Who the hell has got it in for Dax Moy?

Subject: Geoff Freed

You pure miserable person. It seems you get off by putting others down. It seems you are afraid of new ideas. New ideas threaten the established and then often become the accepted.

I know Geoff well we were at Uni together and have a great admiration for his courage and discretion. I bet you would not have the guts to print this, you hide ( I think you maybe Andy Lewis ) it seems like your underhanded cynicism and hopeless inadequacy.

Sugest you get some therapy and cure your intellectual impotency.

Whaletooth

Well, that has told me. Now, there are a number of odd things about this email. The writer talks about Geoff in the third person and signs off with the pseudonym “Whaletooth“. Now whilst the email address is an anonymous hotmail account, the email headers clearly say that the email is from a Geoff Freed. Now are these two friends who shared a name at University or was someone hiding behind a email pseudonym whilst trying to convince me that he is courageous? Unfortunately ‘Whaletooth‘ will not respond to my emails so I must leave it up to you to decide.

Before we go on to the next email, Geoff, yes, new ideas do ‘threaten the established’, but not all ideas do. The threatening ones tend to be the good ideas that can be backed up with published and repeatable evidence. Geoff has many alternative ideas about ‘UFOs, the Inner Child, Pre-Life Agreements, Physics and its application to healing, the Chakra System and, of course, the huge tansformations that are currently taking place’ I don’t see too many evidence-soaked ideas there that might be up for the challenge, unless by Physics he is talking about radiotherapy, diagnostic imaging and various non-invasive measurement techniques. Somehow I doubt it.

Next a much more sensible contribution to the quackery debate from a Guy Dauncey of the Canadian non-profit society, Prevent Cancer Now . Guy writes to defend the idea that salvestrols were the new super cancer cure. I commented earlier that this was a somewhat premature statement as there was no good evidence to suggest that taking supplements of salvestrols would have any such effect.

Guy’s letter is rather long so I will highlight a few key points:

I would encourage people to have some patience here. I understand the value of a quackometer, but I don’t think there’s evidence to include salvestrols. I have met Gerry Potter twice. He is genuine, sincere, and a solid scientist.

First, I do not doubt that Gerry is genuine and sincere and I really hope that his science is solid as this would be a great breakthrough. The next bit of the letter explains the history of the discovery of salvestrols. A few interesting points emerge and I would really like to know if these chemicals are only found in ‘organic‘ vegetables. That really would be startling.

Going on…

When ripe fruits and vegetables are attacked by fungus, which happens all the time, they develop the salvestrols as a natural defence. When we eat the plants, the salvestrols in the food trigger the enzymes in any cancer cell to produce piceatannol, which then attacks the cancer. Having discovered this, his team searched for plants that had the highest level of salvestrols, and stared testing to see if the compound would fight an active cancer if eaten as a supplement. When they discovered that it seemed that they did, he helped create the Nature’s Defence to sell the food supplements as Fruitforce; these are simply concentrated salvestrols, taken from fruit.

Well, I am not sure how even doctors can magically turn anecdotes into data. They may have year’s of experience and plenty of qualifications, but an anecdote, even when grandly dressed as a case study, is still fallible to the same logical pitfalls and necessary incompleteness that all anecdotes suffer from. A good doctor or scientist uses anecdotes as markers to further enquiry and research. So it’s great that clinical trials are being started, but not so great that the commercial steam-train has left the station. That smacks of quackery, as does the publication of salvestrol research in naturopathic journals. As does the non-differentiation between cancers (its not one disease). As does the talk of organic food.

Guy ends,

It is completely right that we should cast a skeptical eye on new developments, since the world is full of scams and quackeries, but this one deserves to be given patience while the clinical trials are proceeding.

Yes, we need to be sceptical, but I would argue that it is not me being impatient, but those who rush to put these products on the high street health food shop shelves before we have any evidence that they do any good.

One final note on this correspondence is to highlight that Guy’s organisation shows a remarkable discrepancy between how it treats ‘bad things’ (phone masts, pesticides, x-rays and nuclear power stations) and ‘good things’ like salvestrols and organic food. The organisation endorses the implementation of the deeply flawed ‘Precautionary Principle’ for banning pretty much anything that sounds to them like it might cause cancer. And yet, guy appears to quite happily endorse the mass medication of huge numbers of people on a chemical that has no safety and efficacy data available for it.

Guy, can I humbly suggest a little light reading of a publication from the charity Sense about Science on the role of ‘chemicals’ and the ‘life-style’ sector

Finally, looking through the web-logs of how the site is doing, where visitors and coming from and what they are doing on the site, one name stands out this month so far – Dax Moy.

Now, I have no idea who Dax is and have never written about him before, but one (or many) people are putting his name into the quackometer, time after time. (4 Canards, by the way.) He name is the search term that is at the top of the list of entries to the site! Why? I have no idea. Has he done something in the news recently that people think is quackery? Or are his lawyers preparing to sue me for the quackometer giving him 4 Canards?

Dax is a personal trainer. Not just any personal trainer, but the most qualified and highest paid personal trainer in the country! Not sure what the qualifications are as his biography declines to say, but Dax claims to be only one of a few ‘elite’ experts in Europe who can offer his sort of combined exercise and nutrition plan. Dax charges £120 an hour for advice on sit-ups and eating salad. And you must commit to at least twelve sessions. That’s a lot of Euros.

Now Dax might not appear on the quackometer at all given that doing exercise, eating your greens and cutting out the fags is all pretty sound advice (even if it is expensive advice), but Dax’s healing hands also do reiki and reflexology. Ouch.

One person who obviously has it in for Dax though is blogger ShoeLover, who wrote “An Open Letter to Dax Moy: You sir are a Quack”. Apparently, the Daily Mirror wrote a story given by “Health and fitness chief” Dax that high heel shoes cause all sorts of health problems for women including menstrual cramps, neck, back, shoulder pain, stress headaches and even premature hair loss. Allegedly, your guts spill forward in heels “producing that ‘pooch’ which many women have wrongly come to think of a ‘fat stomach’.

ShoeLover, being a, er, shoe lover is noticably upset by these claims and says,

While the author of the article, Brian Roberts, writes that Dax (assuming that Dax is the “expert”) claims that wearing five-inch killer heels can affect their (women’s) internal organs and fertility, there is not a single reference to a medical and or research journal. Hell, one would have thought the author might have consulted a gynecologist to back up the claims of “expert” Dax, unless of course Dax is also a gynecologist. Dax, are you a gyno?

I must tell Mrs Canard Noir to stop going to her pole dancing classes in those heels. She told me she was doing it for fitness reasons. Dax knows better.