{"id":685,"date":"2006-09-12T22:17:00","date_gmt":"2006-09-12T22:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/wpblog\/2006\/09\/dr-wendy-denning-diat-doktor-sic.html"},"modified":"2006-09-12T22:17:00","modified_gmt":"2006-09-12T22:17:00","slug":"dr-wendy-denning-diat-doktor-sic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/2006\/09\/dr-wendy-denning-diat-doktor-sic.html","title":{"rendered":"Dr Wendy Denning: Diat Doktor [sic]"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>UPDATE<\/strong> <em>8th February 2007<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Well, six months after first posting this entry, the complementary IT team at Dr Wendy&#8217;s support organisation have made a few spelling corrections. I thought this might happen soon, as this entry became the most widely read entry on the site. I guess it was being passed round a bit &#8211; thousands of times.<\/p>\n<p>So, it looks like, after much speculation, Wendy&#8217;s services are not complimentary, or free, but indeed complementary. Looks like the team also believes the word &#8216;complementary&#8217; deserves capitalising, whereas &#8216;medicine&#8217; does not. Read into that what you may. Anyway, for posterity, the wayback machine has preserved the original site <a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20060216170259\/http:\/\/www.drwendydenning.com\/\">here<\/a>. And you can compare it with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drwendydenning.com\/\">now<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>******************************************************************<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/uploaded_images\/denning-768831.gif\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/uploaded_images\/denning-765346.gif\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a>I&#8217;ve just had a comment pointing out that Dr Wendy Denning only scores 1 Canard on the quackometer. Strangely, I had just flicked over to her new Channel 5 series, &#8220;The Diet Doctors&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The person leaving the comment said that Dr Wendy deserved a much higher score. In addition, anyone describing themselves as a &#8216;nutritional expert&#8217; also needs a good look over just to see what quackery they are up to. (More on that in later blogs). Dr Wendy was also apparently responsible for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/2006\/08\/guild-of-gullible.html\">pushing that useless Christmas-cracker piece of tat, the QLink pendant, <\/a>on the poor, hapless Daily Mail reporter, Sarah Stacey, who wrote the all time highest scoring newspaper quack <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/pages\/you\/article.html?in_article_id=398105&#038;in_page_id=1909&amp;ito=1490\">article<\/a> ever. Also, Dr Wendy got her nutritional qualifications from Patrick Holford&#8217;s Richmond based, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/2006\/09\/quack-word-3-doctor.html\">made-up college<\/a>, the Institute of Optimum Nutrition.<\/p>\n<p>So, I decided to investigate a little further. Why had the Quackometer scored Dr Wendy so low?<\/p>\n<p>Well, I found the answer rather quickly and it has opened up a whole new field of organic broccoli for the quackometer to sort out. It appears that Dr Wendy is not into compl<em>e<\/em>mentary medicine (medicine that complements real medicine) at all. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drwendydenning.com\/\">Her web site <\/a>tells us that she is into compl<em>i<\/em>mentary medicine &#8211; repeatedly &#8211; some seven times at least. Is that going around paying her patients compliments and saying how nice she thinks they would look in her green jacket? Or does compl<em>i<\/em>mentary mean she is giving away her nuggets of &#8216;holistic&#8217; medical wisdom for free?<\/p>\n<p>Apparently, No. A quick check of her web site reveals she charges <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drwendydenning.com\/contact.html\">\u00a3225 for 90 minutes<\/a> in her clinic, of which, she will guarantee to show up for half-an-hour, obviously to pay all the right compl<em>i<\/em>ments to you for handing over your credit card.<\/p>\n<p>So, the answer is obvious. The quackometer only scores those practitioners into complementary medicine. Those who just pay flattering tributes to their patients do not deserve scores on the quackometer.<\/p>\n<p>An insight to quacks then. To get around the quackometer, the answer is simple. Spell everything wrong. Learn a tip from the email spammers: e.g. _V_I_A_G_R_A. Just how many spelling variations of osteopathy, acupuncture and gullible can you come up with?<\/p>\n<p>It looks like I am faced with a big task. To catch the Dr Wendys of this world I am going to have to expand the quack dictionaries enormously with every possible spelling variant. Hell. There is so much good telly I am going to miss over the next few weeks.<\/p>\n<p>Ho Hum.<\/p>\n<p>Just what do they teach them at medical school these days?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"mh-excerpt\"><p>UPDATE 8th February 2007 Well, six months after first posting this entry, the complementary IT team at Dr Wendy&#8217;s support organisation have made a few <a class=\"mh-excerpt-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/2006\/09\/dr-wendy-denning-diat-doktor-sic.html\" title=\"Dr Wendy Denning: Diat Doktor [sic]\">[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55,117,129],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-diets","tag-nutritionist","tag-qlink"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quackometer.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}