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Labels: quackometer, tools

 

I have recently been accused of working for the 'drug industry' and just picking on the 'little guys' who are using gentle, more human, and less capitalist healing methods. Well, as I say in my definition of quackery, quack thinking can come from all quarters and all sides of the orthodox/alternative medicine camps.

'Big Pharma' is a word that is pejoratively used to criticise drug companies in their pursuit of profits by their stubborn refusal to embrace alternative thinking. Their profits depend somehow on them denying the legitimacy of any alternative treatment. Alternative therapies are somehow more suitable for the small practitioner who may not even be that interested in making money - apparently.

The evidence would suggest that this is not so clear cut. Alternative medicine is also huge business with people spending millions on it every year. UK Skeptics believe that is is a £1 billion per annum business in the UK. Whilst I am not sure of the exact figures, a scout around your local high street reveals a growing alternative medicine presence. What town centre these days is not complete without its Dr & Herbs, Holland and Barrett and equivalents? As we walk down the street, the shop windows are encouraging us to pop unnecessary vitamins in our gobs, create mild vacuums on our skin to draw out 'toxins' (or something), imbibe flower extracts and stick candles in our ears.

Holland and Barrett is not a small business. It is part of the American Drug conglomerate NBTY. Their description on their web site is that:

NBTY is a leading vertically integrated manufacturer and retailer of a broad line of high quality, value-priced nutritional supplements in the United States and the United Kingdom.

The company is currently listed as about the 800th largest firm in the US, has a market capitalisation of about $2 billion and is in the top twenty pharmaceutical firms in the US. In the UK, it is cheerfully endorsed in adverts by that 80's pop star favourite, Kim Wilde. This is a company that is quite happy to make a healthy living by selling products that trade on the myths of 'natural' and 'alternative'.

But is just not the 'health' food shops that cash in on alternative medicine. Boots the Chemist is the largest and most respected high street chemist in the UK. It is something of a national institution and is seen as a reliable, trustworthy retailer. More the shame then that it has a large voodoo section next to its other medicines. It sells a full range of food supplements, herbal cures and copper bracelets, much as Holland and Barrett does. It also, has a nice section devoted to Bach Flower Remedies and, most gallingly, homeopathy remedies, both branded and own brand.

Now homeopathy has been aptly described as the pons asinorum (the bridge asses have to cross) of alternative medicine. If you struggle to see why homeopathy is utter nonsense and that claims made of it are ridiculous, then we are not going to get much further on our journey together.

Homeopathy is based on two so-called laws:

• The Principle of Similars - like causes like - re-create the symptoms of the disease somehow and you can cure the disease.
• The Law of Infinitesimals - the more dilute an ingredient is the greater the effect it will have.
  

A Dr Hahnemann (1755-1843) dreamed up these laws. In the two hundred years since his inspiration, no one has managed to show that they are indeed true. In fact, the massive advancement in science since then would suggest only one thing - that these so-called laws should be dumped in the great landfill site of bonkers ideas and covered in seagull shit.

The dilution of homeopathic treatments is really the most ridiculous part. In Boots, preparations are available that are labelled as 30C. This means that the original substance has been diluted to the extend that it is impossible that any active ingredient remains. If you look a the contents label of each 'medicine', Boots actually admit it. In each pill there is nothing but sugar. You might as well pop next door to Woolworths and pick up some Smarties - at least you would get some chocolate.

This means that if you went into Boots and emptied all the pills on the floor, there is not an analytical technique in the world that could tell the pills apart. No amount of measurement would tell you which was which. There is not a machine sensitive enough and no nano-measurement technique that would spot any active ingredient. They are identical. Just expensive sugar pills. You really have to wonder if Boots goes to all the trouble and expense of going through the shamanic ritual of diluting the supposed active ingredient to the required level when they could just scoop a tub full of generic pills into an appropriately labelled pot. No-one would ever know the difference.

So, either all of physics and chemistry is horribly wrong or homeopathy is utter quackery. Place your bets.

But what if I am wrong? People do say it works - they can't all be wrong. Maybe. All the effects of homeopathy can be attributed to the placebo effect. When properly controlled large trials of homeopathy are done, using double-blind randomised techniques, you cannot tell placebo groups from homeopathy groups. Its just sugar pills as we thought.

So, what happens when you write to Boots saying that you are disappointed in their promotion of quackery? Well, you get a letter back like this one I received a little while ago...

Thank you for your recent e mail.

I am sorry to hear that you feel unable to shop with us because we sell homeopathic products and other alternative remedies.

Boots prides itself on offering customers choice and, whilst some people may not believe in the products, a large number of our customers continue to find homoeopathy products beneficial for them.

Whilst this is the case and whilst the MHRA, the government's own regulatory body, continue to regard the product as medicines that are safe for our customers to use, we will continue to offer them in our shops.

I hope this explains our decision to stock this type of product.

Thank you again for taking the trouble to e-mail us.

Kind regards.

Boots Customer Care
PO Box 5300
Nottingham

If you respond to this email pointing out your unhappiness with this answer then silence ensues.

So what are Boots saying here?

Boots prides itself on offering customers choice
Obviously, choice is good, even if the choice made might be a very bad one.

whilst some people may not believe in the products
Like the whole of medical science, physics and chemistry and I would wager most of your own pharmacists and scientists.

a large number of our customers continue to find homoeopathy products beneficial for them
How beneficial? About as beneficial as a smarty would be my guess. If you have proof of efficacy over and above this then your scientists will be up for a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Whilst this is the case and whilst the MHRA, the government's own regulatory body, continue to regard the product as medicines that are safe for our customers to use
No-one is disputing their safety! If they were dangerous, that would be as much as a miracle as if they worked. What is dangerous is Boots giving these pills an endorsement that may discourage people from seeking proper care.

we will continue to offer them in our shops
whilst sections of the public are uninformed enough to buy them, it is not illegal, and we can make big bucks from little bits of sugar.

I hope this explains our decision to stock this type of product.
Yep, you've said it all.

Thank you again for taking the trouble to e-mail us.

If you are outraged by Boots actions too, why not drop them some feedback at this URL?

Labels: boots the chemist, homeopathy

 

I believe that organic food is a con, is not necessarily more healthy for you, tastes no different, and is damaging to the environment.

There, I have got that off my chest, but unfortunately I now feel like I have just admitted to being a child murderer, a racist or even a supporter of George Bush's foreign policy.

Let me explain...

The word organic is now synonymous with everything good, healthy and caring. To be against organic is to be seen to be almost evil. Organic food has huge sections devoted to it in our supermarkets, and its not just food - our shampoos, clothing and beer can all be marketed as 'organic'.

What does the word mean? Its original meaning was a scientific one. The chemistry of carbon-based molecules is described as organic chemistry. As such organic chemistry is the chemistry of life. In this definition, everything alive, and everything we eat, drink or wear (as long as it is natural fibres) is organic. In science, all apples are organic. Indeed all crops are organic. But that is not what the supermarkets mean when the flog us expensive 'organic' veg.

In this context, organic is used to denote crops that have been grown according to certain standards. Those standards are certified by the Soil Association. This body was set up in the forties by a group of people who wanted to turn away from the growing industrialisation of agriculture which they saw as damaging in various ways, environmentally, bodily and spiritually. Their philosophy had been heavily influenced by Rudolph Steiner who had a lot of mystical beliefs about the nature of soil. The basis of the philosophy was that farming should make use of local materials and maximise the use of manures and local grown animal feeds. Other beliefs involved planting at certain phases of the moon and encouraging 'elemental forces' into animals and seeking the help of 'non-physical beings'.

Now it does not really matter if some of the more unhinged ideas were clearly batshit. The Soil Association has continued with the ideas about using manure rather than fertiliser, limited pesticides and limited drugs. The reason for this is so that we have healthier food, more sustainable farming and other benefits like better tasting food and less impact on wildlife.

Great. But the big question is to ask if this is actually true. What evidence is there that organic farming is healthier, tastier, more environmentally friendly and more sustainable?

Now the Quackometer Project is about exposing exaggerated health claims and so I would like to focus on the health claims for organic farming methods. Dick Tavern in his excellent book, The March of Unreason – science, democracy and the new fundamentalism, devotes a chapter to exposing the myths of organic methods and points out things like:

• Tests conducted by independent consumer organisations show that people cannot taste the difference between organic and non-organic foods.
• The rules for pesticides and fungicides use have no 'rhyme or reason'. Older, more damaging chemicals like copper sulphate are allowed, but more modern and specific ones are not.
• If most farming became organic then we would have returned to a time when crops were vulnerable to large scale blights, high labour costs were required and low yields the norm. The poorest in the world would suffer enormously.
• Low yield crops need more land and that is damaging to the environment with more forest clearing and less land set aside.

So what about health? The main issue tends to focus on the 'evils' of pesticide residues. The problem here is that although pesticides can harm in large doses, there is no evidence that they harm at the minute quantities left on foods. As Dick Tavern points out in his book,

In fact every mouthful of food contains some poison, as does every sip of water. Carcinogenic' substances are routinely consumed by all of us in the form of natural chemicals made by plants to repel predators, but at amounts so low they do not harm us. ... There are some dioxons in every breath of air we take

It's all in the dose. Only homeopathists believe that insignificant doses have huge effects. Sir John Krebbs in Nature noted that a cup of [even organic] coffee contains natural carcinogens equal to a year's ingestion of synthetic carcinogenic substances found in the diet. Part of the problem is that our analytical measurement techniques can spot the tiniest traces of substances. But just because we can detect something does not mean that we need worry about it. Plants produce their own natural pesticides and we consume far more of that than the trace residues of the artificial stuff sprayed on. Concern about pesticide residue is just a modern phobia with no basis in evidence.

If there is little basis in fact for the claims made by the organic movement then it looks like the word organic is just one more advertising word used to push expensive, unnecessary products on us. Furthermore, and more damning, by focusing on organic production, our society pays less attention to farming methods and technology advances that really could improve health, protect wildlife and ensure a consistent quality and quantity of food supply. Rather than securing our health, the illogical worship of the word 'organic' could be damaging us all.

As such, I have no reservation in including the word 'organic' in the Quackometer Project. Promoting food that is grown according to 'organic' principles because it is supposed to be healthier for us is just one more form of quackery.

Labels: organic quackery, Quack Words

 

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 and how illness and suffering may be prolonged by irrational thinking. The story is not over yet, but let me tell the first part.

The story starts with my newspaper quack story alert engine that I have been working on recently. It is beginning to settle down now, and has spotted some interesting departures from reality in our esteemed organs. One of the first stories to emerge from the scans appeared in the Sunday Mail You supplement (where else?) and scored a maximum 10 Canards. The article was entitled Good Vibrations and was a completely typical, uncritical and bonkers, piece of quack reporting on some outlandindish pseudoscientific ideas, where someone was hoping to make money out of the credulous by selling some worthless piece of Christmas cracker trash for lots of money. Blatant quack advertorial. Nothing really unusual; we've seen this sort of thing recently in the Daily Junk Mail with that sorry story about the migraine zapper.

I thought it would a shame for the first 10 Canard story to go uninvestigated by the little black duck, so off I went...

The article was as mad as a box of frogs. Completely hatstand. And well deserved of its 10 Canards. The article is full of the usual rubbish about bodies having energy fields and how illness is caused by imbalances in our 'biofield'. Furthermore, the nonsense continues with how electrical items can disturb our - damn, I'm tired of writing this rubbish, let me quote...

Holistic physician Dr Mark Atkinson explains: 'the body’s electro-magnetic field provides a template for the physical body; any imbalance in this field gets reflected by the body as a disturbance in cell structure and function, which is the precursor state to illness.'

Yep, it starts off with that giveaway word 'holistic' and then gets worse. As an aside, let's just run Dr Mark Atkinson through the Quackometer. - Ahh, 7 Canards. Thought as much.

Moving on. The article then goes on to do two things. First, it gives an endorsement for Dr Atkinson's Bi-Aura nonsense philosophy. Bi Aura appears to be similar to that fount of sanity, Reiki, but

Bi-Aura therapy uses both cosmic and earth energy to energise and balance the body.

I see. The addition of cosmic energy, over and above mundane earth energy, is bound to make Bi-Aura the energy healing methodology of choice for the more discerning individual.

Secondly, the article goes on to give another glowing testimonial for a cheap piece of tat called a QLink pendant. This trinket was introduced to the author by Dr Wendy Denning (2 Canards) and Professor Kim Jobst (7 Canards) as employing "Sympathetic Resonance Technology which, the makers claim, ‘repairs and tunes your biofield’ so it functions optimally". Marvelous. You can buy one for £70.

The QLink has cropped up on a number of quack busting sites. I won't bother to go into details here - I have more interesting things to say. If you wondering, why not try the excellent Skepticality podcast that covers this subject. There is loads more on the web. James Randi has also offered anyone (not just the makers) $1,000,000 if they show that the QLink works as claimed. Ought to be easy - spend about $100, make a million. No one has even tried yet.

But I can't help it a little more digging. Let's look at the end of the article in a bit more detail...

Dr Atkinson says: ‘it made a lot of difference to me when I was working hard at the computer, in terms of sustained energy and clarity of thinking.’

Are you sure about that Dr Atkinson? Clarity of thinking?

As with pharmaceutical drugs, there may be a placebo effect although Professor Jobst points out that the ‘remarkable’ effects seen in race horses and other animals sporting a Qlink mean there is something more, which merits serious research. One thing I know: neither technology carries a risk of side effects.

The Prof Jobst obviously deserves some more attention - but not now.

Let's just say for now that the idea that electrical 'smog' from appliances in our home can somehow disrupt 'energy fields' in our bodies is speculative at best. Also, that a small pendant could be 'treated' with the latest 'quantum mechanic' technology to remove this danger has absolutely no basis in theory or experimental validity. It's utter bunkum and it is hard to believe that the makers believe this themselves. I could say more about this - but others have done a fine job.

The thing that spurred me into writing this blog was when I had a look into the background of the author of this piece. The writer is a Sarah Stacey (2 Canards). Googling reveals that Sarah has written a number of health and beauty books, won some awards for health writing and "was elected the first Honorary Chair of the Guild of Health Writers". Now that caught my attention.

Why should that be? Well, Guilds are an ancient tradition where people with similar business interests and skills can get together, organise themselves, uphold morals, standards and conduct within the trade, and generally make sure the cheats, charlatans and the incompetent do not tar the good names of the profession. Surely, a Guild of Health Writers should be very concerned if people are writing utter nonsense under their banner? Surely a Guild would wish to ensure that high standards are upheld and that health writers do not become simple conduits of quackery? Maybe we have found allies in the quest to get good health advice to people?

Who are the Guild of Health Writers? Their web page describes them as

a group of journalists dedicated to providing accurate, broad-based information about health and related subjects to the public.

That's fantastic. Do they know that one of their members is uncritically promoting quackery to their readership? Do they realise that it is none other than their first 'Honorary Chair'? Surely, they must be concerned that their principles are not being upheld? Do they have a complaints procedure? Do they take sanctions against their members who abuse the trust the public put in them to be be accurate? Their web site is not clear on these matters. Obviously, an email was in order.

Now, I would not have written this until I got a reply back. But it has been a little while now without even an acknowledgement. I also, have found out that Sarah Stacey has been the Vice President of the Guild. If true, then I fear a rather depressing outcome. Looking into the Guild a bit reveals founding members with interests in 'integrative medicine', that favourite word combination of Prince Charles, which is just another way of saying that quackery is being slipped in the back door of real medicine.

So, I would like to open this up and ask some more general questions. I fully understand that the Guild wishes to be 'broad-based' and this may well include writing about non-conventional medical approaches, which I have no quarrels with (as long as any claims made are properly caveated). However, what I would really like to know is answers to the following questions:

• Does the Guild take a stance on whether its members only write things that are properly backed up by sound evidence and if not, make it very clear that what they are writing about is controversial, speculative and unproven?
• Does the Guild care if its members are just simple advertising conduits for those wishing to defraud the public, and if a member acts as such, what sanctions they would take?
• How does the Guild help its members find out if medical claims can be properly backed up, such as the skill of reading a scientific paper or doing publication searches?
• Do the Guild encourage its members to seek out broad training in health and science matters, such as how trials are conducted, the nature of evidence and statistics etc?

These things are important. The public get huge amounts of health information from the press. People do tend to think that reporters would not publish something if it was completely groundless. A political story that had no basis in truth would be rightly hammered and could even result in legal action. Why not health matters? I worry that so many of these journalists have English Literature degrees. Not in itself a bad thing, but we would not expect an economics journalist not to have a good foundational understanding of economics. We would not expect a political writer to have no appreciation of our constitution and political systems. Why should we not expect our health writers to be equally well informed?

The current president of the Guild is Simon Crompton. His web site is very informative, he looks like a very decent chap, has written on lots of interesting things, and does not appear to be obsessed with the darker medicinal arts. I will forward my email onto him to see if he has a view on these things.

I hope the responses to my enquiries are encouraging. As I have said, such a Guild could play a great role in keeping the health fraud industry out of the papers. I worry that, like the medieval Guilds, their original laudable aims have become corrupted, and that the Guild of Health Writers has become nothing more than a Guild of the Gullible.

Labels: daily mail, electromagnetic quackery, journalists, newspapers, qlink

 

As you know, the quackometer works by counting words, or combinations of words, that strongly suggest the web site is full of quackery. I thought I would write about a few of those words and why they are dead give-aways.

So, 'Holistic' - not in itself necessarily anything to do with medicine, but this word is often used with medicine when quackery is at work. Why is this and what do quacks mean by it? Why is almost exclusively used by quacks? Spot this word and you spot a quack.

The word was coined by Jan Smuts, the South African statesman, in a work entitled "Holism and Evolution" and defined it as "the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts". Holistic thinking involves an approach to systems where analysis of individual parts of a system may not adequately describe the behaviour of the whole. As such, it is a thoroughly respectable scientific concept that has recently seen popularity through the emergence of chaos theories. However, the word often appears to set itself up against science by appearing to be the opposite of 'reductionist' - the claim that science always tries to break phenomena down into component parts and so ignores the 'whole'. Whilst reductionist approaches have proven to be enormously successful in science, it would be not true that science is only concerned with dissection and dismantling. More of this later.

Alternative medicine advocates rarely describe what they mean by holistic is such terms though. Googling "define: holistic" throw up lots of alternative medicine definitions along the lines that holistic means to ' treat the whole person and not just the symptoms'. What this really means is not clear to me. Press a quack and they slip and slide (as always). However, what I guess is going on is that by using the word 'holistic' the quack is setting up a straw man argument about 'conventional' medicine and then knocking it down.

The Straw Man goes something like this:
- 'conventional' medicine is only concerned about treating symptoms
- it fails to seek 'underlying reasons' for illness
- it fails to look at the 'whole person', spiritual and physical.
- your medical practitioner never has time for these other aspects
My quack therapy, on the other hand, does treat the 'whole person'. Therefore, you should spend your money on me.

These are, of course, all canards. Since when is medicine concerned with only treating symptoms? Do antibiotics cover up the nasty effects of infections? Does chemotherapy just sweep under the carpet the misdoings of that cancerous growth? Do heart patients take aspirin to gently mask their next infarction?

Well, the quack argues, why did you get ill in the first place? Your 'energy levels', 'immune system', 'spiritual balance' is not right - or some further set of canards - I can set this right. Before you know it, you might be onto a never ending set of 'deeper causes'. The quack will intervene when the chain of causality intersects with their personal quack philosophy, whether that be meridians, Qi, auras, chakras or whatever.

Perhaps the only truths encountered in this chain of reasoning are to do with the impersonal nature of much modern medicine. The busy GP, the arrogant consultant and so on. The word 'holistic' is used as an advertising brand word as a shortcut to say that "We are none of these thing. You can count on us to give you time and some TLC."

The huge irony is of course that alternative medicine is as narrowly focused and reductionist in its outlook as its supposed enemies. Each type of alternative medicine has its own pseudoscience associated with it, its own explanations of illness and approach to cures. The more science-like it sounds, the more credence we are supposed to give it.

I would also argue that alternative medicine can be far less holistic than real medicine. For a start, you will never find an alternative medicine advocate who looks at all the evidence to support their claims. They will only look at the evidence that suits. Usually poorly executed, small studies that found a small effect. Big, comprehensive trials are ignored because they do no support their claims. Hardly holistic.

What is more, the lack of holism in alternative medicine can be positively dangerous and sometimes fatal. The recent example of the BBC Newsnight investigation into homeopathy practitioners' advice for malaria prevention showed how narrow and blinkered their approach was. All ten homeopathists, in the investigation, suggested using their little sugar pills for malaria prevention with no discussion of the need for proven prophylactics and no discussion of bite prevention measures (nets, sprays, clothing). Utterly unholistic, as Simon Singh pointed out to the spokesperson for the Homeopathic Society on the programme.

So, finding the holistic on a web page is surely worth awarding a 'Canard'. Meaningless rot.

Labels: homeopathy, Quack Words

 

You can now subscribe to RSS Feeds to get all the Quackiest Stories direct to your browser without scanning the news sites and papers yourself.

The News Alert Engine is still being thoroughly tested and handheld. Expect a few technical glitches and bad matches for a few days yet.

The biggest problems have been keeping down the false positives, that is, stopping stories being flagged as quacky when they are probably quite reasonable. Up to now, the tuning of the engine has really focused on making sure quacky stories were always flagged. With the scanning of huge numbers of newspapers stories, my effort is going into keeping good stories off the quackometer site.

Also, I need more ideas for other news sources to scan - especially outside of the UK. If you know of a (supposedly) reputable paper that publishes medical woo as fact on a regular basis then I will try to include it.

I am struggling with a few sites for technical reasons; the Independent is the most disappointing so far. Because of how the site is constructed, the quackometer finds it hard to do its work.

Noir.

Labels: quackometer, tools

 

The latest quackometer functionality is now being tested on the quackometer web site. Throughout the day, the little black duck will be reading the news for you and creating alerts if quackery is found. Hoards of quackbusters around the world will be alerted to potential quackery in the newsapers before it starts hitting peoples' doormats. Together we can expose the worst offending news sources.

Daily lists of quack stories will be available on this site.

As you are well aware, many so-called serious newspapers regularly publish quack health stories with little or no critical appraisal of their validity. Stories in newspapers are one important area where quacks can seek validation and advertising without too much trouble. The Quackometer intends to expose this laziness as as the ink is drying on the papers.

The beta version will only publish UK and (soon) Ireland news stories (details below). When fully tested and complete, expect to see US and Canada and also Australia and New Zealand versions.

I need your help! If you live somewhere where there is a newspaper that ought to know better and regularly publishes quackery, then let me know and I will try to include it in the daily scans. Some sites are hard - dued to registration and subscription problems - but I will try my best.

Expect to see RSS feeds and email alerts in the near future. Expect also to see league tables and name-and-shame charts too. Science editors beware!

Happy Quackbusting!

Le Canard Noir.

PS Newspapers being scanned so far:

• The Times
• The Daily Mail
• The Telegraph
• The Guardian
• BBC Online

Plus the following, but not yet viewable!

• New York Times
• USA Today
• MSNBC

Labels: quackometer, tools

 

I thought my post on Reiki Healing for Hedgehogs was going to be a one-off. But a recent trip to the garden centre has opened up a whole new compost heap of prickles. Now, I live in hedgehog country. I have a hedgehog hospital within feather spitting distance of my pond, and I see them around me all the time. I am fond of them. My prickly, vespertine friends come out to see me on Summer evenings while I am enjoying a bottle of wine in the garden until it gets too dark to see.

So, I open a book called 'The Natural Hedgehog' by by Lenni Sykes and Jane Durrant with a forward by Virginia McKenna (Born Free remake? Elsa the Hedgehog?). Lenni and Jane appear to run the Welsh Hedgehog Hospital and so should know a great deal about looking after Mrs Tiggywinkle. Anyway, nice pictures but, shockingly, the book is full of hedgehog quackery - mostly homeopathy this time - on how to treat injured hedgehogs with sugar pills and shaken water, with suitable warnings about taking care not to touch the tablets.

I'm quite shocked by this. Now quackery might just about be justifiable on humans on the account that the placebo effect might give some relief (although I would argue against taking this position). But an animal cannot experience the placebo and will gain no benefit whatsoever from homeopathy, reiki, or ear candling for that matter. The only person who will gain is the carer, thinking they are doing good for the prickly little fellow. Placebo Effects work on humans. It's a cultural thing. Hedgehogs do not cotton on to the significance of the psycho-suggestive shamanistic healing rituals involved in homeopathy. They would just prefer to curl up into a pin cushion. Many go on about homeopathy tests on animals proving the case for homeopathy think they do not need to have randomised blind controls, since animals cannot have a placebo effect. But this dodges the fact that it is their carers and owners are reporting the animals' health improvements - the placebo works on the carers. Blinded trials on animal medicines are still absolutely necessary. For more details on homeopathy, placebos and animals see the excellent British Veterinary Voodoo Society.

Doing a bit of web research uncovers shocking new levels of hedgehog quackery. Most comprehensively dealt with here. (6 canards)

Everything from colour therapy, purple plates (the mind boggles), aromatherapy, crystal healing, bach flower remedies, reiki and massage therapy (Ouch!!!).

Now being an awkward bastard, my initial thinking about colour therapy is to question if hedgehogs even experience colour? Nocturnal mammals, on the whole, tend to have poor colour vision. The cones in the retina for colour vision require adequate light to function and so animals rely on their rod cells for night vision and see in black and white - juts like humans. From a google search, it would appear that most placental, nocturnal, mammals (like hedgehogs, bats and moles) lack cones altogether - they have no colour vision. An insectivorous nocturnal mammal is going to be heavily dependent on other senses such as smell and touch, so colour therapy and purple plates (can hardly type that without laughing) are out, but aromatherapy might just be in. Although I doubt your aromatherapist is going to have the hedgehog re-assuring essence of rotting leaves, earthworms and cat shit in their kit bag.

I find this quackery an appalling derogation of responsibility to these animals. The people who take injured hedgehogs to animal hospices expect the resultant duty of care to be upheld. Thinking that you can relieve pain and suffering by putting your poorly hedgehog on a purple plate is animal cruelty. The woolly thinking that leads to giving hedgehogs aromatherapy, colour therapy and homeopathy is an abuse of the responsibility to care for these creatures. The same people who do this would report kids to the RSPCA for kicking a curled-up hedgehog across the street. Maybe the RSPCA should take interest in this too?

The hedgehogs in our care deserve evidence-based medicine too. Like hedgehogs, I'm going to do some shnuffling around to see how widespread this nonsense is.

Labels: energy healing