Download Lectures on Biostatistics (1971). Corrected and searchable version of Google books edition
Download review of Lectures on Biostatistics (THES, 1973).
Carctol
The time when I lose patience with quacks is when they make unjustified claims about serious diseases. Giving false hope to the desperate (often at a high price) is plain wicked. If the patient stops more effective treatment, it’s homicide. Homeopaths have been jailed for that. Sometimes it’s a result of wishful thinking. Sometimes it’s to make money. The latter is morally more despicable. Both are culpable.
|
One example was the Totnes (aka Narnia) to “offer real alternatives to the conventional approach to cancer health care“. Another case, the Dove Clinic, was investigated in the Sunday Times, by Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Justin Stoneman: Clinics mislead patients over cancer ‘cure‘. |
|
There is yet another cancer conference, Back2Health, coming up in April (remember that "integrative", in this context, is a euphemism for quackery).
The speakers are listed on the left, as they were when I first noticed the conference in December 2012. On the right are the speakers as of February 2013,
Spot the difference
|
18 December 2012
 |
28 February 2013
 |
Yes, the one respectable oncologist on the programme, Robert Thomas, has withdrawn from the meeting.
I came across Robert Thomas because it was pointed out to me that he spoke at a meeting of YesToLife, an organisation that advocates all sorts of treatments that are unsupported by evidence. That seemed like an odd thing for a respectable oncologist to be doing, so I wrote to him, to point out some of the bizarre beliefs of his fellow speakers. Most are familiar names in made-up medicine, but probably not widely known among real oncologists.
Professor Thomas seemed unaware of this because he told me
"Thank you for your email and pointing out the vitamin C issues which of course, as you say has no scientific basis and should be outlawed along with many other practices."
Nevertheless he thought it was too late to pull out of the YesToLife meeting, so went ahead.
After this Robert Thomas wrote to me again (18 December 2012) to ask for advice about another conference he’d been invited to speak at, the Back2health event. Again he seemed unaware of the reputations of his fellow speakers, just about all of whom have a track record of advocating treatments for which there is no good evidence. Many of them are purveyors of false hope, often at a high price. I’ll deal with only three of them.
Dr Rosy Daniel is there. She’s featured several times on this blog. I met her, with Karol Sikora,here. Her course in quackery was ditched by the University of Buckingham after a year..
Chris Woollams of CancerActive is also there. As readers of this blog will know, I accept he is an honest man and I do feel a great deal of sympathy for him having lost his daughter. This doesn’t mean I am any closer to accepting his views on cancer treatment.
Next to Thomas’s picture is Barbara Wren. She was secretly filmed by the BBC claiming "to have cured thyroid cancer by applying external compresses, half an hour with castor oil and half an hour with your own urine". You can’t get much barmier than that.
Then there is a nurse, Patricia Peat, who runs a private "integrative" cancer consultancy, Cancer Options. She’s a prominent supporter of YesToLife which, since at least February 8th 2013, has been promoting a video, "Cancer is Curable Now", which makes totally irresponsible claims (and is illegal in the UK under the Cancer Act, 1939). Among other baseless treatments she has advocated high dose Vitamin C.
“The first of these people is the proprietor of Cancer Options. Cancer Options is a private consultancy offering advice to cancer patients. It is run by Patricia Peat who is a qualified nurse. My dad went to see her and she told him the good news, if he followed her advice he could be tumour free in 3 to 4 years. She advised him to have intravenous vitamin C, to have oxygen therapy, heat therapy and to take a myriad of supplements.”
I have heard that the cost of these useless recommendations over a three months would have been £4,640, plus the considerable cost of moving to Brighton, to the Vision of Hope hospital. That includes, for example, a telephone consultation (£175), supplement pills (£400) and intravenous vitamin C (£3000). There is no good evidence that any of these would help the patient. Not only would this have destituted his family and taken the patient away from them: it would also have made his last days an unnecessary misery. For Christmas he would have been condemned to a vegan diet, no wheat, sugar or alcohol, and to live on five glasses of raw juice and two jars of sprouts a day (see "Would you kick a dying man" for a real life experience).
Patricia Peat appears prominently on another web site too, Self Help Cancer. There she’s partnered by Dr Chris Etheridge (an ex biochemist, turned herbalist, with no medical qualifications). On that site you’ll find every kind of barminess endorsed. It even takes seriously the notorious Burzynski clinic about which so much has been written, both here and in the USA.
Recommending a bit of foot massage or reiki as a way to relax distraught patients is harmless enough if you like that sort of thing. Recommending you to ignore real doctors is quite another. Patricia Peat is on record as saying (my emphasis).
"Also detoxification is as important as what goes in – the rapid removal of toxins from the body would be massively beneficial in reducing the side effects. If someone is on chemotherapy, its very important to get any herbal preparations checked out by a qualified practitioner, to make sure there are no interactions, with the chemotherapy. A lot of nutritional and herbal supplements are very strong, and it is dangerous to suppose that because they are natural, they can do no harm. Probably the worst person to ask about this is your oncologist "
There is, of course, no reason to think that "detoxification" is anything other than a figment of the imagination. There is no reason to think that (never-named) toxins are important, and no reason to think that the procedures get rid of anything.
If you want sound advice about diet, go to somewhere like the American Cancer Society. There you will find that most of the things that quack nutritionists love to sell you just don’t work. The ACS asks "Will a vitamin a day keep cancer away?". Their answer is
"Can popping vitamin pills prevent cancer? The simple answer is no, based on what we know so far. In fact, some vitamin supplements have even shown harm."
The journalist, John Diamond, described movingly the way that the alternative industry moved in on him when it became known that he had cancer. His book, Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations was never finished before he died. These extracts from the foreword to the book, by Richard Dawkins, sum it up.
"When the pathologist has read the runes; when the oracles of X-ray, CT scan and biopsy have spoken and hope is guttering low; when the surgeon enters the room accompanied by ‘a tallish man … looking embarrassed … in hood and gown with a scythe over his shoulder’, it is then that the ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary’ vultures start circling. This is their moment. This is where they come into their own, for there’s money in hope: the more desperate the hope, the richer the pickings. And. to be fair, many pushers of dishonest remedies are motivated by an honest desire to help. Their persistent importunings of the gravely ill, their intrusively urgent offers of pills and potions, have a sincerity that rises above the financial greed of the quacks they promote. "
"They are targets that deserve to be hit hard, targets whose neutralisation would leave the world a better place: cynical charlatans (or honest foolish dreamers) who prey on gullible unfortunates. And the best part is that although this gallant man is dead, his guns are not silenced"
Shortly before he died, John Diamond said something that I think is one of the most perceptive comments that I’ve ever read. Some of the blame for the rise of the profitable alternative industry lies with the hype of real medicine. It’s worth quoting at length.
|
"But we expected more. Hell, we’d been promised more. Just as we’d learned, rightly, to expect that the political system could be arranged to provide a roof over the head and food in the stomach of all of us, so, we believed, could the medical system be arranged to give us all health and happiness. It was our right, dammit. And the medical establishment, flattered by all those pieces in the popular press describing the latest miracle cure which was just about —always just about — to arrive at the local surgery, joined in with the celebrations and connived with the scam. Indeed, if the boom in alternative medicine is anybody’s fault it’s that of orthodox medicine. It was the orthodoxy -helped by the media and our own vanity – which allowed us to believe that we could all be healthy and happy, that there was a pill for every problem and that if we died too early or too painfully it was an act of some agency other than capricious old God. The orthodoxy allowed us to expect And the elsewhere we looked to was the alternative practitioners. They were only too willing to take our custom . . ." |
I have no way of knowing whether the people at this conference are "cynical charlatans" or "honest foolish dreamers". I impute no motives. But I can say that their treatments are very expensive and for the most part they don’t work.
There is an interesting question about the extent to which charities like YesToLife function as charities, and the extent to which they act as agencies that channel desperate patients into the hands of private hucksters. I don’t pretend to know tha answer. I’d like to.
|
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” |
Follow-up
1 April 2013. The Times contacted me shortly after this came out, about some of the (illegal) nonsense to be found on sale at Amazon. One of their journalists, Kat Lay, did a good write-up, and they contacted the MHRA and stirred it into action. [download pdf].
5 April 2013. I quoted some of Patricia Peat’s views on diet from a page on Woollams’ blog. I notice that the copyright conditions on that page changed
" This content may be copied, in full or in part", has been changed to " No content may be reproduced, in whole or in part".
It’s curious that there should be an attempt to ban the reproduction of content, of which he authors are presumably proud, and which appears on a public web site. Of course it is also baseless in law, because copyright law has always allowed reproduction of parts of any document for the purposes of fair comment or in the public interest.
20 May 2012
In the USA, the first amendment allows the most outrageous claims to be made. But when they do decide the law has been broken, they do something about it. Their law enforcement is not as pathetically impotent as in the UK.
A Dr Christine Donald treated patients with cancer with an expensive herbal concoction, from her Wellness Clinic in San Fernando Valley. She promised 60 – 80% success rate. she was trusted because she was also a Pentecostal minister.
She was convicted of four counts of mail and wire fraud, six counts of tax evasion and one count of witness tampering she was found guilty of in September 2011
She was sentenced to 14 years in jail and a fine of $1.2 million.
One wonders why that never happens in the UK
26 May 2013 I noticed another incredible assertion by Patricia Peat.
“One could be forgiven for thinking how does anyone manage to die from cancer when the answers to curing it are actually so simplistic and one dimensional.”
So that’s solved, then.
10 June 2013.
I have just come across a good source of information about all sorts of alternative cancer treatments. "CAM-Cancer" was originally funded by the European Commission (EC) within the Framework 5 Programme, it is now hosted by the National Information Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NIFAB) at the University of Tromsø, Norway.
An email yesterday alerted me to YesToLife. This outfit seemed to me to be so dangerous that a word of warning is in the public interest.
Their own description says “YES TO LIFE is a new charitable initiative to open up a positive future for people with cancer in the UK by supporting an integrative* approach to cancer care”. That sounds sort of cuddly but lets look below the surface.
As so often, the funding seems to have been raised as the result of the death of an unfortunate 23 year old woman. Instead of putting the money into real research, yet another small charity was formed. My correspondent pointed out that “I came across them at St Pancras Station on Friday afternoon — they had a live DJ to draw in the crowd and were raising funds through bucket collections”. No doubt many people just see the word ‘cancer’ and put money in the bucket, without realising that their money will be spent on promoting nonsensical and ineffective treatments.
The supporters list.
The list of supporters tells you all you need to know, if you are familiar with the magic medicine business, though it might look quite convincing if you don’t know about the people. Sadly the list starts with some celebrities (I didn’t know before that Maureen Lipman was an enthusiast foir quackery -how very sad). But never mind the air-head celebrities. The more interesting supporters come later.
- Dr Rosy Daniel of Health Creation is an old friend. After I complained about her promotion of some herbal concoction called Carctol to “heal cancer”, she was reprimanded by Trading Standards for breaching the Cancer Act 1939, and forced to change the claims (in my view she should have neen prosecuted but, luckily of her, Trading Standards people are notoriously ineffective). There is, of course not the slightest reason to to think that Carctol works (download Carctol: Profits before Patients?). Read also what Cancer Research UK say about carctol.
Dr Daniel is also well known because ran a course that was, for one year, accredited by the University of Buckingham. But once the university became aware of the nonsense that was being taught on the course, they first removed her as the course director, and then removed accreditation from the course altogether. She then tried to run the course under the aegis of the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health, but even they turned her down. Now it is running as a private venture, and is being advertised by YesToLife. - Boo Armstrong, “Chief Executive of The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health and Founder and Executive Director GetWellUK”. The web site is out of date since the Prince’s Foundation shut its doors a year ago. She runs a private company, GetWellUK, that was responsible for a very poor study of alternative medicine in Northern Ireland. So she has a vested interest in promoting it. See Peter Hain and GetwellUK: pseudoscience and privatisation in Northern Ireland
- Professor George Lewith. This is beginning to look like the usual list of suspects. I’ve had cause to write twice about the curious activities of Dr Lewith. See Lewith’s private clinic has curious standards, in 2006, and this year George Lewith’s private practice. Another case study. The make up your own mind about whether you’d trust him.
- Dr Michael Dixon OBE, Chairman NHS Alliance and Medical Director The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health. Again the job description is a year out of date. You can read about Dr Dixon at Prince of Wales Foundation for magic medicine: spin on the meaning of ‘integrated’. He seems to be a well meaning man for whom no new-age idea is too barmy.
In fact both Dixon and Lewith have moved to a reincarnation of the Prince’s Foundation known as the “College of Medicine” (actually it’s a couple of offices in Buckingham Street). See Don’t be deceived. The new “College of Medicine” is a fraud and delusion.
It seems to me incomprehensible that people such as Sir Graeme Catto, Sir Cyril Chantler and Sir Muir Grey are willing to be associated with people who behave like this. - Charlotte Grobien, Managing Director, Give it Away. This seems to be a fund-raising organisation that has supported YesToLife. The lesson seems to be, never give money to fundraisers unless you know exactly where your money is going.
The Help Centre
YesToLife has a help centre. But beware, There is no medical person there. Just Traditional Chinese medicine (rather dangerous), acupuncture, osteopath and naturopathy (which means, roughly, do nothing and hope for the best).
Patrick Holford,
There can be no better indication of the standard of advice to be expected from YesToLife than the fact they are advertising a lecture by Holford, with the enticing title "Say no to cancer"."Through learning about the effects of diet and nutrition, people with cancer or at risk of developing cancer can be empowered to say Yes to Life and No to Cancer". Would that it were so easy. It will cost you £15.00.
Just in case there is still nobody who has heard of Holford, he is the media nutritionist who has an entire chapter devoted to him in Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science book, He has a whole website that has exposed his dubious advice, the excellent HolfordWatch. And you can find quite a lot about him on this blog. Try, for example, Patrick Holford’s CV: the strange case of Dr John Marks, and Response to a threatening letter from Mr Holford, or Holford’s untruthful and unsubstantiated advertisement
The treatments directory
Now we get to the truly scary bit of YesToLife, their treatment directory. Try searching for ‘cancer type’ and then "breast (metastatic)".. We find no mention of the advances in understanding of the genetics of breast cancer, nor ot real therapies like tamoxifen. What we find are four "alternative treatments".
- Neuroimmunomodulation Therapy It sounds impressive until you learn that its only proponent is a an 82 year old Venezuelan doctor with a clinic in Caracas. Even YesToLife doesn’t pretend that there is any evidence that it works
- Vitamin C Therapy The old chestnut cure-all Vitamin C Again even YesToLife don’t pretend there is any good evidence but it is still offered; treatment cost £3140.00 (what? Vitamin C is very cheap indeed)
- Dendritic Cell Therapy Said by YesToLife to be "well-researched", though that isn’t so for breast cancer (metastatic). Although possibly not as barmy as the other things that are recommended, it is nevertheless not shown to be effective for any sort of cancer,
- Gerson Therapy It is a sign of the extreme unreliability of advice given by YesToLife that they should still recommend anything as totally discredited as Gerson Therapy.Although YesToLife describes it as "well-researched" that is simply not true: there are no proper clinical trials. Cancer Research UK say
"Overall, there is no evidence to show that Gerson therapy works as a cure for cancer. "
"Available scientific evidence does not support claims that Gerson therapy can treat cancer. It is not approved for use in the United States. Gerson therapy can be very harmful to your health. Coffee enemas have been linked to serious infections, dehydration, constipation, colitis (inflammation of the colon), and electrolyte imbalances. In some people, particular aspects of the diet such as coffee enemas have been thought to be responsible for their death."Recommended reading: The (Not-So-)Beautiful (Un)Truth about the Gerson protocol and cancer quackery, by David Gorski (breast cancer surgeon, writing in Science-based Medicine.
Conclusion
The information supplied by YesToLife is more likely to kill you than to cure you.
The next time you see somebody collecting for a "cancer charity" be very careful before you give them money.
Follow-up
November 2012. It gets worse.
I had an email from someone who was distressed because a friend was trying to raise £15,000 to cover the cost of treatments recommended by YesToLife. The treatment is high-dose intravenous Vitamin C infusion. This is pure quackery. There isn’t the slightest reason to think it will affect the course of cancer, or the wellbeing of the patient. It is exploitation of the desperate. My heart sinks at the thought that a “charity” can be quite so wicked.
Sometimes I wonder why one bothers with print. You don’t have active links, you don’t get discussion in comments, and editors alter what you want to say.
This post is about events that followed the removal by the University of Buckingham of its accreditation of the Diploma in Integrated Medicine, as described here.. This diploma was run by the "Faculty of Integrated Medicine" (FIM) which consists largely of Dr Rosy Daniel and Dr Mark Atkinson. The FIM is, in turn, the product of a charity, the Integrated Health Trust (IHT). Oddly enough, the IHT’s web site still says "The two-year, part-time Membership Programme in Integrated Medicine has been accredited as a post-graduate diploma by the University of Buckingham" (as of 13 May 2010). The FIM web site makes similar claims. "Used to be" accredited would be more appropriate.
The advisory board of IHT consists almost entirely of supporters of various forms of alternative medicine, some of whom have been mentioned already on this blog. The respectable supporters who appeared when FIM’s diploma was first announced have vanished, and now they rely entirely on a couple of celebrity endorsements, and a few anecdotes about miracle cures. This is behaviour that is characteristic of all quacks.
After the post here, the story was printed on 13th April in Times Higher Education, under the headline It’s terminal for integrated medicine diploma. On 25th April a reply from Dr Daniel on the THE web site, ‘Terminal’? We’ve only just begun. This attracted a lot of comments. I rather liked the first one,
“The question is: who will stand up and support the formalisation of IM education for doctors and nurses in the UK?”. Not anyone with more than one working neuron, that’s who.
My own comment was rather more restrained than some of the semi-literate abuse from alternative medicine enthusiasts.
On 29th April, Daniel got another go in on the Times Higher Education web site, with the title ‘Bad’ Scientist. This time she got rather personal. Realising that not everyone reads the web version, I thought a print response was called for. I sent them a full response. At their request it was
cut down to the length of a letter, and even then they cut out the reference to Andrew Weil. The abbreviated letter was published on 13th May as Don’t shoot the messenger.
For the record, here is the complete response that I sent.
|
In response to your report [It’s terminal for integrated medicine diploma] and my blog Dr Daniel, in her two recent contributions to THE [‘Terminal’? We’ve only just begun, and ‘Bad’ Scientist], Dr Daniel describes me as misguided, intimidatory, undemocratic, antisocial and prejudiced. Ouch. I can understand that she may well be a bit upset, having recently been rejected by both the University of Buckingham and even by that bastion of all things barmy, the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health (now deceased). I’d like to remind her that it was not I who closed the Buckingham course. That decision was made by Terence Kealey (Buckingham’s VC) and Prof Andrew Miles. And it was the Office of Trading Standards, not I, who made her change the claims on her company’s web page about the alleged “healing” powers of a herbal concoction, Carctol, for cancer. All that I did was help to find out about some of the things that were being taught on her course. I find it quite surprising how often vice-chancellors have no idea what’s going on, but Kealey, unlike most, was interested to find out. Dr Daniel is right about one thing. I’m not a clinician. On the other hand, I do perhaps know a little bit about evidence. She claims that diet can save you from breast cancer but in the comments section it has already been pointed out that the 2007 study invoked by Dr Daniel does not come to the conclusion that she said it does. Furthermore she ignores entirely the 2010 EPIC study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (102:529-537). This study, of almost 500,000 people in ten European countries, found barely any relationship between intake of fruit and vegetables and cancer risk. This may be disappointing, but it can only harm patients to ignore the evidence when, as in this case, it exists. There are plenty of reasons to eat well, but apparently avoiding cancer is not one of them. It seems to be a bit more complicated than that. Dr Daniel says "IM in the UK is still clouded by complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) detractors owing to an important misunderstanding: IM is not CAM.". I beg to differ. The content of the course is about alternative as you can get. It included teachers who have advocated the Q-link pendant to "protect" you from evil radio waves. It is not long since Ben Goldacre opened one of these pendants and found it contained "No microchip. A coil connected to nothing. And a zero-ohm resistor, which costs half a penny, and is connected to nothing". You can’t get more alternative than that. We are told that a new programme is to be launched in May by "advisory board member, Andrew Weil. If you want to learn more about Weil, I suggest the article by ex-editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, Arnold Relman [A Trip to Stonesville: Some Notes on Andrew Weil (1998)]. That is the Dr Weil who has claimed he has insights into medical truth while under the influence of drugs. It is also the Dr Weil who, last year, was threatened with criminal prosecution in a warning letter sent jointly from the Food and Drugs Administration and the Federal Trade Commission because of “Unapproved/Uncleared/Unauthorized Products Related to the H1N1 Flu Virus” In fact every good doctor takes into account the " interaction of emotional, social and physical needs". There is no need to call this "integrative". it is just good medicine. I suggest looking at Michael Baum’s superb Samuel Gee lecture, "Concepts of holism in orthodox and alternative medicine". We are told that "The IHT is now looking for a strong collaborating university partner that will not be intimidated by the likes of Colquhoun". I’m sorry that Dr Daniel sees my approach as "intimidation" and “scare tactics”. The fact of the matter is that the content of the course is truly scary. Once what is taught on courses on alternative medicine is made public, the courses usually seem to close. The contents are just too embarrassing for even the most mercenary vice-chancellor to tolerate. Dr Daniel tells us she is “now looking for a strong collaborating university partner”. If any universities are tempted, I’d suggest that they should first write to the vice-chancellor of Buckingham, Terence Kealey, to seek his advice. |
Follow-up
Still no takers for FIM: June 2010. I made some enquiries about rumours that the Faculty of Integrated Medicine (FIM), having been fired by Buckingham, and rejected by the Prince’s Foundation (deceased), would seek validation from another institution. The University of Bristol says it has not been contacted by FIM. The University of Middlesex, which still runs several courses in magic medicine, was a more likely taker. However, after a long correspondence they responded as follows on June 15, 2010.
“Following an approach by Dr Rosy Daniel to the University, an informal meeting took place between Dr Daniel and our Associate Dean, Academic Development. As a result of that meeting and conversations with other colleagues in the University it was decided that proposals for the University to become a validating partner for the Faculty of Integrated Medicine would not be taken forward. The decision was relayed to Dr Daniel orally.”
3 March 2011. Unsurprisingly, Dr Daniel is up and running again, under the name of the British College of Integrated Medicine. The only change seems to be that Mark Atkinson has jumped ship altogether, and, of course, she is now unable to claim endorsement by Buckingham, or any other university. Sadly, though, Karol Sikora seems to have learned nothing from the saga at the University of Buckingham. He is still there as chair of the Medical Advisory Board, along with the usual suspects mentioned above.
This post recounts a complicated story that started in January 2009, but has recently come to what looks like a happy ending. The story involves over a year’s writing of letters and meetings, but for those not interested in the details, I’ll start with a synopsis.
Synopsis of the synopsis
In January 2009, a course in "integrated medicine" was announced that, it was said, would be accredited by the University of Buckingham. The course was to be led by Drs Rosy Daniel and Mark Atkinson. So I sent an assessment of Rosy Daniel’s claims to "heal" cancer to Buckingham’s VC (president), Terence Kealey, After meeting Karol Sikora and Rosy Daniel, I sent an analysis of the course tutors to Kealey who promptly demoted Daniel, and put Prof Andrew Miles in charge of the course. The course went ahead in September 2009. Despite Miles’ efforts, the content was found to be altogether too alternative. The University of Buckingham has now terminated its contract with the "Faculty of Integrated Medicine", and the course will close. Well done.Buckingham.
Synopsis
- January 2009. I saw an announcement of a Diploma in Integrated Medicine, to be accredited by the University of Buckingham (UB). The course was to be run by Drs Rosy Daniel and Mark Atkinson of the College of Integrated Medicine, under the nominal directorship of Karol Sikora (UB’s Dean of Medicine). I wrote to Buckingham’s vice-chancellor (president), Terence Kealey, and attached a reprint of Ernst’s paper on carctol, a herbal cancer ‘remedy’ favoured by Daniiel.
- Unlike most vice-chancellors, Kealey replied at once and asked me to meet Sikora and Daniel. I met first Sikora alone, and then, on March 19 2009, both together. Rosy Daniel gave me a complete list of the speakers she’d chosen. Most were well-known alternative people, some, in my view, the worst sort of quack. After discovering who was to teach on the proposed course, I wrote a long document about the proposed speakers and sent it to the vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, Terence Kealey on March 23rd 2009.. Unlike most VCs, he took it seriously. At the end of this meeting I asked Sikora, who was in nominal charge of the course, how many of the proposed tutors he’d heard of. The answer was "none of them"
- Shortly before this meeting, I submitted a complaint to Trading Standards about Rosy Daniel’s commercial site, HealthCreation, for what seemed to me to be breaches of the Cancer Act 1939, by claims made for Carctol. Read the complaint.
- On 27th April 2009, I heard from Kealey that he’d demoted Rosy Daniel from being in charge of the Diploma and appointed Andrew Miles, who had recently been appointed as Buckingham’s Professor of Public Health Education and Policy &Associate Dean of Medicine (Public Health). Terence Kealey said "You’ve done us a good turn, and I’m grateful". Much appreciated. Miles said the course “needs in my view a fundamental reform of content. . . “
- Although Rosy Daniel had been demoted, she was still in charge of delivering the course at what had, by this time, changed its name to the Faculty of Integrated Medicine which, despite its name, is not part of the university.
- Throughout the summer I met Miles (of whom more below) several times and exchanged countless emails, but still didn’t get the revised list of speakers. The course went ahead on 30 September 2009. He also talked with Michael Baum and Edzard Ernst.
- By January 2010, Miles came to accept that the course was too high on quackery to be a credit to the university, and simply fired The Faculty of Integrated Medicine. Their contract was not renewed. Inspection of the speakers, even after revision of the course, shows why.
- As a consequence, it is rumoured that Daniel is trying to sell the course to someone else. The University of Middlesex, and unbelievably, the University of Bristol, have been mentioned, as well as Thames Valley University, the University of Westminster, the University of Southampton and the University of East London. Will the VCs of these institutions not learn something from Buckingham’s experience? It is to be hoped that they would at the very least approach Buckingham to ask pertinent questions? But perhaps a more likely contender for an organisation with sufficient gullibility is the Prince of Wales newly announced College of Integrated Medicine. [but see stop press]
The details of the story
The University of Buckingham (UB) is the only private university in the UK. Recently it announced its intention to start a school of medicine (the undergraduate component is due to start in September 2011). The dean of the new school is Karol Sikora.
Karol Sikora shot to fame after he appeared in a commercial in the USA. The TV commercial was sponsored by a far-right Republican campaign group, “Conservatives for Patients’ Rights” It designed to prevent the election of Barack Obama, by pouring scorn on the National Health Serrvice. A very curious performance. Very curious indeed. And then there was a bit of disagreement about the titles that he claimed to have.
As well as being dean of medicine at UB. Karol Sikora is also medical research director of CancerPartnersUK. a private cancer treatment company. He must be a very busy man.
Karol Sikora’s attitude to quackery is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. As well as being a regular oncologist, he is also a Foundation Fellow of that well known source of unreliable information, The Prince of Wales Foundation for Integrated Health. He spoke at their 2009 conference.
In the light of that, perhaps it is not, after all, so surprising thet the first action of UB’s medical school was to accredit a course a Diploma in Integrated Medicine. This course has been through two incarnations. The first prospectus (created 21 January 2009) advertised the course as being run by the British College of Integrated Medicine.But by the time that UB issued a press release in July 2009, the accredited outfit had changed its name to the Faculty of Integrated Medicine That grand title makes it sound like part of a university. It isn’t.
Rosy Daniel runs a company, Health Creation which, among other things, recommended a herbal concoction. Carctol. to "heal" cancer, . I wrote to Buckingham’s vice-chancellor (president), Terence Kealey, and attached a reprint of Ernst’s paper on Carctol. . Unlike most university vice-chancellors, he took it seriously. He asked me to meet Karol Sikora and Rosy Daniel to discuss it. After discovering who was teaching on this course, I wrote a document about their backgrounds and sent it to Terence Kealey. The outcome was that he removed Rosy Daniel as course director and appointed in her place Andrew Miles, with a brief to reorganise the course. A new prospectus, dated 4 September 2009, appeared. The course is not changed as much as I’d have hoped, although Miles assures me that while the lecture titles themselves may not have changed, he had ordered fundamental revisions to the teaching content and the teaching emphases.
In the new prospectus the British College of Integrated Medicine has been renamed as the Faculty of Integrated Medicine, but it appears to be otherwise unchanged. That’s a smart bit of PR. The word : “Faculty” makes it sound as though the college is part of a university. It isn’t. The "Faculty" occupies some space in the Apthorp Centre in Bath, which houses, among other things, Chiropract, Craniopathy (!) and a holistic vet,
The prospectus now starts thus.
The Advisory Board consists largely of well-know advocates of alternative medicine (more information about them below).
Most of these advisory board members are the usual promoters of magic medicine. But three of them seem quite surprising,Stafford Lightman, Nigel Sparrow and Nigel Mathers.
Stafford Lightman? Well actually I mentioned to him in April that his name was there and he asked for it to be removed, on the grounds that he’d had nothing to do with the course. It wasn’t removed for quite a while, but the current advisory board has none of these people. Nigel Sparrow and Nigel Mathers, as well as Lightman, sent letters of formal complaint to Miles and Terence Kealey, the VC of Buckingham, to complain that their involvement in Rosy Daniel’s set-up had been fundamentally misrepresented by Daniel. With these good scientists having extricated themselves from Daniel’s organisation, the FIM has only people who are firmly in the alternative camp (or quackery, as i’d prefer to call it). For example, people like Andrew Weil and George Lewith.
Andrew Weil, for example, while giving his address as the University of Arizona, is primarily a supplement salesman. He was recently reprimanded by the US Food and Drugs Administration
“Advertising on the site, the agencies said in the Oct. 15 letter, says “Dr. Weil’s Immune Support Formula can help maintain a strong defense against the flu” and claims it has “demonstrated both antiviral and immune-boosting effects in scientific investigation.”
The claims are not true, the letter said, noting the “product has not been approved, cleared, or otherwise authorized by FDA for use in the diagnosis, mitigation, prevention, treatment, or cure of the H1N1 flu virus.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve come across people’s names being used to support alternative medicine without the consent of the alleged supporter. There was, for example, the strange case of Dr John Marks and Patrick Holford.
Misrepresentation of this nature seems to be the order of the day. Could it be that people like Rosy Daniel are so insecure or, indeed, so unimportant within the Academy in real terms (where is there evidence of her objective scholarly or clinical stature?), that they seek to attach themselves, rather like limpets to fishing boats, to people of real stature and reputation, in order to boost their own or others’ view of themselves by a manner of proxy?
The background
When the course was originally proposed, a brochure appeared. It said accreditation by the University of Buckingham was expected soon.
Not much detail appeared in the brochure, Fine words are easy to write but what matters is who is doing th teaching. So I wrote to the vice-chancellor of Buckingham, Terence Kealey. I attached a reprint of Ernst’s paper on carctol, a herbal cancer ‘remedy’ favoured by Daniel (download the cached version of her claims, now deleted).
Terence Kealey
Kealey is regarded in much of academia as a far-right maverick, because he advocates ideas such as science research should get no public funding,and that universities should charge full whack for student fees. He has, in fact, publicly welcomed the horrific cuts being imposed on the Academy by Lord Mandelson. His piece in The Times started
“Wonderful news. The Government yesterday cut half a billion pounds from the money it gives to universities”
though the first comment on it starts
"Considerable accomplishment: to pack all these logical fallacies and bad metaphors in only 400 words"
He and I are probably at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Yet he is the only VC who has been willing to talk about questions like this. Normally letters to vice-chancellors about junk degrees go unanswered. Not so with Kealey. I may disagree with a lot of his ideas, but he is certainly someone you can do business with.
Kealey responded quickly to my letter, sent in January 2009, pointing out that Rosy Daniel’s claims about Carctol could not be supported and were possibly illegal. He asked me to meet Sikora and Daniel. I met first Sikora alone, and then, on March 19 2009, both together. Rosy Daniel gave me a complete list of the speakers she’d chosen to teach on this new Diploma on IM.
After discovering who was to teach on the proposed course, I wrote a long document about the proposed speakers and sent it to Terence Kealey on March 23rd 2009. It contained many names that will be familiar to anyone who has taken an interest in crackpot medicine, combined with a surprisingly large element of vested financial interests. Unlike most VCs, Kealey took it seriously.
The remarkable thing about this meeting was that I asked Sikora how many names where familiar to him on the list of people who had been chosen by Rosy Daniel to teach on the course. His answer was "none of them". Since his name and picture feature in all the course descriptions, this seemed like dereliction of duty to me.
After seeing my analysis of the speakers, Terence Kealey reacted with admirable speed. He withdrew the original brochure, demoted Rosy Daniel (in principle anyway) and brought in Prof Andrew Miles to take responsibility for the course. This meant that he had to investigate the multiple conflicts of interests of the various speakers and to establish some sort of way forward in the ‘mess’ of what had been agreed before Miles’ appointment to Buckingham
Andrew Miles.
Miles is an interesting character, a postdoctoral neuroendocrinologist, turned public health scientist. I’d come across him before as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice This is a curious journal that is devoted mainly to condemning Evidence Based Medicine. Much of its content seems to be in a style that I can only describe as post-modernist-influenced libertarian.
The argument turns on what you mean by ‘evidence’ and, in my opinion, Miles underestimates greatly the crucial problem of causality, a problem that can be solved only by randomisation, His recent views on the topic can be read here.
An article in Miles’ journal gives its flavour: "Andrew Miles, Michael Loughlin and Andreas Polychronis, Medicine and evidence: knowledge and action in clinical practice". Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 2007, 13, 481–503 [download pdf]. This paper launches an attack on Ben Goldacre, in the following passage.
“Loughlin identifies Goldacre [36] as a particularly luminous example of a commentator who is able not only to combine audacity with outrage, but who in a very real way succeeds in manufacturing a sense of having been personally offended by the article in question. Such moralistic posturing acts as a defence mechanism to protect cherished assumptions from rational scrutiny and indeed to enable adherents to appropriate the ‘moral high ground’, as well as the language of ‘reason’ and ‘science’ as the exclusive property of their own favoured approaches. Loughlin brings out the Orwellian nature of this manoeuvre and identifies a significant implication.”
"If Goldacre and others really are engaged in posturing then their primary offence, at least according to the Sartrean perspective adopted by Murray et al. is not primarily intellectual, but rather it is moral. Far from there being a moral requirement to ‘bend a knee’ at the EBM altar, to do so is to violate one’s primary duty as an autonomous being.”
This attack on one of my heroes was occasioned because he featured one of the most absurd pieces of post-modernist bollocks ever, in his Guardian column in 2006. I had a go at the same paper on this blog, as well as an earlier one by Christine Barry, along the same lines. There was some hilarious follow-up on badscience.net. After this, it is understandable that I had not conceived a high opinion of Andrew Miles. I feared that Kealey might have been jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
After closer acquaintance I have changed my mind, In the present saga Andrew Miles has done an excellent job. He started of sending me links to heaven knows how many papers on medical epistemology, to Papal Encyclicals on the proposed relationship between Faith and Reason and on more than one occasion articles from the Catholic Herald (yes, I did read it). This is not entirely surprising, as Miles is a Catholic priest as well as a public health academic, so has two axes to grind. But after six months of talking, he now sends me links to junk science sites of the sort that I might get from, ahem, Ben Goldacre.
Teachers on the course
Despite Andrew Miles best efforts, he came in too late to prevent much of the teaching being done in the parallel universe of alternative medicine, The University of Buckingham had a pre-Miles, legally-binding contract (now terminated) with the Faculty of Integrated Medicine, and the latter is run by Dr Rosy Daniel and Dr Mark Atkinson. Let’s take a look at their record.
Rosy Daniel BSc, MBBCh
Dr Rosy Daniel first came to my attention through her commercial web site, Health Creation. This site, among other things, promoted an untested herbal concoction, Carctol, for "healing" cancer.
Carctol: Profit before Patients? is a review by Edzard Ernst of the literature, such as it is, and concludes
Carctol and the media hype surrounding it must have given many cancer patients hope. The question is whether this is a good or a bad thing. On the one hand, all good clinicians should inspire their patients with hope [6]. On the other hand, giving hope on false pretences is cruel and unethical. Rosy Daniel rightly points out that all science begins with observations [5]. But all science then swiftly moves on and tests hypotheses. In the case of Carctol, over 20 years of experience in India and almost one decade of experience in the UK should be ample time to do this. Yet, we still have no data. Even the small number of apparently spectacular cases observed by Dr. Daniel have not been published in the medical literature.
On this basis I referred Health Creation to Trading Standards officer for a prima facie breach of the Cancer Act 1939. ]Download the complaint document]. Although no prosecution was brought by Trading Standards, they did request changes in the claims that were being made. Here is an example.
A Google search of the Health Creation site for “Carctol” gives a link
Dr Daniel has prescribed Carctol for years and now feels she is seeing a breakthrough. Dr Daniel now wants scientists to research the new herbal medicine
But going to the link produces
Access denied.
You are not authorized to access this page.
You can download the cached version of this page, which shows the sort of claims that were being made before Trading Standards Officers stepped in. There are now only a few oblique references to Carctol on the Health Creation site, e.g. here..
Both Rosy Daniel and Karol Sikora were speakers at the 2009 Princes’s Foundation Conference, in some odd company.
Mark Atkinson MBBS BSc (Hons) FRIPH
Dr Mark Atkinson is co-leader of the FiM course. He is also a supplement salesman, and he has promoted the Q-link pendant. The Q-link pendant is a simple and obvious fraud designed to exploit paranoia about WiFi killing you. When Ben Goldacre bought one and opened it. He found
“No microchip. A coil connected to nothing. And a zero-ohm resistor, which costs half a penny, and is connected to nothing.”
Nevertheless, Mark Atkinson has waxed lyrical about this component-free device.
“As someone who used to get tired sitting in front of computers and used to worry about the detrimental effects of external EMF’s, particularly as an avid user of mobile phones, I decided to research the various devices and technologies on the market that claim to strengthen the body’s subtle energy fields. It was Q Link that came out top. As a Q link wearer, I no longer get tired whilst at my computer, plus I’m enjoying noticeably higher energy levels and improved mental performance as a result of wearing my Q Link. I highly recommend it.” Dr Mark Atkinson, Holistic Medical Physician
Mark Atkinson is also a fan of Emo-trance. He wrote, In Now Magazine,
"I wanted you to know that of all the therapies I’ve trained in and approaches that I have used (and there’s been a lot) none have excited me and touched me so deeply than Emotrance."
"Silvia Hartmann’s technique is based on focusing your thoughts on parts of your body and guiding energy. It can be used for everything from insomnia to stress. The good news is that EmoTrance shows you how to free yourself from these stuck emotions and release the considerable amounts of energy that are lost to them."
Aha so this particular form of psychobabble is the invention of Silvia Hartmann. Silvia Hartmann came to my attention because her works feature heavily in on of the University of Westminster’s barmier “BSc” degrees, in ‘naturopaths’, described here. She is fanous, apart from Emo-trance, for her book Magic, Spells and Potions
“Dr Hartmann has created techniques that will finally make magic work for you in ways you never believed to be possible.”
Times Higher Education printed a piece with the title ‘Energy therapy’ project in school denounced as ‘psychobabble’. They’d phoned me a couple of days earlier to see whether I had an opinion about “Emotrance”. As it happens, I knew a bit about it because it had cropped up in a course given at, guess where, the University of Westminster . It seems that a secondary school had bought this extreme form of psychobabble. The comments on the Times Higher piece were unusually long and interesting.
It turned out that the inventor of “Emotrance”, Dr Silvia Hartmann PhD., not only wrote books about magic spells and potions, but also that her much vaunted doctorate had been bought from the Universal Life Church, current cost $29.99.
The rest of the teachers
The rest of the teachers on the course, despite valiant attempts at vetting by Andrew Miles, includes many names only too well-known to anybody who has taken and interest in pseudo-scientific medicine. Here are some of them.
Damien Downing:, even the Daily Mail sees through him. Enough said.
Kim Jobst, homoepath and endorser of the obviously fraudulent Q-link
pendant. His Plaxo profile says
About Kim A. Jobst
Consultant, Wholystic Care Physician [sic!] , Medical Homoeopath, Specialist in Neurodegeneration and Dementia, using food state nutrition, diet and lifestyle to facilitate Healing and Growth;
Catherine Zollman, Well known ally of HRH and purveyer of woo.
Harald Walach, another homeopath, fond of talking nonsense about "quantum effects".
Nicola Hembry, a make-believe nutritionist and advocate of vitamin C and laetrile for cancer
Simon Mills, a herbalist who is inclined to diagnoses like “hot damp”, ro be treated with herbs that tend to “cool and dry.”
David Peters, of the University of Westminster. Enough said.
Nicola Robinson of Thames Valley University. Advocate of unevidenced treatmsnts.
Michael Dixon, of whom more here.
And last but not least,
Karol Sikora.
The University of Buckingham removes accreditation of the Faculty of Integrated Medicine
The correspondence has been long and, at times, quite blunt. Here are a few quotations from it, The University of Buckingham, being private, is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act (2000) but nevertheless they have allowed me to reproduce the whole of the correspondence. The University, through its VC, Terence Keeley, has been far more open than places that are in principle subject to FOIA, but which, in practice, always try to conceal material. I may post the lot, as time permits, but meanwhile here are some extracts. They make uncomfortable reading for advocates of magic medicine.
Miles to Daniel, 8 Dec 2009
” . . . now that the University has taken his [Sikora’s] initial advice in trialing the DipSIM and has found it cost-ineffective, the way forward is therefore to alter that equation through more realistic financial contribution from IHT/FIM at Bath or to view the DipSIM as an experiment that has failed and which must give way to other more viable initiatives."
"The University is also able to confirm that we hold no interest in jointly developing any higher degrees on the study of IM with IHT/FIM at Bath. This is primarily because we are developing our own Master’s degree in Medicine of the Person in collaboration with various leading international societies and scholars including the WHO and which is based on a different school of thought. "
Miles to Daniel 15 Dec 2009
"Dear Rosy
It appears that you have not fully assimilated the content of my earlier e-mails and so I will reiterate the points I have already made to you and add to them.
The DipSIM is an external activity – in fact, it is an external collaboration and nothing more. It is not an internal activity and neither is it in any way part of the medical school and neither will it become so and so the ‘normal rules’ of academic engagement and scholarly interchange do not apply. Your status is one of external collaborator and not one of internal or even visiting academic colleague. There is no “joint pursuit” of an academically rigorous study of IM by UB and IHT/FIM beyond the DipSIM and there are no plans, and never have been, for the “joint definition of research priorities” in IM. The DipSIM has been instituted on a trial basis and this has so far shown the DipSIM to be profoundly cost-ineffective for the University. You appear to misunderstand this – deliberately or otherwise."
Daniel to Miles 13 Jan 2010
"However, I am aware that weather permitting you and Karol will be off to the Fellows meeting for the newly forming National College (for which role I nominated you to Dr Michael Dixon and Prof David Peters.)
I have been in dialogue with Michael and Boo Armstrong from FIH and they are strongly in favour of forming a partnership with FIM so that we effectively become one of many new faculties within the College (which is why we change our name to FIM some months ago).
I have told Michael about the difficulties we are having and he sincerely hopes that we can resolve them so that we can all move forward as one. "
Miles to Daniel 20 Jan 2010
"Congratulations on the likely integration of your organisation into the new College of Integrative Health which will develop out of the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health. This
will make an entirely appropriate home for you for the longer term.Your image of David Colquhoun "alive and kicking" as the Inquisitor General, radiating old persecutory energy and believing "priestess healers" (such as you describe youself) to be best "tortured, drowned and even burnt alive", will remain with me, I suspect, for many years to come (!). But then, as the Inquisitor General did say, ‘better to burn in this life than in the next’ (!). Overall, then, I reject your conclusion on the nature of the basis of my decision making and playfully suggest that it might form part of the next edition of Frankfurt’s recent volume ["On Bullshit] http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html I hope you will forgive my injection of a little academic humour in an otherwise formal and entirely serious communication.
The nature of IM, with its foundational philosophy so vigorously opposed by mainstream medicine and the conitnuing national and international controversies which engulf homeopaths, acupuncturists, herbalists, naturopaths, transcendental meditators, therapeutic touchers, massagers, reflexologists, chiropractors, hypnotists, crystal users, yoga practitioners, aromatherapists, energy channelers, chinese medicine practitioners et al, can only bring the University difficulties as we seek to establish a formal and internationally recognised School of Medicine and School of Nursing.
I do not believe my comments in relation to governance at Bath are "offensive". They are, on the contrary, entirely accurate and of concern to the University. There have been resignations at senior level from your Board due to misrepresentation of your position and there has been a Trading Standards Authority investigation into further instances of misrepresentation. I am advised that an audit is underway of your compliance with the Authority’s instructions. You have therefore not dealt with my concerns, you have merely described them as "offensive".
I note from your e-mail that you are now in discussions with other universities and given the specific concerns of the University of Buckingham which I have dealt with exhaustively in this and other correspondences and the incompatibility of the developments at UB with the DipSIM and your own personal ambitions, etc., I believe you to have taken a very wise course and I wish you well in your negotiations. In these circumstances I feel it appropriate to enhance those negotiations by confirming that the University of Buckingham will not authorise the intake of a second cohort of students and that the relationship between IHT and the University will cease following the graduation of those members of the current course that are successful in their studies – the end of February 2011."
From Miles 2 Feb 2010
"Here is the list of teachers – you can subtract me (I withdrew from teaching when the antics ay Bath started) and also Professor John Cox (Former President of The Royal College of Psychiatrists and Former Secretary General of the World Psychiatric Association) who withdrew when he learned of some of the stuff going on…. Karol Sikora continues to teach. Michael Loughlin and Carmel Martin are both good colleagues of mine and, I can assure you – taught the students solid stuff! Michael taught medical epistemology and Carmel the emerging field of systems complexity in health services (Both of them have now withdrawn from teaching commitments).
The tutors shown are described by Rosy as the finest minds in IM teaching in the country. I interviewed tham all personally on (a) the basis of an updated CV & (b) via a 30 min telephone interview with me personally. Some were excluded from teaching because they were not qualified to do so academically (e.g. Boo Armstrong, Richard Falmer, not even a first degree, etc, etc., but gave a short presentation in a session presided over by an approved teacher) and others were approved because of their academic qualifications, PhD, MD, FRCP etc etc etc) and activity within the IM field. Each approved teacher was issued with highly specific teaching guidance form me (no bias, reference to opposing schools of thought, etc etc) and each teacher was required to complete and sign a Conflicts of Interest form. All of these documentations are with me here. Short of all this governance it’s impossible to bar them from teaching because who else would then do it?! Anyway, the end is in sight – Hallelujah! "
From Miles 19 Feb 2010
"Dear David
Just got back to the office after an excellent planning meeting for the new Master’s Degree in Person-centred Medicine and a hearty (+ alcoholic) lunch at the Ath! Since I shall never be a FRS, the Ath seems to me the next best ‘club’ (!). Michael Baum is part of the steering committee and you might like to take his thoughts on the direction of the programme. Our plans may even find their way into your Blog as an example of how to do things (vs how not to do things, i.e. CAM, IM, etc!). This new degree will sit well alongside the new degrees in Public Health – i.e. the population/utilitarian outlook of PH versus the individual person-centred approach., etc. "
And an email from a senior UB spokesperson
"Rumour has it that now that Buckingham has dismissed the ‘priestess healer of Bath’, RD [Rosy Daniel] , explorations are taking place with other universities, most of which are subject to FoI request from DC at the time of writing. Will these institutions have to make the same mistakes Buckingham did before taking the same action? Rumour also has it that RD changed the name of her institution to FIM in order to fit neatly into the Prince’s FIH, a way, no doubt, of achieving ‘protection’ and ‘accreditation’ in parallel with particularly lucrative IM ‘education’ (At £9,000 a student and with RD’s initial course attracting 20 mainly GPs, that’s £180,00 – not bad business…. And Buckingham’s ‘share of this? £12,000!”
The final bombshell; even the Prince of Wales’ FIH rejects Daniel and Atkinson?
Only today (31 March) I was sent, from a source that I can’t reveal, an email which comes from someone who "represent the College and FIH . . . ".. This makes it clear that the letter comes from the Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Integrated Health
|
Dr Rosy Daniel BSc MBBCh Director of the Faculty of Integrated Medicine Medical Director Health Creation 30th March 2010 RE: Your discussion paper and recent correspondence Thank you for meeting with [XXXXXX] and myself this evening to discuss your proposals concerning a future relationship between your Faculty of Integrated Medicine and the new College. As you know, he and I have been asked to represent the College and FIH in this matter. We are aware of difficulties facing your organisations and the FIM DipSIM course. As a consequence of these, it is not possible for the College to enter into an association with you, any of your organisations nor the DipSIM course at the present time. It would, therefore, be wrong to represent to others that any such association has been agreed. You will appreciate that, in these circumstances, you will not receive an invitation to the meeting of 15th April 2010 nor to other planned events. I am sorry to disappoint you in this matter. Yours sincerely |
Conclusions
I’ll confess to feeling almost a little guilty for having appeared to persecute the particular individuals involved in thie episode. But patients are involved and so is the law, and both of these are more important than individuals, The only unfair aspect is that, while it seems that even the Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Integrated Health has rejected Daniel and Atkinson, that Foundation embraces plenty of people who are just as deluded, and potentially dangerous, as those two. The answer to that problem is for the Prince to stop endorsing treatments that don’t work.
As for the University of Buckingham. Well, despite the ‘right wing maverick’ Kealey and the ‘anti-evidence’ Miles, I really think they’ve done the right thing. They’ve listened, they’ve maintained academic rigour and they’ve released all information for which I asked and a lot more. Good for them, I say.
Follow-up
15 April 2010. This story was reported by Times Higher Education, under the title “It’s terminal for integrated medicine diploma“. That report didn’t attract comments. But on 25th April Dr Rosy Daniel replied with “‘Terminal’? We’ve only just begun“. This time there were some feisty responses. Dr Daniel really should check her facts before getting into print.
3 March 2011. Unsurprisingly, Dr Daniel is up and running again, under the name of the British College of Integrated Medicine. The only change seems to be that Mark Atkinson has jumped ship altogether, and, of course, she is now unable to claim endorsement by Buckingham, or any other university. Sadly, though, Karol Sikora seems to have learned nothing from the saga related above. He is still there as chair of the Medical Advisory Board, along with the usual suspects mentioned above.