at least respect his desire to underpin his suggestions with some evidence.

There are several reasons why it is not wise to jump straight to declaring Wesley a quack.  Firstly, Wesley is quite justified in declaring the theorising of the doctors as being of little value. Today, the mantra of evidence based medicine is that it does not matter what the mechanism of action might be, we must first show that the medicine works. It is an empirical approach that Wesley would have approved of. Furthermore, the theorising of the the late eighteenth century gave rise to one of the most enduring forms of quackery in the Western world. Just a few years after Wesley’s death, Samuel Hahnemann would theorise that miasms were the cause of all illness and that disease could be treated by applying poisons that gave rise to the same symptoms that were displayed by the patient. Homeopathy was a vastly over ambitious attempt to replicate the success of enlightenment physics into the world of medicine. Just as Newton gave us a handful of laws that could explain the movements of all objects in the universe, so Hahnemann hugely over-extrapolated from a single observation of a supposed cure for malaria to hypothesise his law of similars. This is exactly the ‘abstruse science’ that so worried Wesley,

“Men of learning began to set experience aside; to build physic upon hypothesis; to form theories of disease and their cure, and to substitute these in the place of experiment.”

Of course, we cannot know what Wesley would have made of Hahnemann and homeopathy. Hahnemann indeed tried to place homeopathy on a empirical footing with his theories of remedy provings. But these were a very indirect method to test cures and heavily dependent on the core homeopathic theories being correct. Even contemporary critics could see that provings were prone to subjective bias and delusion.

The second reason not to quickly dismiss Primitive Physic as complete quackery is that some cures might have been effective with one or two remarkably so. Wesley lists several cures for Scurvy, first is to “Live on turnips for a month”.  He follows this with tar-water (used to prevent rot on ships), nettle-juice (Tried), boiled Burdock root, goose grass and then Seville Orange or even a teaspoon of lemon juice (well Tried), and scurvy grass.

According to Wesley’s insistence that cures should be effective and available to the poorest, then his priority given to turnips would indeed have been good advice. Turnips are indeed a good source of vitamin C and would have worked well. More expensive citrus fruit might have not been so available. Within a few years of publication, James Lind would be doing his famous trials onboard Navy ships. It would appear that cures such as turnips and lemons were well known as cures for scurvy with the first colonisers of Newfoundland growing turnips in 1601 to beat the disease. Lind is of course credited with the discovery of the cure because he took the naive empirical observation of Wesley onto the next step of a simple comparative trial. Lind would have been able to tell Wesley, with high confidence, which of his scurvy cures were sound and which were not worth pursuing.

Of course, much of Wesley’s cures are fantasy and absurd. He would have been subject to the same observational biases that ensures quackery survives today: an over-reliance on testimony, post hoc reasoning after a self-limiting condition improves and no doubt a good dollop of wishful thinking. But we should recognise that his insistence on observation is important and that an over reliance on hypotheses, no matter how plausible, is no guarantee of effective medicine.

The modern natural health movement appears to have adopted the rhetoric of Wesley, and maintained his simplistic empiricism. They have dropped the real natural cures, such as nettles, cold bathing and onions (and fucking healthy women), and instead embraced modern quackery from vitamin pills to oriental inspired placebo therapies such as reiki and acupuncture. A strong opposition to doctor’s medicine survives with deep suspicions of vaccines and ‘chemical’ drugs. The conspiratorial accusations thrive on sites such as Natural News and What Doctors Don’t Tell You.

Modern medicine took almost two more centuries to emerge into a form we recognise today. In that time, the rationalist movement struggled to find new cures and understand illness. It became very good at diagnosis, but its success in finding effective treatments was a long time coming. The empirical approach thrived and in many ways still does. A strong modern theoretical understanding of illness provides sound hypothesis for testing in a way that the current promoters of natural medicine cannot, but evidence based medicine still of necessity privileges the conclusions of trials.

There are though thoughts that the best reliable medicine can only come from interpreting our empirical results within a framework of scientific theory. These ideas are well discussed on the Science Based Medicine blog. It argues that we should dispense with trials of implausible claims, such as homeopathy, as a priori we can know that they are nonsense. In a world of limited resources for research into medicine, our efforts should be directed to hypothesis that have sound plausibility.

Wesley, understandably for his time, did not trust the emerging science of medicine and trusted his own accounts of cured cases. He saw the new electricity and took the reports of cures at face value – even though I am sure many people would happily proclaim they were cured after being subject to repeat electric shocks. In darker, modern times, such ‘treatments’ are used to extract favourable statements against the will.

Wesley’s stance appeared to be a honest reaction, inspired by his religious faith, against the emerging professionalisation of medicine and its removal from the hands of the ordinary person, whether that be a family member or wise elder. Modern advocates of Natural Health appear to use the same arguments more as marketing; as a differentiator from conventional medicine. The Natural Health products are just as modern, contrived and artificial as any – but wrapped in the language of naturalness, personal experience and free from corrupting influence. The promise of personal, easy and natural cures is a highly alluring concept that draws people in from the rather more stark reality of disease, illness, pain and the sometimes difficult treatments that must be endured.

You can buy Primitive Physic from the Quackometer Bookstore.

**************************************************************************************************************

Postscript

As you can see from the comments, the quote about “fuck a healthy woman” has caused some deserved scepticism.

The text I took my quote from reads as follows:

Google books facsimile from 1858 reads thus,

It would appear to be almost certain, on reflection, that ‘suck’ is the correct interpretation. However, I have written to the Methodist New Rooms in Bristol (the oldest Methodist Chapel in the world where my copy was published) to see if Wesley preferred fucking or sucking. (Got to be a first.)

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It goes without saying that David Tredinnick is off with the faeries. He is also the democratically elected representative of the constituency of Bosworth. His parliamentary history is tarred by his involvement with the ‘cash for questions’ affair and the recent revelations that he was using parliamentary expenses to buy astrology software and training from ‘Crucial Astro Tools’.

Whilst we might dismiss this man as an eccentric buffoon, the government’s response to his speech is a large cause for concern.

Tredinnick uses his speech to rant about his desire to see more government funding of quackery within the NHS and to use legislation to support quacks in their work. He covers a lot of ground.

He rants about how homeopaths (a favourite of his) are under attack from the World Health Organisation. He fails to mention these homeopaths are trying to use their sugar pills to treat AIDS and malaria  – a practice that can only really be described as murderous. Tredinnick misrepresent the research on homeopathy and childhood diarrhoea – a condition that kills hundreds of thousands in the developing world – by saying that trials have ‘proved’ its efficacy. Utter nonsense.

Tredinnick brings to parliament’s attention the Simon Singh affair:

There are also serious problems in chiropractic, which one might call an assisted discipline to osteopathy. The General Chiropractic Council has been bombarded by complaints from bloggers—spurious complaints I would say—which it is obliged by law to investigate. I am very concerned that genuine complaints will not get through and that any practitioner, against whom a genuine complaint had been lodged, could continue to practise. Will the Minister look at this very unsatisfactory situation, which arose following an individual losing a court case against the British Chiropractic Association?

This is a very misleading statement. Simon Singh has not lost a court case against the BCA. It has not gone to trial yet. Indeed, the whole libel case has attracted massive media attention due to the terrible way this case is being used to close down debate about chiropractors and their dubious methods.

The complaints from various people to the GCC are far from spurious too. Claims are being made by chiropractors where there is not a jot of evidence to support them. This is a serious public health issue and the MP is completely missing the point.

Most offensively, he claims critics of alternative medicine are from ‘superstitious’, ignorant and racially prejudiced scientists. It would appear he has a cheek calling scientists superstitious. He says that scientists should not criticise other culture’s quackery because “Criticism is deeply offensive to those cultures, and I have a Muslim college in my constituency.”

One would have thought the only reasonable response to such a display of delusion, stupidity and irrationality would have been to laugh the poor man out of the chamber. But the minister for health, Gillian Merron, appears to take him seriously. I would hope this is just parliamentary custom, but she begins “I congratulate David Tredinnick on securing this debate on the important matter of complementary and alternative medicine” Yes, medical astrology is the most important thing that is missing from our health service.

Tredinnick continued his advancement of nonsense by pressing the minister to comment on

“healers who can do remote healing, it is no good people saying that just because we cannot prove something, it does not work. The anecdotal evidence that it does is enormous. I know that the Minister is a forward thinker, and I believe that the Department needs to be very open to the idea of energy transfers and the people who work in that sphere.”

He also presses on,

problems of negative information, particularly in the context of the Royal London homeopathic hospital and homeopathy generally, and of what is effectively an attack on a statutorily regulated body dealing with chiropractic. Will the Minister offer to look into the position, and perhaps write to me about both the state of the Royal London and the disinformation that has been issued and the chiropractic regulatory council?

The Minister’s response shows how far the government is from understanding the issues raised by protecting the public from the false claims of alternative medicine.

Merron says “that the Government’s position on complementary and alternative medicines, which I shall refer to as CAM, is the same as our position on mainstream medicines. “

This is a major mistake. To treat the claims of pseudo-medical cults in the same way as you treat the claims of scientific medical research is an absurdity. The result is a complete failure to understand how best to protect the public from harm.

Real medicine, whilst obtaining genuine and life saving results,  has serious risks. It requires practitioners to be fully trained in the techniques and be able to assess evidence and understand the risk and benefits of these treatments. It needs practitioners to be insured for the inevitable mistakes and to undergo continuing professional development. It requires bodies to prevent the incompetent from practicing of they are found to be incapable of maintaining agreed standards of care.

None of this applies to pseudo-medicine. Firstly, these treatments, such as homeopathy and most applications of chiropractic, have been shown to be ineffective, The practitioners, in maintaining their claims, are systematically incompetent. Incompetence is the common standard not an exception to be guarded against. Their training merely serves to reinforce delusions and bad practices. That is why so many homeopaths and chiropractors are almost universally against vaccination and the use of real medical treatments. Their training reinforces harmful and absurd ideas.

The governments stance is to validate and rubber stamp this training in delusion. Merron says,

Other schemes that the Department supports include the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency’s new traditional herbal medicines registration scheme, which will make it easier for consumers to identify regulated products. We will also continue to support the work of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, and we have funded its start-up costs. The CNHC is a voluntary registration body that is open to massage, nutritional, aromatherapy and reflexology therapists. It will open to more therapies in due course. Registration means that the practitioner has met certain entry standards, including accredited qualification, and subscribes to a set of professional standards. The Department meets the CNHC regularly to discuss progress.

She is of course referring to Ofquack here, the derided and incompetent new regulator which will run out of cash very soon due to its failure to sign up quacks to the register. Such bodies do not protect customers; they merely rubber stamp dangerous incompetence.

Merron says,

Let me recap briefly: we provide information on safety, clinical effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and the availability of suitably qualified or regulated practitioners, and I think that that puts us in about the right place. As I was saying, the hon. Gentleman is a great ambassador and is very knowledgeable about this subject.

Regulation needs to move away from this naive view of alternative medicine. It is not medicine and it is not an alternative. It is a set of pseudo-medical beliefs held by cult like bodies and deluded individuals. Protecting the public needs to take this into account.

Tredinnick is hopefully a minority of one in parliament. His views are extreme and obviously idiotic, but government appears to wish to pander to these delusions. A complete rethink is required on the gopvernments stance to quackery. A start would be to throw out the Pittilo report which is currently being consulted on. Its adoption would be a major threat to the public and a step closer to us having state appointed medical astrologers. An absurd but not too absurd thought.

Related posts:

1. Worlds Collide for David Tredinnick MP David Tredinnick is a Tory Member of Parliament who appears to be obsessed with a couple of issues. In the past year, he has received 17 written answers to...
2. Medical Astrology – Forseeing the Future of Regulated Alternative Medicine Part of the wonderful new world of regulated alternative medicine is the insistence that all registered practitioners undergo Continuous Professional Development. Just like in real professions, quacks will be expected...
3. MP David Tredinnick is Wrong about the Homeopathy Report David ‘cash for questions’ Tredinnick is the MP who liked to buy astrology software and training on expenses. He is a keen supporter of pseudoscience and appears to be...

October 5th, 2009 7pm – 8pm

TAM London – The Amaz!ing Panel

Conway Hall, Holborn

Sign Up Here

As part of the official fringe to the first ever London TAM, there will be a panel meeting about the Internet and Scepticism. I will be rushing back from a meeting and so I will not have time to don my usual sceptical wig (pictured above). However, I plan to answer all your questions with wit and insight – sans syrup*.

(For Americans who plan to come, we promise not to speak David Hockney** all night).

You will have the chance to engage in intercourse with the following delightful panel – all at once:

George Hrab is a drummer, skeptic and podcaster who also tweets some of the funniest things at machine gun pace.

Rebecca Watson is one of the founders of Skepchick and is a host on The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast. She is unlikely to respond to proposals of marriage from the audience.

Martin Robbins created Lay Science and wears a menacing Matrix style leather coat which makes him look a bit Mariah Carey***

Neil Denny is a producer and presenter on Little Atoms on Resonance 104.4FM. He has interviewed more famous scientists than you could shake a sceptical stick at.

Tim Farley created the invaluable What’s the Harm web site where the dangers of uncritical belief in magic medicine are documented. He is currently lost somewhere in London.

And me.

See you there and maybe for a Dame Edna Everidge**** afterwards.

(Thanks to Crispian Jago for the Simpson’s Skeptic’s Top Trumps)

* syrup of fig – wig

** Cockney

*** scary

**** Beverage

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This is the figure that people spend on such things as homeopathy ($3B), yoga and qi gong ($4B) and non vitamin supplements ($15B). The report does not include purchases of vitamin and mineral supplements and estimates suggest this could triple this spend.

The NCCAM has spent nearly a billion pounds on researching CAM and has failed to demonstrate the efficacy of any complementary medicine. Yes, its all quackery and these Americans are wasting their money.

So, $34 billion is a big number. Let’s try to put that into perspective:

• Achieving the the WHO–UNICEF Global Immunization Vision and Strategy for 2006–2015 would cost US$35 billion over those years. Children throughout the world need not die of measles, diphtheria, polio and other killers.
• Putting all America 3 and 4 year old children through preschool education and thus reducing the need for remedial and special education, welfare and criminal justice services would cost $25 billion to $39 billion.
• Nearly 46 million Americans do not have health insurance and do not have the access to health care services that the rest of the civilised world enjoys. $34 billion would ensure there was cover for the uncompensated care that hospitals deliver every year. It would also provide about a third of these people with good health insurance cover.
• To reach the United Nations Development Programme Millennium Development Goals of halving the proportion of people without access to safe water or sanitation worldwide by 2015 about $30 billion needs to be spent annually.

• More than one billion people in the world could have about a 10% pay rise as they only earn a dollar a day.

• There are 7 million people in Sub Saharan African in need of antiretroviral treatment. Costs of HAART can be as much as $400 per month. Supplying this treatment would cost $35 billion per year.

• Malaria kills several million each year, the majority being children in Africa. It has been estimated that only $3 billion could bring this under control, sparing another $12 billion to remove the economic impact of lost work days, lost education and lack of development in malarial areas.

I am glad we have our priorities sorted out.

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Last March I asked, “Will the government bail out Ofquack?” when it was becoming very clear that the new government backed ‘regulator’ for pseudo-medical trades people (quacks) were running out of money  fast. It looks like at about the time I was asking this, the CNHC were running cap in hand to the Department of Health.

In documents I have obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, it would appear that the Department of Health has agreed to give the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council a further £409,300 for the year 2009/2010 and is looking at an additional £127,750 for the following year. This money would appear to be conditional on Ofquack “making good progress against their Business Plan.”

Quite what the CNHC are telling the Department of Health is not clear. I am failing so far to get any reports from the DoH regarding their progress. The problem with FOI requests is that you have to know what documents and data are available. It is taking some time to tease that information out. So far, it looks as if there are no reports  – which is worrying in itself.

What is even more bizarre is how Ofquack appear now to be rewriting old press releases that mentioned what their Business Plan might be. I have been reporting now for several years how most of the pseudo-medical  trades that come under the umbrella of the CNHC have been very reluctant to participate. The homeopaths have flatly refused to take part. The Nutritional Therapists looked as if they might but then have backed out. Only the Massage Therapists have joined in any numbers. And after six months of operation,  they have managed to sign up 423 quacks against a target of 10,000 for the year. Back of the envelope calculations would suggest that this number of registrants would keep the CNHC in business for a few weeks. Hence, the need for the government to chip in again if they are not to sink as fast as a lead duck.

But this new money does appear to dependent on them meeting ‘Business Objectives’. It would take an enormous stretch of the imagination to think that 423 registrants is anything like an acceptable achievment. When they started signing people up I said they would be lucky to reach 1,000 by the end of the year. I might have been over optimistic.

So it comes as little surprise to see that in the last few days, Ofquack have been busy in an Orwelian attempt to rewrite history so that it makes things look a little rosier for them. They say they now have “seven overarching priorities” and then go on to list all eight of them.  The press release dated 10th December 2008 now begins with two “overarching priorities”:

• To register 4,000 complementary practitioners
• To achieve a self-sustaining financial position by the end of the financial year 2010/2011 (ie second year or operation

This is not the first time they have re-written their history. Originally, we were told that Ofquack would be supplying a ‘Kitemark’ to registrants. The British Standards Institute objected to them using their trademark and were told to stop. So, the press releases, and the rest of the site, were changed.

Further insight comes from an email I have seen between Ofquack officials and someone enquiring about their progress suggest they are confident they will sign up 2,000 pseudo-medical practitioners by the Autumn and 4000 by the Spring and will achieve their ‘self-funding’ target of 10,000 by Spring 2011.

Now, I think it pretty naughty to go back and rewrite old press releases. It does not look to me like a particularly honest thing to do. Ofquack is showing a complete failure to be open and transparent in its business. Despite pledging to post their minutes online, they quickly withdrew their first attempts and then failed to post others. They recently posted some minutes but they were so sanitised that they contained no information beyond a bunch of people met up and discussed some stuff.

The lack of accountability is quite worrying and I have discussed this before. At the moment, I see no evidence that they have had to report to anyone. I see no evidence that anyone is keeping an eye on their progress. They claim to be a regulator to help the protect the public against dangerous quacks but they refuse to discuss that tricky problem that none of those they seek to regulate have any good evidence that what they do works. It is the nonsensical regulation of charlatanism and delusion. 

The UK is currently facing grave funding decisions for our health service. Cuts are going to be made quite deep by the look of things. Ofquack is a small part of that, but a commitment to cutting out such nonsense would signal a greater commitment to ensuring our Health Service spends money on treatments that are effective and embraces systems that respect evidence. Ofquack just does not fit. It is a toothless regulator that cannot do what it sets out to do – protect the public. It refuses to consider the effectiveness of the treatments that it seeks to regulate. It is happy to give a ‘quality mark’ to pseudo-medical trades people as long as they have a certificate hanging on their toilet wall to show they have been ‘properly trained’. It does not matter a jot if that training is in nonsense, discredited techniques, mumbo jumbo or disproven theories. Ofquack was set up under the watchful eye of Prince Charles and his toad eaters at the Foundation for Integrated Health. All it will do is aggrandize them – which is what Mr Windsor no doubt wants to further his bizarre ‘integrative’ agenda.

The hundreds of thousands being thrown away here may not be large in the grand scheme of things. But it is money wasted and it could be used in a much more efficient way. The first thing that should be done if the government is serious about protecting the public from charlatans and the deluded is to divert the money into training Trading Standards officers in enforcing the current laws that prevent false medical claims being made by businesses. The law is new. It is unfamiliar to TS in practice, but it would only take a few successful prosecutions to really send a message through to the full zoology of quackery out there.

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 Yes. Let’s be clear. Over a hundred people, sat through several hours of discussion about funnel plots and publication bias, baseline manipulation, subgroup analyses and inappropriate controls – and it was huge fun. Ben was describing how pharmaceutical companies manipulate trial data in order to make their products look better than they are. It was a lecture he normally gives to medical students in London and we had the pleasure of it whilst drinking Speckled Hen.

I was one of the organisers, along with up-and-coming comedian Iszi Lawrence, keen sceptic Justin and comedy promoter, Andi Currie, and the size of crowd and response surprised us – so apologies to those who could not get in. We are working on it. When I was a student, we went to evenings in a small room above a pub in Kings Heath, Birmingham, to sit through a crappy little comedy club run by an unknown Frank Skinner and hear jokes about rubbing the breasts of the Madame Tusauds waxwork of Prince Anne. Now people are coming out to pubs to hear talks about rational thought, sceptical enquiry, quackery, pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Scepticism is the new comedy is the new rock and roll.

Oxford is not the first group like this. London has been going for a number of years now and is used to huge crowds. In the UK, there are now groups in Edinburgh, Leeds, Birmingham and Leicester, with new groups being set up in other cities as we speak. Across the world, similar groups are cropping up in Australia, Canada, South Africa and the USA.

Why should this be so? There are perhaps many reasons. One simple explanation may be that comedy and scepticism appear to be good bedfellows. There are now many entertainers and comedians who take a distinct sceptical line, including Tim Minchin, Derren Brown, Mark Thomas, and Dara Ó Briain. Indeed, comedy king Robin Ince organised a phenomenally successful Christmas show, Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People: A Rational Celebration for Christmas which seamlessly combined the scathing sceptical wit of Ricky Gervais with the arch rationalism of Richard Dawkins. Yesterday, James Randi’s first London TAM meeting sold out its hundreds of tickets in just a few hours, taking the organisers by complete surprise. So, one simple explanation is that laughing at quacks and cranks might just be good honest fun.

But I think there might be more than that. Remember, Ben’s talk was about the abuse of statistics by drug companies. It was serious stuff and shocking. The numbers trotted out of the deaths caused by vitamin pill pushing quacks and deceitful pharmaceutical company marketing departments were extraordinary. Ben made the point of highlighting how immune we are to feeling shocked by such figures – but torture a kitten and we are up in arms. And yet, there was a real sense of engagement and humour. The feedback was that people were thoroughly enjoying it. And I think this is because that organisations like Skeptics in the Pub create shared experiences of thoughtful dialogue in a way that is hard to find in today’s media-led environment. If you have been trained in science and enjoy reading popular science books and no longer work in a University environment, for example, there are few opportunities to discuss these ideas. (Interestingly, there were only three Oxford undergraduate students there after a head count). Television contains close to zero science content. Newspapers appear to deliberately misrepresent science in order to create sensational or politically loaded stories. And our celebrity obsessed culture has our friends down the pub talking about the split up of some bird with big tits with some bloke with big pecs. And we are used to biting our lips at dinner parties, weddings and at work, where friends and colleagues appear unashamed to tell us how much they believe in homeopathy, star signs and ‘spiritual’ things. These pub chats supply a huge and welcome antidote – there really are people in the world who are not completely batshit – lots of them.

Skeptics in the Pub Oxford began with a meeting between the four organisers in the Eagle and Child, an Oxford pub more famous for earlier drinkers, the Inklings, where Tolkien and C S Lewis would read to the group from their latest writings, drink heavily, and then argue about who was the hardest, Aslan or Gandalf. (I am personally waiting for the film franchise fusion to take place, in the style of Aliens vs. Predator, to see on onscreen resolution of this ultimate fantasy question.) So, maybe we are seeing a revival of talking about interesting things in pubs. If you want to to, go along to your nearest sceptics talking and drinking club and have a rational pint, I am sure they will be pleased to see you.

***************************************************************************************************************

Our next meeting in Oxford is with Simon Singh (Monday, June 8 at 6:30PM). This should be another crowd puller – get there early. Simon is also the subject of a special Skeptics In the Pub meeting in London on Monday (The Penderel’s Oak) where Nick Cohen, and other prominent sceptics, will be holding a Public Support meeting to help Simon in his recent troubles with the British Chiropractic Association.

Subject: Public Meeting, London, 18 May 2009

I understand that Simon Singh will announce whether he will appeal on Monday 18 May 2009 at a public support meeting to take place in London at 6.30pm.

The venue will be the Penderels Oak, the usual meeting place of London Skeptics in the Pub.

As well as Simon Singh, the leading UK journalist Nick Cohen will be speaking. Other speakers are currently being confirmed.

For more, see: http://www.facebook.com/l/;http://jackofkent.blogspot.com/2009/05/bca-v-singh-update-and-roundup.html

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