Download Lectures on Biostatistics (1971). Corrected and searchable version of Google books edition
Download review of Lectures on Biostatistics (THES, 1973).
Dangerous advice
This piece is almost identical with today’s Spectator Health article.
This week there has been enormously wide coverage in the press for one of the worst papers on acupuncture that I’ve come across. As so often, the paper showed the opposite of what its title and press release, claimed. For another stunning example of this sleight of hand, try Acupuncturists show that acupuncture doesn’t work, but conclude the opposite: journal fails, published in the British Journal of General Practice).
Presumably the wide coverage was a result of the hyped-up press release issued by the journal, BMJ Acupuncture in Medicine. That is not the British Medical Journal of course, but it is, bafflingly, published by the BMJ Press group, and if you subscribe to press releases from the real BMJ. you also get them from Acupuncture in Medicine. The BMJ group should not be mixing up press releases about real medicine with press releases about quackery. There seems to be something about quackery that’s clickbait for the mainstream media.
As so often, the press release was shockingly misleading: It said
Acupuncture may alleviate babies’ excessive crying Needling twice weekly for 2 weeks reduced crying time significantly
This is totally untrue. Here’s why.
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Luckily the Science Media Centre was on the case quickly: read their assessment. The paper made the most elementary of all statistical mistakes. It failed to make allowance for the jelly bean problem. The paper lists 24 different tests of statistical significance and focusses attention on three that happen to give a P value (just) less than 0.05, and so were declared to be "statistically significant". If you do enough tests, some are bound to come out “statistically significant” by chance. They are false postives, and the conclusions are as meaningless as “green jelly beans cause acne” in the cartoon. This is called P-hacking and it’s a well known cause of problems. It was evidently beyond the wit of the referees to notice this naive mistake. It’s very doubtful whether there is anything happening but random variability. And that’s before you even get to the problem of the weakness of the evidence provided by P values close to 0.05. There’s at least a 30% chance of such values being false positives, even if it were not for the jelly bean problem, and a lot more than 30% if the hypothesis being tested is implausible. I leave it to the reader to assess the plausibility of the hypothesis that a good way to stop a baby crying is to stick needles into the poor baby. If you want to know more about P values try Youtube or here, or here. |
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One of the people asked for an opinion on the paper was George Lewith, the well-known apologist for all things quackish. He described the work as being a "good sized fastidious well conducted study ….. The outcome is clear". Thus showing an ignorance of statistics that would shame an undergraduate.
On the Today Programme, I was interviewed by the formidable John Humphrys, along with the mandatory member of the flat-earth society whom the BBC seems to feel obliged to invite along for "balance". In this case it was professional acupuncturist, Mike Cummings, who is an associate editor of the journal in which the paper appeared. Perhaps he’d read the Science media centre’s assessment before he came on, because he said, quite rightly, that
"in technical terms the study is negative" "the primary outcome did not turn out to be statistically significant"
to which Humphrys retorted, reasonably enough, “So it doesn’t work”. Cummings’ response to this was a lot of bluster about how unfair it was for NICE to expect a treatment to perform better than placebo. It was fascinating to hear Cummings admit that the press release by his own journal was simply wrong.
Listen to the interview here
Another obvious flaw of the study is that the nature of the control group. It is not stated very clearly but it seems that the baby was left alone with the acupuncturist for 10 minutes. A far better control would have been to have the baby cuddled by its mother, or by a nurse. That’s what was used by Olafsdottir et al (2001) in a study that showed cuddling worked just as well as another form of quackery, chiropractic, to stop babies crying.
Manufactured doubt is a potent weapon of the alternative medicine industry. It’s the same tactic as was used by the tobacco industry. You scrape together a few lousy papers like this one and use them to pretend that there’s a controversy. For years the tobacco industry used this tactic to try to persuade people that cigarettes didn’t give you cancer, and that nicotine wasn’t addictive. The main stream media obligingly invite the representatives of the industry who convey to the reader/listener that there is a controversy, when there isn’t.
Acupuncture is no longer controversial. It just doesn’t work -see Acupuncture is a theatrical placebo: the end of a myth. Try to imagine a pill that had been subjected to well over 3000 trials without anyone producing convincing evidence for a clinically useful effect. It would have been abandoned years ago. But by manufacturing doubt, the acupuncture industry has managed to keep its product in the news. Every paper on the subject ends with the words "more research is needed". No it isn’t.
Acupuncture is pre-scientific idea that was moribund everywhere, even in China, until it was revived by Mao Zedong as part of the appalling Great Proletarian Revolution. Now it is big business in China, and 100 percent of the clinical trials that come from China are positive.
if you believe them, you’ll truly believe anything.
Follow-up
29 January 2017
Soon after the Today programme in which we both appeared, the acupuncturist, Mike Cummings, posted his reaction to the programme. I thought it worth posting the original version in full. Its petulance and abusiveness are quite remarkable.
I thank Cummings for giving publicity to the video of our appearance, and for referring to my Wikipedia page. I leave it to the reader to judge my competence, and his, in the statistics of clinical trials. And it’s odd to be described as a "professional blogger" when the 400+ posts on dcscience.net don’t make a penny -in fact they cost me money. In contrast, he is the salaried medical director of the British Medical Acupuncture Society.
It’s very clear that he has no understanding of the error of the transposed conditional, nor even the mulltiple comparison problem (and neither, it seems, does he know the meaning of the word ‘protagonist’).
I ignored his piece, but several friends complained to the BMJ for allowing such abusive material on their blog site. As a result a few changes were made. The “baying mob” is still there, but the Wikipedia link has gone. I thought that readers might be interested to read the original unexpurgated version. It shows, better than I ever could, the weakness of the arguments of the alternative medicine community. To quote Upton Sinclair:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
It also shows that the BBC still hasn’t learned the lessons in Steve Jones’ excellent “Review of impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of science“. Every time I appear in such a programme, they feel obliged to invite a member of the flat earth society to propagate their make-believe.
Acupuncture for infantile colic – misdirection in the media or over-reaction from a sceptic blogger?26 Jan, 17 | by Dr Mike Cummings So there has been a big response to this paper press released by BMJ on behalf of the journal Acupuncture in Medicine. The response has been influenced by the usual characters – retired professors who are professional bloggers and vocal critics of anything in the realm of complementary medicine. They thrive on oiling up and flexing their EBM muscles for a baying mob of fellow sceptics (see my ‘stereotypical mental image’ here). Their target in this instant is a relatively small trial on acupuncture for infantile colic.[1] Deserving of being press released by virtue of being the largest to date in the field, but by no means because it gave a definitive answer to the question of the efficacy of acupuncture in the condition. We need to wait for an SR where the data from the 4 trials to date can be combined. So what about the research itself? I have already said that the trial was not definitive, but it was not a bad trial. It suffered from under-recruiting, which meant that it was underpowered in terms of the statistical analysis. But it was prospectively registered, had ethical approval and the protocol was published. Primary and secondary outcomes were clearly defined, and the only change from the published protocol was to combine the two acupuncture groups in an attempt to improve the statistical power because of under recruitment. The fact that this decision was made after the trial had begun means that the results would have to be considered speculative. For this reason the editors of Acupuncture in Medicine insisted on alteration of the language in which the conclusions were framed to reflect this level of uncertainty. DC has focussed on multiple statistical testing and p values. These are important considerations, and we could have insisted on more clarity in the paper. P values are a guide and the 0.05 level commonly adopted must be interpreted appropriately in the circumstances. In this paper there are no definitive conclusions, so the p values recorded are there to guide future hypothesis generation and trial design. There were over 50 p values reported in this paper, so by chance alone you must expect some to be below 0.05. If one is to claim statistical significance of an outcome at the 0.05 level, ie a 1:20 likelihood of the event happening by chance alone, you can only perform the test once. If you perform the test twice you must reduce the p value to 0.025 if you want to claim statistical significance of one or other of the tests. So now we must come to the predefined outcomes. They were clearly stated, and the results of these are the only ones relevant to the conclusions of the paper. The primary outcome was the relative reduction in total crying time (TC) at 2 weeks. There were two significance tests at this point for relative TC. For a statistically significant result, the p values would need to be less than or equal to 0.025 – neither was this low, hence my comment on the Radio 4 Today programme that this was technically a negative trial (more correctly ‘not a positive trial’ – it failed to disprove the null hypothesis ie that the samples were drawn from the same population and the acupuncture intervention did not change the population treated). Finally to the secondary outcome – this was the number of infants in each group who continued to fulfil the criteria for colic at the end of each intervention week. There were four tests of significance so we need to divide 0.05 by 4 to maintain the 1:20 chance of a random event ie only draw conclusions regarding statistical significance if any of the tests resulted in a p value at or below 0.0125. Two of the 4 tests were below this figure, so we say that the result is unlikely to have been chance alone in this case. With hindsight it might have been good to include this explanation in the paper itself, but as editors we must constantly balance how much we push authors to adjust their papers, and in this case the editor focussed on reducing the conclusions to being speculative rather than definitive. A significant result in a secondary outcome leads to a speculative conclusion that acupuncture ‘may’ be an effective treatment option… but further research will be needed etc… Now a final word on the 3000 plus acupuncture trials that DC loves to mention. His point is that there is no consistent evidence for acupuncture after over 3000 RCTs, so it clearly doesn’t work. He first quoted this figure in an editorial after discussing the largest, most statistically reliable meta-analysis to date – the Vickers et al IPDM.[2] DC admits that there is a small effect of acupuncture over sham, but follows the standard EBM mantra that it is too small to be clinically meaningful without ever considering the possibility that sham (gentle acupuncture plus context of acupuncture) can have clinically relevant effects when compared with conventional treatments. Perhaps now the best example of this is a network meta-analysis (NMA) using individual patient data (IPD), which clearly demonstrates benefits of sham acupuncture over usual care (a variety of best standard or usual care) in terms of health-related quality of life (HRQoL).[3] |
30 January 2017
I got an email from the BMJ asking me to take part in a BMJ Head-to-Head debate about acupuncture. I did one of these before, in 2007, but it generated more heat than light (the only good thing to come out of it was the joke about leprechauns). So here is my polite refusal.
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Hello Thanks for the invitation, Perhaps you should read the piece that I wrote after the Today programme Why don’t you do these Head to Heads about genuine controversies? To do them about homeopathy or acupuncture is to fall for the “manufactured doubt” stratagem that was used so effectively by the tobacco industry to promote smoking. It’s the favourite tool of snake oil salesman too, and th BMJ should see that and not fall for their tricks. Such pieces night be good clickbait, but they are bad medicine and bad ethics. All the best David |
The Scottish Universities Medical Journal asked me to write about the regulation of alternative medicine. It’s an interesting topic and not easy to follow because of the veritable maze of more than twenty overlapping regulators and quangos which fail utterly to protect the public against health fraud. In fact they mostly promote health fraud. The paper is now published, and here is a version with embedded links (and some small updates).
We are witnessing an increasing commercialisation of medicine. It’s really taken off since the passage of the Health and Social Security Bill into law. Not only does that mean having NHS hospitals run by private companies, but it means that “any qualified provider” can bid for just about any service. The problem lies, of course, in what you consider “qualified” to mean. Any qualified homeopath or herbalist will, no doubt, be eligible. University College London Hospital advertised for a spiritual healer. The "person specification" specified a "quallfication", but only HR people think that a paper qualification means that spiritual healing is anything but a delusion.
The vocabulary of bait and switch
First, a bit of vocabulary. Alternative medicine is a term that is used for medical treatments that don’t work (or at least haven’t been shown to work). If they worked, they’d be called “medicine”. The anti-malarial, artemesinin, came originally from a Chinese herb, but once it had been purified and properly tested, it was no longer alternative. But the word alternative is not favoured by quacks. They prefer their nostrums to be described as “complementary” –it sounds more respectable. So CAM (complementary and alternative medicine became the politically-correct euphemism. Now it has gone a stage further, and the euphemism in vogue with quacks at the moment is “integrated” or “integrative” medicine. That means, very often, integrating things that don’t work with things that do. But it sounds fashionable. In reality it is designed to confuse politicians who ask for, say, integrated services for old people.
Put another way, the salespeople of quackery have become rather good at bait and switch. The wikepedia definition is as good as any.
Bait-and-switch is a form of fraud, most commonly used in retail sales but also applicable to other contexts. First, customers are “baited” by advertising for a product or service at a low price; second, the customers discover that the advertised good is not available and are “switched” to a costlier product.
As applied to the alternative medicine industry, the bait is usually in the form of some nice touchy-feely stuff which barely mentions the mystical nonsense. But when you’ve bought into it you get the whole panoply of nonsense. Steven Novella has written eloquently about the use of bait and switch in the USA to sell chiropractic, acupuncture, homeopathy and herbal medicine: "The bait is that CAM offers legitimate alternatives, the switch is that it primarily promotes treatments that don’t work or are at best untested and highly implausible.".
The "College of Medicine" provides a near-perfect example of bait and switch. It is the direct successor of the Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Integrated Health. The Prince’s Foundation was a consistent purveyor of dangerous medical myths. When it collapsed in 2010 because of a financial scandal, a company was formed called "The College for Integrated Health". A slide show, not meant for public consumption, said "The College represents a new strategy to take forward the vision of HRH Prince Charles". But it seems that too many people have now tumbled to the idea that "integrated", in this context, means barmpottery. Within less than a month, the new institution was renamed "The College of Medicine". That might be a deceptive name, but it’s a much better bait. That’s why I described the College as a fraud and delusion.
Not only did the directors, all of them quacks, devise a respectable sounding name, but they also succeeded in recruiting some respectable-sounding people to act as figureheads for the new organisation. The president of the College is Professor Sir Graham Catto, emeritus professor of medicine at the University of Aberdeen. Names like his make the bait sound even more plausible. He claims not to believe that homeopathy works, but seems quite happy to have a homeopathic pharmacist, Christine Glover, on the governing council of his college. At least half of the governing Council can safely be classified as quacks.
So the bait is clear. What about the switch? The first thing to notice is that the whole outfit is skewed towards private medicine: see The College of Medicine is in the pocket of Crapita Capita. The founder, and presumably the main provider of funds (they won’t say how much) is the huge outsourcing company, Capita. This is company known in Private Eye as Crapita. Their inefficiency is legendary. They are the folks who messed up the NHS computer system and the courts computer system. After swallowing large amounts of taxpayers’ money, they failed to deliver anything that worked. Their latest failure is the court translation service.. The president (Catto), the vice president (Harry Brunjes) and the CEO (Mark Ratnarajah) are all employees of Capita.
The second thing to notice is that their conferences and courses are a bizarre mixture of real medicine and pure quackery. Their 2012 conference had some very good speakers, but then it had a "herbal workshop" with Simon Mills (see a video) and David Peters (the man who tolerates dowsing as a way to diagnose which herb to give you). The other speaker was Dick Middleton, who represents the huge herbal company, Schwabe (I debated with him on BBC Breakfast), In fact the College’s Faculty of Self-care appears to resemble a marketing device for Schwabe.
Why regulation isn’t working, and can’t work
There are various levels of regulation. The "highest" level is the statutory regulation of osteopathy and chiropractic. The General Chiropractic Council (GCC) has exactly the same legal status as the General Medical Council (GMC). This ludicrous state of affairs arose because nobody in John Major’s government had enough scientific knowledge to realise that chiropractic, and some parts of osteopathy, are pure quackery,
The problem is that organisations like the GCC function more to promote chiropractic than to regulate them. This became very obvious when the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) decided to sue Simon Singh for defamation, after he described some of their treatments as “bogus”, “without a jot of evidence”.
In order to support Singh, several bloggers assessed the "plethora of evidence" which the BCA said could be used to justify their claims. When, 15 months later, the BCA produced its "plethora" it was shown within 24 hours that the evidence was pathetic. The demolition was summarised by lawyer, David Allen Green, in The BCA’s Worst Day.
In the wake of this, over 600 complaints were made to the GCC about unjustified claims made by chiropractors, thanks in large part to heroic work by two people, Simon Perry and Allan Henness. Simon Perry’s Fishbarrel (browser plugin) allows complaints to be made quickly and easily -try it). The majority of these complaints were rejected by the GCC, apparently on the grounds that chiropractors could not be blamed because the false claims had been endorsed by the GCC itself.
My own complaint was based on phone calls to two chiropractors, I was told such nonsense as "colic is down to, er um, faulty movement patterns in the spine". But my complaint never reached the Conduct and Competence committee because it had been judged by a preliminary investigating committee that there was no case to answer. The impression one got from this (very costly) exercise was that the GCC was there to protect chiropractors, not to protect the public.
The outcome was a disaster for chiropractors, wno emerged totally discredited. It was also a disaster for the GCC which was forced to admit that it hadn’t properly advised chiropractors about what they could and couldn’t claim. The recantation culminated in the GCC declaring, in August 2010, that the mythical "subluxation" is a "historical concept " "It is not supported by any clinical research evidence that would allow claims to be made that it is the cause of disease.". Subluxation was a product of the fevered imagination of the founder of the chiropractic cult, D.D. Palmer. It referred to an imaginary spinal lesion that he claimed to be the cause of most diseases. .Since ‘subluxation’ is the only thing that’s distinguished chiropractic from any other sort of manipulation, the admission by the GCC that it does not exist, after a century of pretending that it does, is quite an admission.
The President of the BCA himself admitted in November 2011
“The BCA sued Simon Singh personally for libel. In doing so, the BCA began one of the darkest periods in its history; one that was ultimately to cost it financially,”
As a result of all this, the deficiencies of chiropractic, and the deficiencies of its regulator were revealed, and advertisements for chiropractic are somewhat less misleading. But this change for the better was brought about entirely by the unpaid efforts of bloggers and a few journalists, and not at all by the official regulator, the GCC. which was part of the problem. not the solution. And it was certainly not helped by the organisation that is meant to regulate the GCC, the Council for Health Regulatory Excellence (CHRE) which did nothing whatsoever to stop the farce.
At the other end of the regulatory spectrum, voluntary self-regulation, is an even worse farce than the GCC. They all have grand sounding "Codes of Practice" which, in practice, the ignore totally.
The Society of Homeopaths is just a joke. When homeopaths were caught out recommending sugar pills for prevention of malaria, they did nothing (arguably such homicidal advice deserves a jail sentence).
The Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC) is widely know in the blogosphere as Ofquack. I know about them from the inside, having been a member of their Conduct and Competence Committee, It was set up with the help of a £900,000 grant from the Department of Health to the Prince of Wales, to oversee voluntary self-regulation. It fails utterly to do anything useful.. The CNHC code of practice, paragraph 15 , states
“Any advertising you undertake in relation to your professional activities must be accurate. Advertisements must not be misleading, false, unfair or exaggerated”.
When Simon Perry made a complaint to the CNHC about claims being made by a CNHC-registered reflexologist, the Investigating Committee upheld all 15 complaints. But it then went on to say that there was no case to answer because the unjustified claims were what the person had been taught, and were made in good faith.
This is precisely the ludicrous situation which will occur again and again if reflexologists (and many other alternative therapies) are “accredited”. The CNHC said, correctly, that the reflexologist had been taught things that were not true, but then did nothing whatsoever about it apart from toning down the advertisements a bit. They still register reflexologists who make outrageously false claims.
Once again we see that no sensible regulation is possible for subjects that are pure make-believe.
The first two examples deal (or rather, fail to deal) with regulation of outright quackery. But there are dozens of other quangos that sound a lot more respectable.
European Food Standards Agency (EFSA). One of the common scams is to have have your favourite quack treatment classified as a food not as a medicine. The laws about what you can claim have been a lot laxer for foods. But the EFSA has done a pretty good job in stopping unjustified claims for health benefits from foods. Dozens of claims made by makers of probiotics have been banned. The food industry, needless to say, objects very strongly to be being forced to tell the truth. In my view, the ESFA has not gone far enough. They recently issued a directive about claims that could legally be made. Some of these betray the previously high standards of the EFSA. For example you are allowed to say that "Vitamin C contributes to the reduction of tiredness and fatigue" (as long as the product contains above a specified amount of Vitamin C. I’m not aware of any trials that show vitamin C has the slightest effect on tiredness or fatigue, Although these laws do not come into effect until December 2012, they have already been invoked by the ASA has a reason not to uphold a complaint about a multivitamin pill which claimed that it “Includes 8 nutrients that can contribute to the reduction in tiredness and fatigue”
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). This is almost the only organisation that has done a good job on false health claims. Their Guidance on Health Therapies & Evidence says
"Whether you use the words ‘treatment’, ‘treat’ or ‘cure’, all are likely to be seen by members of the public as claims to alleviate effectively a condition or symptom. We would advise that they are not used"
"Before and after’ studies with little or no control, studies without human subjects, self-assessment studies and anecdotal evidence are unlikely to be considered acceptable"
"Before and after’ studies with little or no control, studies without human subjects, self-assessment studies and anecdotal evidence are unlikely to be considered acceptable"
They are spot on.
The ASA’s Guidance for Advertisers of Homeopathic Services is wonderful.
"In the simplest terms, you should avoid using efficacy claims, whether implied or direct,"
"To date, the ASA has have not seen persuasive evidence to support claims that homeopathy can treat, cure or relieve specific conditions or symptoms."
That seems to condemn the (mis)labelling allowed by the MHRA as breaking the rules.. Sadly, though, the ASA has no powers to enforce its decisions and only too often they are ignored. The Nightingale collaboration has produced an excellent letter that you can hand to any pharmacist who breaks the rules
The ASA has also judged against claims made by "Craniosacral therapists" (that’s the lunatic fringe of osteopathy). They will presumably uphold complaints about similar claims made (I’m ashamed to say) by UCLH Hospitals.
The private examination company Edexcel sets exams in antiscientific subjects, so miseducating children. The teaching of quackery to 16 year-olds has been approved by a maze of quangos, none of which will take responsibility, or justify their actions. So far I’ve located no fewer than eight of them. The Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator (OfQual), Edexcel, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), Skills for Health, Skills for Care, National Occupational Standards (NOS), private exam company VTCT and the schools inspectorate, Ofsted.. Asking any of these people why they approve of examinations in imaginary subjects meets with blank incomprehension. They fail totally to protect tha public from utter nonsense.
The Department of Education has failed to do anything about the miseducation of children in quackery. In fact it has encouraged it by, for the first time, giving taxpayers’ money to a Steiner (Waldorf) school (at Frome, in Somerset). Steiner schools are run by a secretive and cult-like body of people (read about it). They teach about reincarnation, karma, gnomes, and all manner of nonsense, sometimes with unpleasant racial overtones. The teachers are trained in Steiner’s Anthroposophy, so if your child gets ill at school they’ll probably get homeopathic sugar pills. They might well get measles or mumps too, since Steiner people don’t believe in vaccination.
Incredibly, the University of Aberdeen came perilously close to appointing a chair in anthroposophical medicine. This disaster was aborted by bloggers, and a last minute intervention from journalists. Neither the university’s regulatory mechanisms. nor any others, seemed to realise that a chair in mystical barmpottery was a bad idea.
Trading Standards offices and the Office of Fair Trading.
It is the statutory duty of Trading Standards to enforce the Consumer Protection Regulations (2008) This European legislation is pretty good. it caused a lawyer to write " Has The UK Quietly Outlawed “Alternative” Medicine?". Unfortunately Trading Standards people have consistently refused to enforce these laws. The whole organisation is a mess. Its local office arrangement fails totally to deal with the age of the internet. The situation is so bad that a group of us decided to put them to the test. The results were published in the Medico-Legal Journal, Rose et al., 2012. "Spurious Claims for Health-care Products: An Experimental Approach to Evaluating Current UK Legislation and its Implementation". They concluded "EU directive 2005/29/EC is
largely ineffective in preventing misleading health claims for consumer products in
the UK"
Skills for Health is an enormous quango which produces HR style "competences" for everything under the son. They are mostly quite useless. But those concerned with alternative medicine are not just useless. They are positively harmful. Totally barmy. There are competences and National Occupational Standards for every lunatic made-up therapy under the sun. When I phoned them to discover who’d written them, I learned that the had been drafted by the Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Magic Medicine. And when I joked by asking if they had a competence for talking to trees, I was told, perfectly seriously, “You’d have to talk to LANTRA, the land-based organisation for that.”
That was in January 2008. A lot of correspondence with the head of Skills for Health got nowhere at all. She understood nothing and it hasn’t improved a jot.
This organisation costs a lot of taxpayers’ money and it should have been consigned to the "bonfire of the quangos" (but of course there was no such bonfire in reality). It is a disgrace.
The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) is supposed to ensure the quality of university courses. In fact it endorses courses in nonsense alternative medicine and so does more harm than good. The worst recent failure of the QAA was in the case of the University of Wales: see Scandal of the University of Wales and the Quality Assurance Agency. The university was making money by validating thousands of external degrees in everything from fundamentalist theology to Chinese Medicine. These validations were revealed as utterly incompetent by bloggers, and later by BBC Wales journalist Ciaran Jenkins (now working for Channel 4).
The mainstream media eventually caught up with bloggers. In 2010, BBC1 TV (Wales) produced an excellent TV programme that exposed the enormous degree validation scam run by the University of Wales. The programme can be seen on YouTube (Part 1, and Part 2). The programme also exposed, incidentally, the uselessness of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) which did nothing until the scam was exposed by TV and blogs. Eventually the QAA sent nine people to Malaysia to investigate a dodgy college that had been revealed by the BBC. The trip cost £91,000. It could have been done for nothing if anyone at the QAA knew how to use Google.
The outcome was that the University of Wales stopped endorsing external courses, and it was soon shut down altogether (though bafflingly, its vice-chancellor, Marc Clement was promoted). The credit for this lies entirely with bloggers and the BBC. The QAA did nothing to help until the very last moment.
Throughout this saga Universities UK (UUK), has maintained its usual total passivity. They have done nothing whatsoever about their members who give BSc degrees in anti-scientific subjects. (UUK used to known as the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals).
Council for Health Regulatory Excellence (CHRE), soon to become the PSAHSC,
Back now to the CHRE, the people who failed so signally to sort out the GCC. They are being reorganised. Their consultation document says
"The Health and Social Care Act 20122 confers a new function on the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care (the renamed Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence). From November 2012 we will set standards for organisations that hold voluntary registers for people working in health and social care occupations and we will accredit the register if they meet those standards. It will then be known as an ‘Accredited Register’. "
They are trying to decide what the criteria should be for "accreditation" of a regulatory body. The list of those interested has some perfectly respectable organisations, like the British Psychological Society. It also contains a large number of crackpot organisations, like Crystal and Healing International, as well as joke regulators like the CNHC.
They already oversee the Health Professions Council (HPC) which is due to take over Herbal medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine, with predictably disastrous consequences.
Two of the proposed criteria for "accreditation" appear to be directly contradictory.
Para 2.5 makes the whole accreditation pointless from the point of view of patients
2.5 It will not be an endorsement of the therapeutic validity or effectiveness of any particular discipline or treatment.
Since the only thing that matters to the patient is whether the therapy works (and is safe), accrediting of organisations that ignore this will merely give the appearance of official approval of crystal healing etc etc. This appears to contradict directly
A.7 The organisation can demonstrate that there either is a sound knowledge base underpinning the profession or it is developing one and makes that explicit to the public.
A "sound knowledge base", if it is to mean anything useful at all, means knowledge that the treatment is effective. If it doesn’t mean that, what does it mean?
It seems that the official mind has still not grasped the obvious fact that there can be no sensible regulation of subjects that are untrue nonsense. If it is nonsense, the only form of regulation that makes any sense is the law.
Please fill in the consultation. My completed return can be downloaded as an example, if you wish.
Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) should be a top level defender of truth. Its strapline is
"We enhance and safeguard the health of the public by ensuring that medicines and medical devices work and are acceptably safe."
The MHRA did something (they won’t tell me exactly what) about one of the most cruel scams that I’ve ever encountered, Esperanza Homeopathic Neuropeptide, peddled for multiple sclerosis, at an outrageous price ( £6,759 for 12 month’s supply). Needless to say there was not a jot of evidence that it worked (and it wasn’t actually homeopathic).
Astoundingly, Trading Standards officers refused to do anything about it.
The MHRA admit (when pushed really hard) that there is precious little evidence that any of the herbs work, and that homeopathy is nothing more than sugar pills. Their answer to that is to forget that bit about "ensuring that medicines … work"
Here’s the MHRA’s Traditional Herbal Registration Certificate for devils claw tablets.
The wording "based on traditional use only" has to be included because of European legislation. Shockingly, the MHRA have allowed them to relegate that to small print, with all the emphasis on the alleged indications. The pro-CAM agency NCCAM rates devil’s claw as "possibly effective" or "insufficient evidence" for all these indications, but that doesn’t matter because the MHRA requires no evidence whatsoever that the tablets do anything. They should, of course, added a statement to this effect to the label. They have failed in their duty to protect and inform the public by allowing this labelling.
But it gets worse. Here is the MHRA’s homeopathic marketing authorisation for the homeopathic medicinal product Arnicare Arnica 30c pillules
It is nothing short of surreal.
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Since the pills contain nothing at all, they don’t have the slightest effect on sprains, muscular aches or bruising. The wording on the label is exceedingly misleading.
If you "pregnant or breastfeeding" there is no need to waste you doctor’s time before swallowing a few sugar pills.
"Do not take a double dose to make up for a missed one". Since the pills contain nothing, it doesn’t matter a damn.
"If you overdose . . " it won’t have the slightest effect because there is nothing in them
And it gets worse. The MHRA-approved label specifies ACTIVE INGREDIENT. Each pillule contains 30c Arnica Montana
No, they contain no arnica whatsoever.
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It truly boggles the mind that men with dark suits and lots of letters after their names have sat for hours only to produce dishonest and misleading labels like these.
When this mislabeling was first allowed, it was condemned by just about every scientific society, but the MHRA did nothing.
The Nightingale Collaboration.
This is an excellent organisation, set up by two very smart skeptics, Alan Henness and Maria MacLachlan. Visit their site regularly, sign up for their newsletter Help with their campaigns. Make a difference.
Conclusions
The regulation of alternative medicine in the UK is a farce. It is utterly ineffective in preventing deception of patients.
Such improvements as have occurred have resulted from the activity of bloggers, and sometime the mainstream media. All the official regulators have, to varying extents, made things worse.
The CHRE proposals promise to make matters still worse by offering "accreditation" to organisations that promote nonsensical quackery. None of the official regulators seem to be able to grasp the obvious fact that is impossible to have any sensible regulation of people who promote nonsensical untruths. One gets the impression that politicians are more concerned to protect the homeopathic (etc, etc) industry than they are to protect patients.
Deception by advocates of alternative medicine harms patients. There are adequate laws that make such deception illegal, but they are not being enforced. The CHRE and its successor should restrict themselves to real medicine. The money that they spend on pseudo-regulation of quacks should be transferred to the MHRA or a reformed Trading Standards organisation so they can afford to investigate and prosecute breaches of the law. That is the only form of regulation that makes sense.
Follow-up
The shocking case of the continuing sale of “homeopathic vaccines” for meningitis, rubella, pertussis etc was highlighted in an excellent TV programme by BBC South West. The failure of the MHRA and the GPC do take any effective action is a yet another illustration of the failure of regulators to do their job. I have to agree with Andy Lewis when he concludes
“Children will die. And the fault must lie with Professor Sir Kent Woods, chairman of the regulator.”
Although many university courses in quackery have now closed, two subjects that hang on in a few places are western herbalism, and traditional Chinese medicine (including acupuncture). The University of Westminster still runs Chinese medicine, and Western herbal medicine (with dowsing). So do the University of Middlesex and University of East London.
Since the passing of the Health and Social Security Act, these people have been busy with their customary bait and switch tactics, trying to get taxpayers’ money. It’s worth looking again at the nonsense these people talk.
Take for example, the well known herbalist, Simon Mills. At one time he was associated with the University of Exeter, but no longer. Perhaps his views are too weird even for their Third Gap section (the folks who so misrepresented their results in a trial of acupuncture). Unsurprisingly, he was involved in the late Prince’s Foundation for Magic Medicine, and, unsurprisingly, he is involved with its successor, the "College of Medicine", where he spoke along similar lines. You can get a good idea about his views from the video of a talk that he gave at Schumacher College in 2005. It’s rather long, and exceedingly uncritical, so here’s a shorter version to which some helpful captions have been added.
That talk is weird by any standards. He says, apparently with a straight face, that "all modern medicines are cold in the third degree"..And with ginger and cinnamon "You can stop a cold, generally speaking, in its tracks" (at 21′ 30" in the video). This is simply not true, but he says it, despite the fact that the Plant Medicine with site (of which he’s a director) which he is associated gives them low ratings
Simon Mills is also a director of SustainCare. Their web site says
SustainCare Community Interest Company is a social enterprise set up to return health care to its owners: “learning to look after ourselves and our families in ways that make sense and do not cost the earth“. It is founded on the principle that one’s health is a personal story, and that illness is best managed when we make our health care our own. The enterprise brings clinical expertise, long experience of academia, education and business, and the connections and resources to deliver new approaches.
"As its own social enterprise contribution to this project Sustaincare set up and supported Café Sustain as a demonstration Intelligent Waiting Room at Culm Valley Integrated Centre for Health in Devon". (yes, that’s Michael Dixon, again]
In the talk (see video) Mills appears to want to take medicine back to how it was 1900 years ago, in the time of Galen. The oblique speaking style is fascinating. He never quite admits that he thinks all that nonsense is true, but presumably it is how he treats patients. Yet a person with these bizarre pre-scientific ideas is thought appropriate to advise the MHRA
It’s characteristic of herbalists that they have a very long list of conditions for which each herb is said to be good. The sort of things said by Mills differ little from the 1900-year old ideas of Galen, io the 17th century ideas of Culpepper.
You can see some of the latter in my oldest book, Blagrave’s supplement to Culpepper’s famous herbal, published in 1674.
See what he has to say about daffodils
It is "under the dominion of Mars, and the roots hereof are hot and dry almost in the third degree".
"The root, boyled in posset drink, and drunk, causeth vomiting, and is used with good successe in the beginning of Agues, especiallyTertians, which frequently rage in the spring-time: a plaister made of the roots with parched Barley meal, and applied to swellings and imposthumes do dissolve them; the juice mingled with hony, frankincense, wine and myrrhe, and dropped into the Eares, is good against the corrupt filth and running matter of the Eares; the roots made hollow and boyled in oyl doth help Kib’d heels [or here]: the juice of the root is good for Morphew, and discolourings of the skin."
It seems that daffodils would do a lot in 1674. Even herbalists don’t seem to use it much now. A recent herbal site describes daffodil as "poisonous".
But the descriptions are very like those used by present day herbalists, as you can hear in Simon Mills’ talk.
Chinese medicine is even less tested than western herbs. Not a single Chinese herb has been shown to be useful for treating anything (though in a very few case, they have been found to contain drugs that are useful when purified, notably the anti-malarial compound, artemesinin). They are often contaminated, some are dangerously toxic. And they contribute to the extinction of tigers and rhinoceros because of the silly myths that these make useful medicines. The cruelty of bear bile farming is legendary.
In a recent report in China Daily (my emphasis).
In a congratulation letter, Vice-Premier Li Keqiang called for integration of TCM and Western medicine.
TCM, as a time-honored treasure of Chinese civilization, has contributed to the prosperity of China and brought impacts to world civilization, Li said.
He also urged medical workers to combine the merits of TCM with contemporary medicine to better facilitate the ongoing healthcare reform in China.
The trade in Chinese medicines survives only for two reasons. One is that thay are a useful tool for promoting Chinese nationalism. The other is that they are big business. Both are evident in the vice-premier’s statement.
I presume that it’s the business bit that is the reason why London South Bank University (ranked 114 ou ot 114) that led to one of their main lecture theatres being decorated with pictures like this.“Mr Li Changchun awarding 2010 Confucius Institute of the year to LSBU Vice Chancellor” . I’ll bet Mr Li Changchun uses real medicine himself, as most Chinese who can afford it do.
Presumably, what’s taught in their Confucius Institute is the same sort of dangerous make-believe nonsense.that’s taught on other such courses.
The "College of Medicine" run a classical bait and switch operation. Their "First Thursday lectures" have several good respectable speakers, but then they have Andrew Flower, He is "a former president of the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine, a medical herbalist and acupuncturist. He has recently completed a PhD exploring the role of Chinese herbal medicine in the treatment of endometriosis". He’s associated with the Avicenna Centre for Chinese Medicine, and with the University of Southampton’s quack division The only bit of research I could find by Andrew Flower was a Cochrane review, Chinese herbal medicine for endometriosis. The main results tell us
"Two Chinese RCTs involving 158 women were included in this review. Both these trials described adequate methodology. Neither trial compared CHM with placebo treatment."
But the plain language summary says
"This review suggests that Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) may be useful in relieving endometriosis-related pain with fewer side effects than experienced with conventional treatment."
It sounds to me as though people as partisan as the authors of this should not be allowed to write Cochrane reviews.
Flower’s talk is followed by one from the notorious representative of the herbal industry, Michael McIntyre, talking on Herbal medicine: A major resource for the 21st century. That’s likely to be about as objective as if they’d invited a GSK drug rep to talk about SSRIs.
The people at Kings College London Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences are most certainly not quacks. They have made a database of chemicals found in traditional Chinese medicine. It’s sold by a US company, Chem-TCM and it’s very expensive (Commercial license: $3,740.00. Academic/government license: $1,850.00). Not much open access there. It’s a good idea to look at chemicals of plant origin, but only as long as you don’t get sucked into the myths. It’s only too easy to fall for the bait and switch of quacks (like TCM salespeople). The sample page shows good chemical and botanical information, and predicted (not observed) pharmacological activity. More bizarrely, it shows also analysis of the actions claimed by TCM people.
It does seem odd to me to apply sophisticated classification methods to things that are mostly myth.
The multiple uses claimed for Chinese medicines are very like the make-believe claims made for western herbs by Galen, Culpepper and (with much less excuse) by Mills.
They are almost all untrue, but their proponents are good salesmen. Don’t let them get a foot in your door.
Follow-up
10 June 2012. No sooner did this post go public when I can across what must be one of the worst herbal scams ever: “Arthroplex“
31 July 2012. Coffee is the subject of another entry in the 1674 edition of Blagrave.
Blagrave evidently had a lower regard for coffee than I have.
“But being pounded and baked, as do it to make the Coffee-liquor with, it then stinks most loathsomly, which is an argument of some Saturnine quality in it.”
“But there is no mention of an medicinal use thereof, by any Author either Antient of Modern”
Blagrave says also
“But this I may truly say of it [coffee]: Quod Anglorum Corpora quae huic liquori, tantopere indulgent, in Barbarorum naturam degenerasse videntur,”
This was translated expertly by Benet Salway, of UCL’s History department
“that the bodies of the English that indulge in this liquor to such an extent seem to degenerate into the nature of barbarians”
My boss, Lucia Sivolotti got something very like that herself. Be very impressed.
Salway suggested that clearer Latin would have been “quod corpora Anglorum, qui tantopere indulgent huic liquori, degenerasse in naturam barbarorum videntur”.
I’d have passed that on to Blagrave, but I can’t find his email address.
I much prefer Alfréd Rényi’s aphorism (often misattributed to Paul Erdös)
“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems”
This post has been translated into Belorussian..
Chinese medicine and herbal medicine are in the news at the moment. There is a real risk that the government could endorse them by accepting the Pittilo report.
In my view traditional Chinese medicine endangers people. The proposed ‘regulation’ would do nothing to protect the public. Quite on the contrary, it would add to the dangers, by giving an official stamp of approval while doing nothing for safety.
The government’s idea of improving safety is to make sure that practitioners are ‘properly trained’. But it is the qualifications that cause the danger in the first place. The courses teach ideas that are plain wrong and often really dangerous.
Why have government (and some universities) not noticed this? That’s easy to see. Governments, quangos and university validation committees simply don’t look. They tick boxes but never ask what actually goes on. Here’s some examples of what goes on for them to think about. They show clearly the sort of dangerous rubbish that is taught on some of these ‘degrees’.
These particular slides are from the University of Westminster, but similar courses exist in only too many other places. Watch this space for more details on courses at Edinburgh Napier University, Middlesex University and the University of East London
Just a lot of old myths. Sheer gobbledygook,
SO much for a couple of centuries of physiology,
It gets worse.
Plain wrong.
Curious indeed. The fantasy gobbledygook gets worse.
Now it is getting utterly silly. Teaching students that the brain is made of marrow is not just absurd, but desperately dangerous for anyone unlucky (or stupid) enough to go to such a person when they are ill.
Here’s another herbal lecture., and this time the topic is serious. Cancer.
Herbal approaches for patients with cancer.
I’ve removed the name of the teacher to spare her the acute embarrassment of having these dangerous fantasies revealed. The fact that she probably believes them is not a sufficient excuse for endangering the public. There is certainly no excuse for the university allowing this stuff to be taught as part of a BSc (Hons).
First get them scared with some bad statistics.
No fuss there about distinguishing incidence, age-standardisation and death rates. And no reference. Perhaps a reference to the simple explanation of statistics at Cancer Research UK might help? Perhaps this slide would have been better (from CDC). Seems there is some mistake in slide 2.
Straight on to a truly disgraceful statement in slide 3
The is outrageous and very possibly illegal under the Cancer Act (1939). It certainly poses a huge danger to patients. It is a direct incentive to make illegal, and untrue claims by using weasel words in an attempt to stay just on the right side of the law. But that, of course, is standard practice in alternative medicine,
Slide 11 is mostly meaningless. “Strengthen vitality” sounds good but means nothing. And “enhancing the immune system” is what alternative medicine folks always say when they can think of nothing else. Its meaning is ill-defined and there is no reason to think that any herbs do it.
The idea of a ‘tonic’ was actually quite common in real medicine in the 1950s. The term slowly vanished as it was realised that it was a figment of the imagination. In the fantasy world of alternative medicine, it lives on.
Detoxification, a marketing term not a medical one, has been extensively debunked quite recently. The use of the word by The Prince of Wales’ company, Duchy Originals recently fell foul of the Advertising Standards Authority, and his herbal ‘remedies’ were zapped by the MHRA (Medicines and Health Regulatory Authority).
And of course the antioxidant myth is a long-disproved hypothesis that has become a mere marketing term.
“Inhibits the recurrence of cancer”! That sounds terrific. But if it is so good why is it not even mentioned in the two main resources for information about herbs?
In the UK we have the National Library for Health Complementary and Alternative Medicine Specialist Library (NeLCAM), now a part of NHS Evidence. It was launched in 2006. The clinical lead was none other than Peter Fisher, clinical director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, and the Queen’s homeopathic physician. The library was developed with the School of Integrated Health at the University of Westminster (where this particular slide was shown to undergraduates). Nobody could accuse these people of being hostile to magic medicine,
It seems odd, then, that NeLCAM does not seem to thnk to think that Centella asiatica, is even worth mentioning.
In the USA we have the National Center for Alternative and Complementary Medicine (NCCAM), an organisation that is so friendly to alternative medicine that it has spent a billion dollars on research in the area, though it has produced not a single good treatment for that vast expenditure. But NCCAM too does not even mention Centella asiatica in its herb list. It does get a mention in Cochrane reviews but only as a cosmetic cream and as an unproven treatment for poor venous circulation in the legs.
What on earth is a “lymph remedy”. Just another marketing term?
“especially valuable in the treatment of breast, throat and uterus cancer.“
That is a very dramatic claim. It as as though the hapless students were being tutored in doublespeak. What is meant by “especially valuable in the treatment of”? Clearly a desperate patient would interpret those words as meaning that there was at least a chance of a cure. That would be a wicked deception because there isn’t the slightest reason to think it works. Once again there this wondrous cure is not even mentioned in either NELCAM or NCCAM. Phytolacca is mentioned, as Pokeweed, in Wikipedia but no claims are mentioned even there. And it isn’t mentioned in Cochrane reviews either. The dramatic claims are utterly unfounded.
Ah the mistletoe story, again.
NHS Evidence (NeLCAM) lists three completed assessments. One concludes that more research is needed. Another concludes that “Rigorous trials of mistletoe extracts fail to demonstrate efficacy of this therapy”, and the third says “The evidence from RCTs to support the view that the application of mistletoe extracts has impact on survival or leads to an improved ability to fight cancer or to withstand anticancer treatments is weak”.
NCCAM says of mistletoe
- More than 30 human studies using mistletoe to treat cancer have been done since the early 1960s, but major weaknesses in many of these have raised doubts about their findings (see Question 6).
- Very few bad side effects have been reported from the use of mistletoe extract, though mistletoe plants and berries are poisonous to humans (see Question 7).
- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved mistletoe as a treatment for cancer or any other medical condition (see Question 8).
- The FDA does not allow injectable mistletoe to be imported, sold, or used except for clinical research (see Question 8).
Cochrane reviews lists several reviews of mistletoe with similar conclusions. For example “The evidence from RCTs to support the view that the application of mistletoe extracts has impact on survival or leads to an improved ability to fight cancer or to withstand anticancer treatments is weak”.
Anthroposophy is one of the highest grades of fantasy you can find. A post on that topic is in the works.
“Indicated for cancers . . . colon/rectal, uterine, breast, lung“. A cure for lung cancer? That, of course, depends on how you interpret the weasel words “indicated for”. Even Wikipedia makes no mention of any claims that Thuja benefits cancer. NHS Evidence (NeLCAM) doesn’t mention Thuja for any indication. Neither does NCCAM. Nor Cochrane reviews. That is not the impression the hapless students of this BSc lecture were given. In my view suggestions that you can cure lung cancer with this tree are just plain wicked.
Pure snake oil, and not even spelled correctly, Harry Hoxsey’s treatment centres in the USA were closed by court order in the 1950s.
At least this time it is stated that there is no hard evidence to support this brand of snake oil.
More unfounded claims when it says “treated successfully many cancer patients”. No references and no data to support the claim. It is utterly unfounded and claims to the contrary endanger the public.
Gerson therapy is one of the most notorious and unpleasant of the quack cancer treatments. The Gerson Institute is on San Diego, but their clinics are in Mexico and Hungary. It is illegal in the USA. According to the American Cancer Society you get “a strict low-salt, low-fat, vegetarian diet and drinking juice from about twenty pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables each day. One glass of juice is consumed each hour, thirteen times a day. In addition, patients are given several coffee enemas each day. Various supplements, such as potassium, vitamin B12, pancreatic enzymes, thyroid hormone, and liver extracts, are used to stimulate organ function, particularly of the liver and thyroid.”. At one time you also got several glasses of raw calf liver every day but after infections killed several people] carrot juice was given instead.
Cancer Research UK says “there is no evidence to show that Gerson therapy works as a cure for cancer”, and “The Gerson diet can cause some very serious side effects.” Nobody (except perhaps the Price of Wales) has any belief in this unpleasant, toxic and expensive folk-lore.
Again patients are endangered by teaching this sort of stuff.
And finally, the usual swipe at vaccines. It’s nothing to do with herbalism. but just about every alternative medicine advocate seems to subscribe to the anti-vaccination lobby.. It is almost as though they have an active preference for things that are known to be wrong. They seem to believe that medicine and science are part of an enormous conspiracy to kill everyone.
Perhaps this dangerous propaganda might have been ameliorated if the students had been shown this slide (from a talk by Melinda Wharton).
Click to enlarge
Left to people like this, we would still have smallpox, diphtheria. tetanus and rabies, Take a look at Vaccine-preventable diseases.
This is the sort of ‘education’ which the Pittilo report wants to make compulsory.
Smallpox in Baltimore, USA, 1939. This man was not vaccinated.
Conclusion
This selection of slides shows that much of the stuff taught in degrees in herbal medicine poses a real danger to public safety and to public health.
Pittilo’s idea that imposing this sort of miseducation will help safety is obviously and dangerously wrong. The Department of Health must reject the Pittilo recommendations on those grounds.
Follow-up
The much-delayed public consultation on the Pittilo report has just opened.
It is very important that as many people as possible respond to it. It’s easy to say that the consultation is sham. It will be if it is left only to acupuncturists and Chinese medicine people to respond to it. Please write to them before the closing date, November 2nd 2009. The way to send your evidence is here.
There is a questionnaire that you can complete, with the usual leading questions. Best do it anyway, but I’d suggest also sending written evidence as attachment too. I just got from DoH the email address where you can send it. They said
| if you have material you wish to send which you can’t easily “shoehorn” into the questionnaire, please send it to the following mailbox:
HRDListening@dh.gsi.gov.uk |
Here are three documents that I propose to submit in response to the consultation.I ‘d welcome criticisms that might make it more convincing. Use any parts of them you want in your own response.
- Submission to the Department of Health, for the consultation on the Pittilo report [download pdf].
- What is taught in degrees in herbal and traditional Chinese medicine? [download pdf]
- $2.5B Spent, No Alternative Med Cures [download pdf]
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I’ve written quite a lot about the Pittilo report already, in particular A very bad report: gamma minus for the vice-chancellor, and in The Times (see also the blog version).
Intriguingly, these posts are at number 2 in a Google search for “Michael Pittilo”. |
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Briefly, the back story is this.
It is now over a year since the Report to Ministers from “The Department of Health Steering Group on the Statutory Regulation of Practitioners of Acupuncture, Herbal Medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Other Traditional Medicine Systems Practised in the UK” [download the report].
The chair of the steering group was Professor R. Michael Pittilo, Principal and Vice-Chancellor of The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. The reason thet the report is so disastrously bad in its assessment of evidence is that it was written entirely by people with vested interests.
The committee consisted of five acupuncturists, five herbalists and five representatives of traditional Chinese medicine (plus eleven observers). There was not a single scientist or statistician to help in the assessment of evidence. And it shows: The assessment of the evidence in the report was execrable. Every one of the committee members would have found themselves out of work if they had come to any conclusion other than that their treatment works, Disgracefully, these interests were not declared in the report, though they are not hard to find. The university of which the chair is vice-chancellor runs a course in homeopathy, the most discredited of the popular forms of alternative medicine. That tells you all you need to know about the critical faculties of Michael Pittilo.
The two main recommendations of this Pittilo report are that
- Practitioners of Acupuncture, Herbal Medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine should be subject to statutory regulation by the Health Professions Council
- Entry to the register normally be through a Bachelor degree with Honours
Let’s consider the virtue of these two recommendations.
Regulation by the Health Professions Council (HPC) breaks their own rules
For a start, this should be ruled out by the HPC’s own rules, which require “Practise based on evidence of efficacy” as a condition for registration. Since there is practically no “evidence of efficacy”, it follows that the HPC can’t regulate acupuncture, herbal and Chinese medicine as Pittilo recommends. Or so you’d think. But the official mind seems to have an infinite capacity for doublespeak. The HPC published a report on 11 September 2008, Regulation of Medical Herbalists, Acupuncturists and Traditional Chinese Medicine Practitioners.
The report says
1. Medical herbalists, acupuncturists and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners should be statutorily regulated in the public interest and for public safety reasons.
2. The Health Professions Council is appropriate as the regulator for these professions.
3. The accepted evidence of efficacy overall for these professions is limited, but regulation should proceed because it is in the public interest.
In other words, the HPC simply decided to ignore its own rules, Its excuse for doing so is that regulation would protect “public safety” . But it simply would not do that. It is ell known that some Chinese herbs are adulterated with dangerous substances, but laws against that already exist. Trading Standards are much more likely to take appropriate action than the HPC. The Medicines and Health Regulatory Authority (MHRA) already deals with the licensing of herbal medicines. and, despite the fact that it recently betrayed its trust by allowing them to be labelled in a misleading way, they are the people to do it, not the HPC.
The Pittilo report (page 11) says
In future, it is hoped that more Government funding can be allocated to research into traditional/herbal medicines and acupuncture and that grants will become available to encourage practitioners to undertake postgraduate research work.
So they are asking for more government money.
In March 2007, the Chinese Government pledged to spend over $130 million over the next five years on research into the effectiveness of traditional Chinese medicine. It is to be hoped that this money will be targeted effectively to evaluate TCM.
It seems to have escaped the notice of Pittilo that roughly 100 percent of trials of Chinese medicine done in China come out positive. Elsewhere, very few come out positive,(see Vickers et al., 1998, Controlled Clinical Trials, 19, 159-166: download reprint) The Department of Health would be unwise to rely on Chinese research. Remember that modern acupuncture was not so much a product of ancient wisdom, but rather it stems from nationalist propaganda by Mao Tse-Tung, who needed a cheap way to keep the peasants quiet, though he was too sensible to use it himself.
The HPC report (page 5) cites these with the words
” . . . a lack of evidence of efficacy should not prevent regulation but that the professions should be encouraged and funded to strengthen the evidence base.”
This sentence seems to assume that the outcomes of research will be to strengthen the evidence base. Thus far, precisely the opposite has been the case. The Pittilo group has apparently not noticed that the US National Institutes of Health has already spent a billion dollars on research in alternative medicine and failed to come up with a single effective treatment. There are better ways to spend money on health. See, for example $2.5B Spent, No Alternative Med Cures found. .An enornous amount of research has already been done and the outcomes have produced no good treatments,
The proposed regulation would endanger the public, not protect it.
The excuse given by the HPC for breaking its own rules is that it should do so to protect the public.
Likewise Ann Keen, Health Minister, said:
“Patient safety is paramount, whether people are accessing orthodox health service treatments or using alternative treatments”
So first we need to identify what dangers are posed by acupuncture, herbal medicine and traditional Chinese medicine.
- Acupuncture is fairly safe. Its biggest danger lies in the unjustified claims that are routinely made for what can be achieved by being impaled by needles. This poses a danger that people may use acupuncture in place of treatments that work
- Herbal medicines are unstandardised, so even the very few that may work are dangerous to patients because the dose of active principle is unknown and varies from one batch to another. Taking a herbal medicine is a bit like swallowing a random number of tablets, False health claims pose a danger to patients too, when they cause patients to avoid treatments that work.
- Traditional Chinese Medicine is probably the most dangerous. Like the other two, the medicines are unstandardised so the dose is never known. False health claims abound. And in addition to these dangers, many cases have been found of Chinese medicines being adulterated with poisonous substances or with conventional drugs.
The form of regulation proposed by Pittilo would do little or nothing to protect the public from any of these dangers.
The proposals accept the herbal and Chinese medicine as traditionally practised. Nothing would be done about one of the major dangers, the lack of standardisation. That is a problem that was solved by pharmacologists in the 1930s, when international standards were set for the biological activity of things like tincture of digitalis, and assays were devised so that different batches could be adjusted to the same potency. Now, 80 years later, it is being proposed by Pittilo that we should return to the standards of safety that existed at the beginning of the last century. That is a threat to public safety., but the proposed regulation would do nothing whatsoever to protect the public from this dangerous practice. On the contrary, it would give official government sanction to it.
The other major danger is that patients are deceived by false health claims. This is dangerous (as well as dishonest) because it can cause patients to avoid treatments that work better, The internet abounds with claims that herbs can cure anything from diabetes to cancer. Many are doubtless illegal, but regulators like the HPC have traditionally ignored such claims: they are left to Trading Standards, Advertising Standards and the Medicines and Health Regulatory Authority (MHRA) to deal with. The MHRA already also has responsibility for monitoring side effects. The HPC would not do this.
The analogy with chiropractic and the GCC
The foolishness of allowing statutory regulation for unproven treatments has recently been illustrated quite dramatically by the case of chiropractic. Chiropractors have had statutory regulation by the General Chiropractic Council, which was established by the Chiropractors Act of 1994. The British Chiropractic Association (BCA) recently decided to sue the science writer, Simon Singh, for defamation when he cast doubt on some of the claims made by chiropractors, in particular their claims to be able to cure colic and asthma in children. That led to close examination of the claims. In fact there is no reason to think that spinal manipulation works for asthma, or that it works for colic. In fact there is quite good evidence that the claims are false. The result was that about 600 well-justified complaints have been lodged with the GCC (enough to bankrupt the GCC if the complaints are dealt with properly).
The point of this story is that the statutory regulator had nothing whatsoever to prevent these false health claims being made. Two of the complaints concern practices run by the chair of the GCC. Worse, the GCC actually endorsed such claims. The statutory regulator saw its duty to defend chiropractic (apart from a handful of cases of sexual misdemeanours), not to protect the patient from false health claims. The respectability conferred by statutory regulation made false health claims easier and endangered the public. It would be a disaster if the same mistake were made again.
On 11th December 2008 I got a letter form the HPC which said
in our opinion a lack of evidence of efficacy would not impede our ability to set standards or deal with complaints we receive. The vast majority of cases we consider are related to conduct.
But perhaps that is because they haven’t tried “regulating” quacks before. Now that the public is far more conscious about health fraud than it used to be, one can predict confidently that the HPC would be similarly overwhelmed by a deluge of complaints about the unjustified health claims made by acupuncturists, herbal medicine and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. There is no shortage of them to complain about.
The education problem
The Pittilo report recommends that the entry level for registration should be a bachelors degree with honours. At first sight it seems reasonable to ask that practitioners should be ‘properly qualified’, but when one looks at what is actually taught on these degrees it becomes clear that they endanger, rather than protect, the public,
There are two very big problems with this recommendation.
Firstly, you can’t have a bachelors degree with honours until after you have decided whether or not there is anything useful to teach. If and when any of the subjects under consideration and shown to work to a useful extent, then it would be quite reasonable to establish degrees in them. Even the report does not pretend seriously that that stage has been reached. The proposal to set up degrees in subjects, at least some of which are quite likely to have no more than placebo value, is self-evidently nonsense,
The time for degrees, and the time for government endorsement by statutory regulation, is after the therapies have been shown to work, not before.
The absurdity of thinking that the public will be protected because a practitioner has a degree in, say, acupuncture, is shown with startling clarity by a recently revealed examination paper in acupuncture’
You can download the entire exam paper. Here are a few highlights from it.
So students, in 2009, are being taught the crudest form of vitalism.
Teaching of traditional Chinese medicine is just as bad. Here are two slides from a course run by the University of Westminster.
The first ‘explains’ the mysterious and entirly mythical “Qi”.
So “Qi” means breath, air, vapour, gas, energy, vitalism. This is meaningless nonsense.
The second slide shows the real dangers posed by the way Chinese medicine is taught, The symptoms listed at the top could easily be a clue to serious illness, yat students are taught to treat them with ginger. Degrees like this endanger the public.
There are more mind-boggling slides from lectures on Chinese medicine and cancer: they show that what students are being taught is terrifyingly dangerous to patients.
It is entirely unacceptable that students are being taught these ancient myths as though they were true, and being encouraged to treat sick people on their basis. The effect of the Pittilo recommendations would be to force new generations of students to have this sort of thing forced on them. In fact the course for which this exam was set has already closed its doors. That is the right thing to do.
Here’s another example. The course leader for “BSc (Hons) Herbal Medicine” at the Univsrsity of Central Lancashire is Graeme Tobyn BA. But Tobyn is not only a herbalist but also an astrologer. In an interview he said
“At the end I asked her if I could cast her horoscope. She threw up her hands and said, ‘I knew this would happen if I came to an alternative practitioner.”
“I think the ruler of the ascendant was applying to Uranus in the ninth house, which was very pertinent.”
This would be preposterous even in the life style section of a downmarket women’s magazine, The Pittilo report wants to make degrees run my people like this compulsory. Luckily the Univerity of Central Lancashire is much more sensible and the course is being closed.
The matter is, in any case, being taken out of the hands of the government by the fact that universities are closing degrees in complementary medicine, including courses in some of those under discussion here, The University of Salford and the University of Central Lancashire have recently announced the closure of all the degree programmes in complementary and alternative medicine. The largest provider of such degrees, the University of Westminster has already shut down two of them, and the rest are being assessed at the moment. It is likely that the rest will be closed in the future.
The revelation that Westminster had been teaching its first year students that “amethysts emit high yin energy” and that students had been taught to diagnose disease and choose treatments by means of a dowsing pendulum, showed very clearly the sort of utter nonsense that undergraduates were being forced to learn to get a ‘bachelors degree with honours’. It stretches credulity to its limits to imagine that the public is protected by degrees like this. Precisely the opposite is true. The universities have recognised this, and shut the degrees. One exception is Professor Pittilo’s own university which continues to run a course in homeopathy, the most discredited of all the popular types alternative medicine.
A simpler, more effective and cheaper way to protect the public
I must certainly agree with the minister that protection of the public is an important matter. Having established that the Pittllo recommendations are more likely to endanger the public than protect them, it is essential to suggest alternative proposals that would work better.
Luckily, that is easy, because mechanisms already exist for dealing with the dangers that were listed above. The matter of adulteration, which is serious in traditional Chinese medicine, is a matter that is already the responsibility of the Office of Trading Standards. The major problem of false claims being made for treatment is also the responsibility of the Office of Trading Standards, which has a statutory duty to enforce the Unfair Trading Consumer Protection Regulations of May 2008. These laws state, for example, that
“One of the 31 commercial practices which are in all circumstances considered unfair is “falsely claiming that a product is able to cure illnesses, dysfunction or malformations”
The monitoring of false claims, and of side effects of treatments, is also the responsibility of the Medicines and Health Regulatory Authority (MHRA).
Rather than setting up complicated, expensive and ineffective ‘regulation’ by the HPC, all that need to be done is to ensure that the MHRA and/or Trading Standards have the funds to enforce existing laws. At the moment, they are not being implemented effectively, so I’d recommend that responsibility for enforcing the law against false health claims be transferred entirely to the MHRA, which has much more expertise in such matters than Trading Standards This would be both cheaper and more effective than the present system in which the responsibility is divided between the two organisations in an unclear way.
This proposal would protect the public against unsafe and adulterated treatments, and it would protect the public against false and fraudulent claims. That is what matters. It would do so more effectively,
more cheaply and more honestly than the Pittilo recommendations. There would be no reduction in patient choice either, There is no proposal to ban acupuncture, herbal medicine or traditional Chinese medicine. All that is necessary is to ensure that they don’t endanger the public.
Since the root of the problem lies in the fact that the evidence for the effectiveness is very weak. the question of efficacy, and cost-benefit ratio, should be referred to NICE. This was recommended by the House of Lords Report (2000). It is recommended again by the Smallwood report (sponsored by the Prince of Wales Foundation). It is baffling that this has not been done already. It does not seem wise to spend large amounts of money on new research at the moment, in the light of the fact that the US National Institutes of Health has already spent over $1 billion on such research without finding a single useful treatment.
The results of all this research has been to show that hardly any alternative treatment are effective. That cannot be ignored.
Conclusion
Recent events show that the halcyon days for alternative medicine are over. When the Pittilo report first appeared, it was greeted with derision in the media. For example, in The Times Alice Miles wrote
“This week came the publication of the Report to Ministers from the Department of Health Steering Group on the Statutory Regulation of Practitioners of Acupuncture, Herbal Medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Other Traditional Medicine Systems Practised in the UK. Otherwise known as twaddle.”
In the Independent, Dominic Lawson wrote
So now we will have degrees in quackery.
What, really, is the difference between acupuncture and psychic surgery?
People will no doubt continue to use it and that is their right and their responsibility. But if the government were to accept the recommendations of the Pittilo report it would be seen, quite rightly, as being anti-scientific and of posing a danger to the public.
Fortunately there is a better, and cheaper, way to protect the public.
Follow-up
Margaret McCartney’s blog in the Financial Times puts rhw view of a GP with her usual sense, humour and incisiveness.
“This report would, if implemented, create lots more nonsense exam papers funded by a lot more public money – and would produce practitioners without the absolutely crucial skill of how to assess evidence and reject or use it appropriately”
The Times has covered the story (with some interesting comments) Consultation on how to regulate complementary and alternative therapies
Times Higher Education UK-wide consultation on CAM regulation is launched Excellent response from Andy Lewis.
The Sun has by far the best coverage up to now, Jane Symons writes “Regulating quacks helps them prey on gullible patients“
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.The University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) is the first place I asked to see teaching materials that were used on its homeopathy “BSc” course. The request was refused, and subsequent internal appeals were refused too, Clearly UCLAN had something to hide. |
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An appeal to the information commissioner took almost two years to be judged, but the case was won. The eventual decision by the Information
Commissioner rejected all the grounds that UClan had used to evade the Freedom of Information Act.
UClan appealed against the judgement and I still haven’t got the stuff but that hardly matters now, because the course in question shut its doors. In any case, plenty of stuff from similar courses has leaked out already.
Meanwhile, in September 2008, UCLAN announced an internal review of all its courses in magic medicine, The review seemed to be genuine. For a start they asked me to give evidence to the review (something that no other university has done). They also asked Michael Eslea to give evidence. He is the UCLAN psychologist, whose magnificent open letter probably tipped the authorities into holding the review.
Just in case it is useful to anyone, here is a copy of the written evidence that I sent [download pdf],
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Report of the Working Party on the Review of issues associated with Homeopathy, Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine
1. Introduction As a consequence of concerns expressed by some colleagues within the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) Dr Malcolm McVicar, Vice Chancellor appointed a working party to review the issues associated with the University offering courses in Homeopathy, Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine. MEMBERSHIP: Eileen Martin (Chair) Pro-Vice Chancellor and Dean of Faculty of Health and Social Care |
The report was the subject of a special meeting of UCLAN’s Academic Board on 9th July 2009. The following resolutions were passed.
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Resolutions R1 That further minor revisions be made to the report prior to publication on the University’s website; R2 That the University refrain from offering any practitioner-qualifying courses in Homeopathy, Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine until such disciplines have achieved statutory regulation status; R3 That the University consider offering a limited number of postgraduate research studentships (leading to Masters by Research of PhD) to suitably qualified UCLan students and staff in these disciplines. They should have interdisciplinary supervisory teams to facilitate development of a broad range of research skills and to contribute to the generation of knowledge in CAM; R4 That the University consider how more interdisciplinary teaching can be achieved, where appropriate, within both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching to facilitate greater exposure to subject expertise and different paradigms. |
Resolutions 1, 3 and 4 say very little. Resolution 4 sounds thoroughly relativist. We are talking about medicine, about treating sick patients. There is only one “paradigm”. That is to find treatments that are as effective and safe as possible. There aren’t two sorts of medicine, regular and alternative. There is just medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t work. It’s a good illustration of DC’s rule number 2, “never trust anyone who uses the word paradigm”.
Resolution 2 is the really interesting one, because none if the topics, Homeopathy, Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine, is subject to statutory regulation.
If taken literally, resolution 2 means that all the UCLan courses in alternative medicine will close their doors. Bafflingly, this inevitable conclusion is not stated explicitly.
At least resolution 2 means that homeopathy, already closed, will stay closed. It is never likely to get statutory regulation.
For practical purposes, we can ignore for the moment the obvious fact that statutory regulation of nonsense subjects results only in nonsense. The only forms of alternative medicine that have got “statutory regulation” at the moment are chiropractic and osteopathy. The public has not been safeguarded by the General Chiropractic Council (GCC). The GCC, on the contrary, has endangered the public by allowing false health claims to be made with impunity. Perhaps the members of the review committee had not noticed that the Simon SIngh affair has resulted in almost 600 complaints being made to the GCC? The faith of the review in statutory regulation is clearly misplaced.
The Pittilo report is critical for what happens next
Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine are not subject to statutory regulation at present, so one would suppose that these degrees will close their doors too. However the infamous Pittilo report has proposed that they should become regulated by the Health Professions Council (HPC). The many problems of the Pittilo report have been documented here, in “A very bad report: gamma minus for the vice-chancellor“. There was also a high-profile critique of the report in The Times (and on this blog).
The HPC has, as one of its criteria for regulation, “evidence-based practice”. Disgracefully, the HPC has already shown its willingness to ignore its own rules and to act as statutory regulator for Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal medicine. This rather disgraceful behaviour is documented in “Health Professions Council ignores its own rules: the result is nonsense“.
The UCLAN report seems to assume that the recommendations of the Pittilo report will be accepted. But the long-awaited consultation has still not opened. We can be sure that when it does, the opposition to it will be very strong indeed.
The report in full
Here are a few comments on the report itself. Download the full report (as of July 15th).
i have to say that when I visited Preston to give evidence, my views seem to be treated seriously, even sympathetically, so it was a great disappointment to see the outcome. So what’s wrong? The major disaster is declared early in the report.
Section 2, Context
The debate is centred on a number of key themes which relate to:-
1. The quality of and/or absence of an evidence base to support claims of the efficacy and benefits of such treatments, linked to issues of public safety/protection and professional regulation.
Sounds good. What matters about any sort of medicine is whether or not it works and whether it is safe. It therefore verges on the incredible that we read in section 4.1
“conclusions from research into the efficacy of the various CAM’s are outside the remit of this report.”
The whole point about CAM is that there is very little evidence that any of it works. So the review committee decided to ignore the most important problem of the lot. I can’t see how any rational decision can be made without first deciding whether the treatment is better than placebo. That, surely, is the main question, and it was dodged.
UCLAN has failed to grasp the nettle, just as the Department of Health has also consistently failed to do so.
Section 4,1 Efficacy This section repeats the assertion, absurd to my mind, that it is possible to judge CAM courses while declining to assess whether they work or not.
Section 4.2 Role of Universities in Society.
There is universal agreement that critical thinking is crucial to the idea of a university, but the judgement of whether CAM teaches critical thinking is simply fudged. Again the report fails to grasp the nettle.
“Disagreements about critical thinking within CAMs arises because some will argue that such substantiation and assessment can occur within the discipline, whilst others will argue that the methodology for substantiation, that is evidence provision, is universal. As a result, the latter will demand that evidence is provided using methods from one field (e.g. randomised controlled trials) for use in another.”
Sadly, the report dodged the crucial judgement once again. The most obvious characteristic of every form of alternative medicine is their total lack of critical self-appraisal. It is very sad that the review committee could not bring itself to say so.
Section 4.4 Nomenclature of degrees
Recommendation
The nomenclature of courses, leading to a professional as well as an academic award, should reflect the professional route; for example Bachelor with Honours in Complementary Medicine, B Comp. Med.(Hons) or B Acupuncture (Hons).
This sounds to me like another truly pathetic fudge. What on earth is solved by changing the name of the degree? You’d still be teaching students the same load of gobbledygook and then letting them loose on sick people, whether you call it a Bachelor of Science, a Bachelor of Arts, or, as is recommended here, a Bachelor of nothing whatsoever.
Well, I suppose there is a (doubtless unintended) irony in calling CAM degrees “Bachelor of nothing whatsoever”.
Section 4.4 Ethical, non-harm and economic considerations
This section list a lot of reasons why teaching alternative medicine should be unethical. but nevertheless manages to conclude that
” . . . it is not unethical to offer courses in Homeopathy, Acupuncture and Chinese Herbal Medicine at a university.”
I find the logic by which this bizarre conclusion was reached quite impossible to follow. Like much of the rest of the report this conclusion seems to stem from a reluctance to grapple with the really important questions, like ‘does it work or not?’.
Despite this the recommendation is perhaps the most interesting of all.
“Recommendation
• The University refrains from offering any CAM courses until such disciplines have achieved statutory regulation status.”
This recommendation was accepted, and passed as a resolution at Academic Board. If it is implemented now, than there will be no more alternative medicine degrees next year at the University of Central Lancashire. If and when this happens, the University must be congratulated on its return to rational medicine.
Follow-up
Michael Eslea, UCLAN’s hero in resisting nonsense from the inside, has posted on this topic.
17 July 2009. It seemed odd that that no announcement was made about the future if the remaining CAM courses at UCLAN. So I asked deputy Vice-Chancellor Patrick McGhee for clarification. After a couple of days, I got this response.
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From: CTheobald@uclan.ac.uk To: d.colquhoun@ucl.ac.uk Hi David, I have been asked to respond to your question below on the running of acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine at UCLan. It is correct to assume that UCLan will not be taking any new entrants onto these programmes until further notice. Best Wishes Chris Chris Theobald |
So the report may have been disappointing, but it has done the job. As several people have pointed out in comments, it would be asking too much to expect a university to say “sorry we just noticed that we have been running junk-science courses for years”. But they have done the right thing anyway.
Here is a short break from the astonishing festival of chiropractic that has followed the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) v Simon Singh defamation case, and the absurd NICE guidance on low back pain.
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Singh’s statement already has over 10000 signatories, many very distinguished, Sign it now if you haven’t already. And getting on for 600 separate complaints about exaggerated and false claims by chiropractors have been lodged with the General Chiropractic Council and with Trading Standards offices. |
 Click to sign |
The BCA has exposed the baselessness of most of chiropractic’s claims more effectively than any sceptic could have done.
The University of Westminster is seeing the light?
It is only recently that the University of Westminster suspended entry to degrees in homeopathy and remedial massage and neuromuscular therapy. Luckily for science, they have a new Dean who knows bullshit when she sees it. I suspect than she has been instrumental in starting to restore Westminster’s reputation. The job isn’t finished yet though. According to the UCAS site Westminster still offers
- Chinese Medicine: Acupuncture with Foundation (B341) 4FT Hon BSc
- Health Sciences: Complementary Ther with Foundn (B300) 4FT Hon BSc
- Health Sciences: Complementary Therapies (B255) 3FT Hon BSc
- Health Sciences: Herbal Medicine (B342) 3FT Hon BSc
- Health Sciences: Herbal Medicine with Foundation (B340) 4FT Hon BSc
- Health Sciences: Naturopathy (B391) 3FT Hon BSc
- Health Sciences: Naturopathy with Foundation (B392) 4FT Hon BSc
- Health Sciences: Nutritional Therapy (B400) 3FT Hon BSc
- Health Sciences: Nutritional Therapy with Foundn (B402) 4FT Hon BSc
With the possible exception of herbal medicine, which could be taught scientifically. all the rest is as delusional as homeopathy.
Rumour has it that Naturopathy may be next for the chop, so it seems appropriate to help the dean by showing a bit more of what the hapless students get taught. Remember that, according to Westminster, this is a bachelor of science degree!
Psychotherapeutic Approaches in Naturopathy 3CMW606
“This module is a core subject for BSc (Hons) Health Sciences: Naturopathy and option for BSc (Hons) Health Sciences: Complementary Therapies; BSc (Hons) Health Sciences: Therapeutic Bodywork; Graduate Diploma in Therapeutic Bodywork.”
Lectures 3 – 5 of this course are about the Theory and Application of EmoTrance.
EMOTRANCE? No I had never heard of it either. But it takes only two minutes with Google to discover that it yet another product of the enormous navel-gazing self-help industry. A new variant is born almost every day, and no doubt they make buckets of money for their inventors. You can download a primer from http://emotrance.com/. The web site announces.
“EmoTrance REAL energy healing for the 21st Century”
Here are three quotations from the primer.
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And then I thought of the lady in the supermarket whose husband had died, and I spend the following time sending her my best wishes, and my best space time quantum healing efforts for her void. It doesn’t matter how “bad”; something is or how old, it is ONLY AN ENERGY and energy can be moved with consciousness in quantum time, easily, and just for the asking. Is EmoTrance a Science? |
Now back to Westminster
Here are a few slides about EmoTrance
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So it is pure vitalistic psycho-babble. The usual undefined use of impressive sounding words like “energy” and “quantum” with no defined meaning. Just preposterous made-up gobbledygook.
Before getting to EmoTrance, the course Psychotherapeutic Approaches in Naturopathy (3CMW606) had a lecture on Flower Essences. The evidence says, not surprisingly, that the effects of flower essences is not distinguishable from placebo “The hypothesis that flower remedies are associated with effects beyond a placebo response is not supported by data from rigorous clinical trials.” (See Ernst Wien. Klin. Wochenschr. 2002 114(23-24):963-6). Here are two of the slides.
This last slide departs from the simply silly to the totally mad. Dowsing? Kinesiology?
Pendulums I’m told from more than one source that the use of pendulums is not uncommon. both in teaching and by students in the Westminster University polyclinic Apparently they provide an excellent way to choose a ‘remedy’ or make a diagnosis (well, I expect they are as good as the alternatives). If in doubt, guess.
Of course pendulums were popular with Cherie Blair who is reported to have taken her son Leo to a pendulum waver, Jack Temple, rather than have him vaccinated with MMR. At least her delusions affected fewer people than those of her husband (the latest Iraq body count is about 100,000).
Kinesiology was originally a word that applied to the perfectly sensible science of human movement. But Applied Kinesiology more often refers now to a fraudulent and totally ineffective diagnostic method invented by (you guessed) a chiropractor. It has been widely used by alternative medicine to misdiagnose food allergies. It does not work (Garrow, 1988: download reprint).
General Chiropractic Council It is a mind-boggling sign of the incompetence of the General Chiropractic Council that they manage to include kinesiology within their definition of “evidence based care”. Their definition is clearly sufficiently flexible to include anything whatsoever. The incompetence of the GCC is documented in superb detail on jdc325’s blog (James Cole).
Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence (CHRE) is yet another example of the network of ineffective and incompetent quangos that plague us.. It is meant to ensure that regulation is effective but utterly fails to do so. The CHRE is quoted as saying “[The GCC] takes its role seriously and aspires to, and often maintains, excellence.”. Like endorsing kinesiology and ‘craniosacral therapy’ perhaps? Quangos like the CHRE not only fail to ensure regulatory excellence, they actually endorse rubbish. They do more harm than good.
The reading list for the course includes the following books. I guess the vibrational medicine (whatever that means) was covered already in the now infamous ‘amethysts emit high yin energy‘ lectures.
Reading List
Essential:
Hartman S (2003) Oceans of Energy: The Patterns and Techniques of EmoTrance: Vol 1.DragonRising. ISBN: 1873483732.
Lynch V and Lynch P (2001) Emotional Healing in Minutes. Thorsons: London. ISBN: 0007112580Recommended:
Gerber R (2001) Vibrational Medicine for the 21st Century. Piatkus Publishers: London.
Gurudas (1989) Flower Essences and Vibrational Medicine. Cassandra Press: California, USA
Hartman S (2000) Adventures in EFT: The Essential Field Guide to Emotional Freedom Techniques. DragonRising. ISBN: 1873483635.
Hartman S (2004) Living Energy: The Patterns and Techniques of EmoTrance: Vol 2. DragonRising.ISBN: 1873483740.
Hartman S (2006) Energy Magic: The Patterns and Techniques of EmoTrance: Vol 3. Dragon Rising.ISBN: 1873483767.
Real magic.
Sylvia Hartman’s books seem to feature heavily in the reading list. I just got news of her latest effort
Welcome to a special update to the June 2009 newsletter to announce Silvia Hartmann’s latest book “Magic, Spells & Potions” is now available to pre-order from our site. The eBook edition will be released this Sunday, the most magical day of the year.
http://DragonRising.com/store/magic_spells_and_potions/?r=DR0609MSAP
If you do pre-order this exciting new book, not only will you be amongst the first to receive your copy, but you will also be entered into an exciting competition for Silvia Hartmann’s handmade copal amber magic pendant. Each paperback book pre-ordered will also be signed by the author and contain a unique blessing for the reader.
Because this is a serious book on real magic, potions and fortune telling if you are a beginner Silvia has provided ample sample spells and potions for you to practice working with before you start covering the advanced material.
What? No honestly, I didn’t invent that.
The idea that stuff of this sort is appropriate for a bachelor of science degree is simply ludicrous. I have no doubt that Westminster’s new dean can see that as well as anyone else. She has the delicate diplomatic job of extirpating the nonsense, I wish her well.
Follow-up
Latest from ABC News (Australia)
Parents guilty of eczema baby manslaughter
The baby girl had severe eczema and died of septicemia in 2002. After a four-week trial the Supreme Court jury took less than two days to reach its decision. The Crown argued the couple did not seek conventional medical treatment for their child, instead treating her with homeopathic drops. The defence argued the couple were not warned about how sick the child was by medical staff who examined her. Thomas and Manju Sam sat in the dock with their arms around each other, crying as the verdict was read out. Thomas Sam’s brother, who was in the public gallery, collapsed sobbing and was taken outside. Both were granted bail with strict conditions ahead of their sentencing hearing. |
How many times does one have to say it. Sugar pills can kill.
They kill when give given to prevent malaria
They kill when given to treat AIDS
Young scientists have condemned it. Their excellent efforts were reported in The Guardian and in the Times). Anyone with half a brain condemns it.
Most homeopaths I’ve met are genuine people who really believe their own fairy tales. Is being genuinely deluded absolve you from blame? Not in Australia, it seems.
Follow-up
| The Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Integrated Health (FiH) is a propaganda organisation that aims to persuade people, and politicians, that the Prince’s somewhat bizarre views about alternative medicine should form the basis of government health policy.
His attempts are often successful, but they are regarded by many people as being clearly unconstitutional. |
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The FiH’s 2009 AnnualConferen ce conference was held at The King’s Fund, London 13 – 14 May 2009. It was, as always, an almost totally one-sided affair devoted to misrepresentation of evidence and the promotion of magic medicine. But according to the FiH, at least, it was a great success. The opening speech by the Quacktitioner Royal can be read here. It has already been analysed by somebody who knows rather more about medicine than HRH. He concludes
“It is a shocking perversion of the real issues driven by one man; unelected, unqualified and utterly misguided”.
We are promised some movie clips of the meeting. They might even make a nice UK equivalent of “Integrative baloney @ Yale“.
This post is intended to provide some background information about the speakers at the symposium. But let’s start with what seems to me to be the real problem. The duplicitous use of the word “integrated” to mean two quite different things.
The problem of euphemisms: spin and obfuscation
One of the problems of meetings like this is the harm done by use of euphemisms. After looking at the programme, it becomes obvious that there is a rather ingenious bit of PR trickery going on. It confuses (purposely?) the many different definitions of the word “integrative” . One definition of “Integrative medicine” is this (my emphasis).
” . . . orienting the health care process to engage patients and caregivers in the full range of physical, psychological, social, preventive, and therapeutic factors known to be effective and necessary for the achievement of optimal health.”
That is a thoroughly admirable aim. And that, I imagine, is the sense in which several of the speakers (Marmot, Chantler etc) used the term. Of course the definition is rather too vague to be very helpful in practice, but nobody would dream of objecting to it.
But another definition of the same term ‘integrative medicine’ is as a PR-friendly synonym for ‘alternative medicine’, and that is clearly the sense in which it is used by the Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Integrated Health (FIH), as is immediately obvious from their web site.
The guide to the main therapies supports everything from homeopathy to chiropractic to naturopathy, in a totally uncritical way. Integrated service refers explicitly to integration of ‘complementary’ medicine, and that itself is largely a euphemism for alternative medicine. For example, the FIH’s guide to homeopathy says
“What is homeopathy commonly used for?
Homeopathy is most often used to treat chronic conditions such as asthma; eczema; arthritis; fatigue disorders like ME; headache and migraine; menstrual and menopausal problems; irritable bowel syndrome; Crohn’s disease; allergies; repeated ear, nose, throat and chest infections or urine infections; depression and anxiety.”
But there is not a word about the evidence, and perhaps that isn’t surprising because the evidence that it works in any of these conditions is essentially zero.
The FIH document Complementary Health Care: A Guide for Patients appears to have vanished from the web after its inaccuracy received a very bad press, e.g. in the Times, and also here. It is also interesting that the equally widely criticised Smallwood report (also sponsored by the Prince of Wales) seems to have vanished too).
The programme for the meeting can be seen here, for Day 1, and Day 2
Conference chair Dr Phil Hammond, GP, comedian and health service writer. Hammond asked the FIH if I could speak at the meeting to provide a bit of balance. Guess what? They didn’t want balance.
09:30 Opening session
Dr Michael Dixon OBE
09:30 Introduction: a new direction for The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health and new opportunities in integrated health and care. Dr Michael Dixon, Medical Director, FIH
Michael Dixon is devoted to just about every form of alternative medicine. As well as being medical director of the Prince’s Foundation he also runs the NHS Alliance. Despite its name, the NHS Alliance is nothing to do with the NHS and acts, among other things, as an advocate of alternative medicine on the NHS, about which it has published a lot.
Dr Dixon is also a GP at College Surgery, Cullompton, Devon, where his “integrated practice” includes dozens of alternative practitioners. They include not only disproven things like homeopathy and acupuncture, but also even more bizarre practitioners in ‘Thought Field Therapy‘ and ‘Frequencies of Brilliance‘.
To take only one of these, ‘Frequencies of Brilliance’ is bizarre beyond belief. One need only quote its founder and chief salesperson.
“Frequencies of Brilliance is a unique energy healing technique that involves the activation of energetic doorways on both the front and back of the body.”
“These doorways are opened through a series of light touches. This activation introduces high-level Frequencies into the emotional and physical bodies. It works within all the cells and with the entire nervous system which activates new areas of the brain.”
“Frequencies of Brilliance is a 4th /5th dimensional work. The process is that of activating doorways by lightly touching the body or working just above the body.”
“Each doorway holds the highest aspect of the human being and is complete in itself. This means that there is a perfect potential to be accessed and activated throughout the doorways in the body.”
Best of all, it can all be done at a distance (that must help sales a lot). One is reminded of the Skills for Health “competence” in distant healing (inserted on a government web site at the behest (you guessed it) of the Prince’s Foundation, as related here)
“The intent of a long distance Frequencies of Brilliance (FOB) session is to enable a practitioner to facilitate a session in one geographical location while the client is in another.
A practitioner of FOB that has successfully completed a Stage 5 Frequency workshop has the ability to create and hold a stable energetic space in order to work with a person that is not physically present in the same room.
The space that is consciously created in the Frequencies of Brilliance work is known as the “Gap”. It is a space of nonlinear time. It contains ”no time and no space” or respectively “all time and all space”. Within this “Gap” a clear transfer of the energies takes place and is transmitted to an individual at a time and location consciously intended. Since this dimensional space is in non-linear time the work can be performed and sent backward or forward in time as well as to any location.
The Frequencies of Brilliance work cuts through the limitations of our physical existence and allows us to experience ourselves in other dimensional spaces. Therefore people living in other geographic locations than a practitioner have an opportunity to receive and experience the work.
The awareness of this dimensional space is spoken about in many indigenous traditions, meditation practices, and in the world of quantum physics. It is referred to by other names such as the void, or vacuum space, etc.”
This is, of course, preposterous gobbledygook. It, and other things in Dr Dixon’s treatment guide, seem to be very curious things to impose on patients in the 21st century.
Latest news. The Mid-Devon Star announces yet more homeopathy in Dr Dixon’s Cullompton practice. This time it comes in the form of a clinic run from the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital. I guess they must be suffering from reduced commissioning like all the other homeopathic hospitals, but Dr Dixon seems to have come to their rescue. The connection seems to be with Bristol’s homeopathic consultant, Dr Elizabeth A Thompson. On 11 December 2007 I wrote to Dr Thompson, thus
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In March 2006, a press release http://www.ubht.nhs.uk/press/view.asp?257 announced a randomised trial for homeopathic treatment of asthma in children. This was reported also on the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/4971050.stm . I’d be very grateful if you could let me know when results from this trial will become available. Yours sincerely David Colquhoun |
The reply, dated 11 December 2007, was unsympathetic
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I have just submitted the funders report today and we have set ourselves the deadline to publish two inter-related papers by March 1st 2007. Can I ask why you are asking and what authority you have to gain this information. I shall expect a reply to my questions, |
I answered this question politely on the same day but nevertheless my innocent enquiry drew forth a rather vitriolic complaint from Dr Thompson to the Provost of UCL (dated 14 December 2007). In this case, the Provost came up trumps. On 14 January 2008 he replied to Thompson: “I have looked at the email that you copied to me, and I must say that it seems an entirely proper and reasonable request. It is not clear to me why Professor Colquhoun should require some special authority to make such direct enquiries”. Dr Thompson seems to be very sensitive. We have yet to see the results of her trial in which I’m still interested.
Not surprisingly, Dr Dixon has had some severe criticism for his views, not least from the UK’s foremost expert on the evidence for efficacy, Prof Edzard Ernst. Accounts of this can be found in Pulse,
and on Andrew Lewis’s blog.
Dixon is now (in)famous in the USA too. The excellent Yale neurologist, Steven Novella, has written an analysis of his views on Science Based Medicine. He describes Dr. Michael Dixon as “A Pyromaniac In a Field of (Integrative) Straw Men”
Peter Hain
09:40 Politics and people: can integrated health and care take centre stage in 2009/2010? Rt Hon Peter Hain MP
It seems that Peter Hain was converted to alternative medicine when his first baby, Sam, was born with eczema. After (though possibly not because of) homeopathic treatment and a change in diet, the eczema got better. This caused Hain, while Northern Ireland Secretary to spend £200,000 of taxpayers’ money to set up a totally uninformative customer satisfaction survey, which is being touted elsewhere in this meeting as though it were evidence (see below). I have written about this episode before: see Peter Hain and Get Well UK: pseudoscience and privatisation in Northern Ireland.
I find it very sad that a hero of my youth (for his work in the anti-apartheid movement) should have sunk to promoting junk science, and even sadder that he does so at my expense.
There has been a report on Hain’s contribution in Wales Online.
09:55 Why does the Health Service need a new perspective on health and healing? Sir Cyril Chantler, Chair, King’s Fund, previous Dean, Guy’s Hospital and Great Ormond Street
Cyril Chantler is a distinguished medical administrator. He also likes to talk and we have discussed the quackery problem several times. He kindly sent me the slides that he used. Slide 18 says that in order to do some good we “need to demonstrate that the treatment is clinically effective and cost effective for NHS use”. That’s impeccable, but throughout the rest of the slides he talks of integrating with complementary” therapies, the effectiveness of which is either already disproved or simply not known.
I remain utterly baffled by the reluctance of some quite sensible people to grasp the nettle of deciding what works. Chantler fails to grasp the nettle, as does the Department of Health. Until they do so, I don’t see how they can be taken seriously.
10.05 Panel discussion
The Awards
10:20 Integrated Health Awards 2009 Introduction: a review of the short-listed applications
10:45 Presentations to the Award winners by the special guest speaker
11:00 Keynote address by special guest speaker
Getting integrated
Dr David Peters
12:00 Integration, long term disease and creating a sustainable NHS. Professor David Peters, Clinical Director and Professor of Integrated Healthcare, University of Westminster
I first met David Peters after Nature ran my article, Science Degrees without the Science. .One of the many media follow-ups of that article was on Material World (BBC Radio 4). This excellent science programme, presented by Quentin Cooper, had a discussion between me and David Peters ( listen to the mp3 file).
There was helpful intervention from Michael Marmot who had talked, in the first half of the programme, about his longitudinal population studies.
Marmot stressed the need for proper testing. In the case of
homeopathy and acupuncture, that proper testing has largely been done. The tests were failed.
The University of Westminster has, of course, gained considerable notoriety as the university that runs more degree programmes in anti-scientific forms of medicine than any other. Their lecture on vibrational medicine teaches students that amethysts “emit high Yin energy so transmuting lower energies and clearing and aligning energy disturbances at all levels of being”. So far their vice-chancellor, Professor Geoffrey Petts, has declined to answer enquiries about whether he thinks such gobbledygook is appropriate for a BSc degree.
But he did set up an internal enquiry into the future of their alternative activities. Sadly that enquiry seems to have come to the nonsensical conclusion that the problem can be solved by injection of good science into the courses, as reported here and in the Guardian.
It seems obvious that if you inject good science into their BSc in homeopathy the subject will simply vanish in a puff of smoke.
In 2007, the University of Westminster did respond to earlier criticism in Times Higher Education, but their response seemed to me to serve only to dig themselves deeper into a hole.
Nevertheless, Westminster has now closed down its homeopathy degree (the last in the country to go) and there is intense internal discussion going on there. I have the impression that Dr Peters’ job is in danger. The revelation of more slides from their courses on homeopathy, naturopathy and Chinese herbal medicine shows that these courses are not only barmy, but also sometimes dangerous.
Professor Chris Fowler
12:10 Educating tomorrow’s integrated doctors. Professor Chris Fowler, Dean for Education, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry
I first came across Dr Fowler when I noticed him being praised for his teaching of alternative medicine to students at Barts and the London Medical School on the web site of the Prince’s Foundation. I wrote him a polite letter to ask if he really thought that the Prince of Wales was the right person to consult about the education of medical students. The response I got was, ahem, unsympathetic. But a little while later I noticed that two different Barts students had set up public blogs that criticised strongly the nonsense that was being inflicted on them.
At that point, I felt it was necessary to support the students who, it seemed to me, knew more about medical education than Professor Fowler. It didn’t take long to uncover the nonsense that was being inflicted on the students: read about it here.
There is a follow-up to this story here. Fortunately, Barts’ Director of Research, and, I’m told, the Warden of Barts, appear to agree with my view of the harm that this sort of thing can do to the reputation of Barts, so things may change soon,
Dame Donna Kinnair
12:30 Educating tomorrow’s integrated nurses.
Dame Donna Kinnair, Director of Nursing, Southwark PCT
As far as I can see, Donna Kinnair has no interest in alternative medicine. She is director of nursing at Southwark primary care trust and was an adviser to Lord Laming throughout his inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié. I suspect that her interest is in integrating child care services (they need it, judging by the recent death of ‘Baby P’). Perhaps her presence shows the danger of using euphemisms like ‘integrated medicine’ when what you really mean is the introduction of unproven or disproved forms of medicine.
Michael Dooley
12:40 Integrating the care of women: an example of the new paradigm. Michael Dooley, Consultant Obstetrician and Gynecologist
DC’s rule 2. Never trust anyone who uses the word ‘paradigm’. It is a sure-fire sign of pseudoscience. In this case, the ‘new paradigm’ seems to be the introduction of disproven treatment. Dooley is a gynaecologist and Medical Director of the Poundbury Clinic. His clinic offers a whole range of unproven and disproved treatments. These include acupuncture as an aid to conception in IVF. This is not recommended by the Cochrane review, and one report suggests that it hinders conception rather than helps.
12.40 Discussion
13.00 – 14.00 Lunch and Exhibition
15.30 Tea
Boo Armstrong and Get Well UK
16.00 Integrated services in action: The Northern
Ireland experience: what has it shown us and what are its implications?
Boo Armstrong of Get Well UK with a team from the NI study
I expect that much will be made of this “study”, which, of course, tells you absolutely nothing whatsoever about the effectiveness of the alternative treatments that were used in it. This does not appear to be the view of Boo Armstrong, On the basis of the “study”, her company’s web site proclaims boldly
“Complementary Medicine Works
Get Well UK ran the first government-backed complementary therapy project in the UK, from February 2007 to February 2008″
This claim appears, prima facie, to breach the Unfair Trading Regulations of May 2008. The legality of the claim is, at the moment, being judged by a Trading Standards Officer. In any case, the “study” was not backed by the government as a whole, but just by Peter Hain’s office. It is not even clear that it had ethical approval.
The study consisted merely of asking people who had seen an alternative medicine practitioner whether they felt better or worse. There was no control group; no sort of comparison was made. It is surely obvious to the most naive person that a study like this cannot even tell you if the treatment has a placebo effect, never mind that it has any genuine effects of its own. To claim that it does so seems to be simply dishonest. There is no reason at all to think that the patients would not have got better anyway.
It is not only Get Well UK who misrepresent the evidence. The Prince’s
Foundation itself says
“Now a new, year long trial supported by the Northern Ireland health service has . . . demonstrated that integrating complementary and conventional medicine brings measurable benefits to patients’ health.”
That is simply not true. It is either dishonest or stupid. Don’t ask me which, I have no idea.
This study is no more informative than the infamous Spence (2005) ‘study’ of the same type, which seems to be the only thing that homeopaths can produce to support their case.
There is an excellent analysis of the Northern Ireland ‘study’ by Andy Lewis, The Northern Ireland NHS Alternative Medicine ‘Trial’. He explains patiently, yet again, what constitutes evidence and why studies like this are useless.
His analogy starts
” . . . the Apple Marketing Board approach the NHS and ask for £200,000 to do a study to show the truth behind the statement ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’. The Minister, being particularly fond of apples, agrees and the study begins.”
16.30 Social enterprise and whole systems integrated care. Dee Kyne, Sandwell PCT and a GP. Developing an integrated service in secondary care
Dee Kyne appears to be CEO of KeepmWell Ltd (a financial interest that is not mentioned).
Peter Mackereth, Clinical Lead, Supportive Services, Christie Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
I had some correspondence with Mackereth when the Times (7 Feb 2007) published a picture of the Prince of Wales inspecting an “anti-MRSA aromatherapy inhaler” in his department at the Christie. It turned out that the trial they were doing was not blind No result has been announced anyway, and on enquiry, I find that the trial has not even started yet. Surprising, then to find that the FIH is running the First Clinical Aromatherapy Conference at the Christie Hospital, What will there be to talk about?
Much of what they do at the Christie is straightforward massage, but they also promote the nonsensical principles of “reflexology” and acupuncture.
The former is untested. The latter is disproven.
Parallel Sessions
Developing a PCT funded musculoskeletal service Dr Roy Welford, Glastonbury Health Centre
Roy Welford is a Fellow of the Faculty of Homeopathy, and so promotes disproven therapies. The Glastonbury practice also advertises acupuncture (disproven), osteopathy and herbal medicine (largely untested so most of it consists of giving patients an unknown dose of an ill-defined drug, of unknown effectiveness and unknown safety).
Making the best of herbal self-prescription in integrated practice: key remedies and principles. Simon Mills, Project Lead: Integrated Self Care in Family Practice, Culm Valley Integrated Centre for Health, Devon
Simon Mills is a herbalist who now describes himself as a “phytotherapist” (it sounds posher, but the evidence, or lack of it, is not changed by the fancy name). Mills likes to say things like “there are herbs for heating and drying”, “hot and cold” remedies, and to use meaningless terms like “blood cleanser”, but he appears to be immune to the need for good evidence that herbs work before you give them to sick people. He says, at the end of a talk, “The hot and the cold remain the trade secret of traditional medicine”. And this is the 21st Century.
Practical ways in which complementary approaches can improve the treatment of cancer. Professor Jane Plant, Author of “Your life in your hands” and Chief Scientist, British Geological Society and Professor Karol Sikora, Medical Director, Cancer Partners UK
Jane Plant is a geologist who, through her own unfortunate encounter with breast cancer, became obsessed with the idea that a dairy-free diet cured her. Sadly there is no good evidence for that idea, according to the World Cancer Research Fund Report, led by Professor Sir Michael Marmot. No doubt her book on the subject sells well, but it could be held that it is irresponsible to hold out false hopes to desperate people. She is a supporter of the very dubious CancerActive organisation (also supported by Michael Dixon OBE –see above) as well as the notorious pill salesman, Patrick Holford (see also here).
Karol Sikora, formerly an oncologist at the Hammersmith Hospital, is now Dean of Medicine at the University of Buckingham (the UK’s only private university). He is also medical director at CancerPartners UK, a private cancer company.
He recently shot to fame when he appeared in a commercial in the USA sponsored by “Conservatives for Patients’ Rights”, to pour scorn on the NHS, and to act as an advocate for the USA’s present health system. A very curious performance. Very curious indeed.
His attitude to quackery is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. One was somewhat alarmed to see him sponsoring a course at what was, at first, called the British College of Integrated Medicine, and has now been renamed the Faculty of Integrated Medicine That grand title makes it sound like part of a university. It isn’t.
The alarm was as result of the alliance with Dr Rosy Daniel (who promotes an untested herbal conconction, Carctol, for ‘healing’ cancer) and Dr Mark Atkinson (a supplement salesman who has also promoted the Qlink pendant. The Qlink pendant is a simple and obvious fraud designed to exploit paranoia about WiFi killing you.
The first list of speakers on the proposed diploma in Integrated Medicine was an unholy alliance of outright quacks and commercial interests. It turned out that, although Karol Sikora is sponsoring the course, he knew nothing about the speakers. I did and when I pointed this out to Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of Buckingham, he immediately removed Rosy Daniel from directing the Diploma. At the moment the course is being revamped entirely by Andrew Miles. There is hope that he’ll do a better job. It has not yet been validated by the University of Buckingham. Watch this space for developments.
Stop press It is reported in the Guardian that Professor Sikora has been describing his previous job at Imperial College with less than perfect accuracy. Oh dear. More developments in the follow-up.
The role of happy chickens in healing: farms as producers of health as well as food – the Care Farm Initiative Jonathan Dover, Project Manager, Care Farming, West Midlands.
“Care farming is a partnership between farmers, participants and health & social care providers. It combines the care of the land with the care of people, reconnecting people with nature and their communities.”
Sounds lovely, I wonder how well it works?
What can the Brits learn from the Yanks when it comes to integrated health? Jack Lord, Chief Executive Humana Europe
It is worth noticing that the advisory board of Humana Europe includes Micheal Dixon OBE, a well known advocate of alternative medicine (see
above). Humana Europe is a private company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Humana Inc., a health benefits company with 11 million members and 22,000 employees and headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky. In 2005 it entered into a business partnership with Virgin Group. Humana was mentioned in the BBC Panorama programme “NHS for Sale”. The company later asked that it be pointed out that they provide commissioning services, not clinical services [Ed. well not yet anyway].
Humana’s document “Humana uses computer games to help people lead healthier lives” is decidedly bizarre. Hang on, it was only a moment ago that we were being told that computer games rewired your brain.
Day 2 Integrated health in action
09.00 Health, epidemics and the search for new solutions. Sir Michael Marmot, Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, Royal Free and University College Medical School
It is a mystery to me that a distinguished epidemiologist should be willing to keep such dubious company. Sadly I don’t know what he said, but judging my his publications and his appearence on Natural World, I can’t imagine he’d have much time for homeopaths.
9.25 Improving health in the workplace. Dame Carol Black, National Director, Health and Work, Department of Health
This is not the first time that Dame Carol has been comtroversial.
9.45 Integrated health in focus: defeating obesity. Professor Chris Drinkwater, President, NHS Alliance.
The NHS Alliance was mentioned above. Enough said.
10.00 Integrated healthcare in focus: new approaches to managing asthma, eczema and allergy. Professor Stephen Holgate, Professor of Immunopharmacology, University of Southampton
10.15 Using the natural environment to increase activity. The Natural England Project: the results from year one. Dr William Bird and Ruth Tucker, Natural England.
10.30 Panel discussion
10.45 Coffee
Self help in action
11.10 Your health, your way: supporting self care through care planning and the use of personal budgets. Angela Hawley, Self Care Lead, Department of Health
11.25 NHS Life Check: providing the signposts to
integrated health. Roy Lambley, Project Director, NHS LifeCheck Programme
This programme was developed with the University of Westminster’s “Health and Well-being Network”. This group, with one exception, is separate from Westminster’s extensive alternative medicine branch (it’s mostly psychologists).
11.45 The agony and the ecstasy of helping patients to help themselves: tips for clinicians, practices and PCTs. Professor
Ruth Chambers, FIH Foundation Fellow.
11.55 Providing self help in practice: Department of Health Integrated Self Help Information Project. Simon Mills, Project Lead: Integrated Self Care in Family Practice, Culm Valley Integrated Centre for Health, Devon and Dr Sam Everington, GP, Bromley by Bow.
The Culm Valley Integrated Centre for health is part of the College Surgery Partnership, associated with Michael Dixon OBE (yes, again!).
Simon Mills is the herbalist who says “The hot and the cold remain the trade secret of traditional medicine” .
Sam Everington, in contrast, seems to be interested in ‘integration’ in the real sense of the word, rather than quackery.
Integrated health in action
How to make sense of the evidence on complementary approaches: what works? What might work? What doesn’t work?
Dr Hugh MacPherson, Senior Research Fellow in Health Sciences, York University and Dr Catherine Zollman, Bravewell Fellow
Hugh MacPherson‘s main interest is in acupuncture and he publishes in alternative medicine journals. Since the recent analysis in the BMJ from the Nordic Cochrane Centre (Madsen et al., 2009) it seems that acupuncture is finally dead. Even its placebo effect is too small to be useful. Catherine Zollman is a Bristol GP who is into homeopathy as well as acupuncture. She is closely connected with the Prince’s Foundation via the Bravewell Fellowship. That fellowship is funded by the Bravewell Collaboration, which is run by Christie Mack, wife of John Mack (‘Mack the Knife’), head of Morgan Stanley (amazingly, they still seem to have money). This is the group which, by sheer wealth, has persuaded so many otherwise respectable US universities to embrace every sort of quackery (see, for example, Integrative baloney @ Yale)
The funding of integrated services
14.15 How to get a PCT or practice- based commissioner to fund your integrated service. A PCT Chief Executive and a Practice-Based Commissioning lead.
14.30 How I succeeded: funding an integrated service. Dr John Ribchester, Whitstable
14.45 How we created an acupuncture service in St Albans and Harpenden PBC group. Mo Girach, Chief Executive, STAHCOM
Uhuh Acupunture again. Have these people never read Bausell’s
book? Have they not read the BMJ? Acupuncture is now ell-established to be based on fraudulent principles, and not even to have a worthwhile placeobo effect. STAHCOM seem to be more interested in money than in what works.
Dragon’s Den. Four pitchers lay out their stall for the commissioning dragons
And at this stage there is no prize for guessing that all four are devoted to trying to get funds for discredited treatments
- An acupuncture service for long-term pain. Mike Cummings Chair, Medical Acupuncture Association
- Manipulation for the treatment of back pain Simon Fielding, Founder Chairman of the General Osteopathic Council
- Nigel Clarke, Senior Partner, Learned Lion Partners Homeopathy for long term conditions
- Peter Fisher, Director, Royal Homeopathic Hospital
Sadly it is not stated who the dragons are. One hopes they will be more interested in evidence than the supplicants.
Mike Cummings at least doesn’t believe the nonsense about meridians and Qi. It’s a pity he doesn’t look at the real evidence though.
You can read something about him and his journal at BMJ Group promotes acupuncture: pure greed.
Osteopathy sounds a bit more respectable than the others, but in fact it has never shaken off its cult-like origins. Still many osteopaths make absurd claims to cure all sorts of diseases. Offshoots of osteopathy like ‘cranial osteopathy’ are obvious nonsense. There is no reason to think that osteopathy is any better than any other manipulative therapy and it is clear that all manipulative therapies should be grouped into one.
Osteopathy and chiropractic provide the best ever examples of the folly of giving official government recognition to a branch of alternative medicine before the evidence is in.
Learned Lion Partners is a new one on me. It seems it is
part of Madsen Gornall Ashe Chambers (‘MGA Chambers’) “a grouping of top level, independent specialists who provide a broad range of management consultancy advice to the marketing community”. It’s a management consultant and marketing outfit. So don’t expect too much when it comes to truth and evidence. The company web site says nothing about alternative medicine, but only that Nigel Clarke
“. . . has very wide experience of public affairs issues and campaigns, having worked with clients in many sectors in Europe, North America and the Far East. He has particular expertise in financial, competition and healthcare issues. “
However, all is revealed when we see that he is a Trustee of the Prince’s Foundation where his entry says
“Nigel Clarke is senior partner of Learned Lion Partners. He is a director of Vidapulse Ltd, Really Easy Ltd, Newscounter Ltd and Advanced Transport Systems Ltd. He has worked on the interfaces of public policy for 25 years. He has been chair of the General Osteopathic Council since May 2001, having been a lay member since it was formed. He is now a member of the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence”
The Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence is yet another quango that ticks boxes and fails absolutely to grasp the one important point, does it work?. I came across them at the Westminster Forum, and they seemed a pretty pathetic way to spend £2m per year.
Peter Fisher is the last supplicant to the Dragons. He is clinical director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (RLHH), and Queen’s homeopathic physician, It was through him that I got an active interest in quackery. The TV programme QED asked me to check the statistics in a paper of his that claimed that homeopathy was good for fibrositis (there was an elementary mistake and no evidence for an effect). Peter Fisher is also remarkable because he agreed with me that BSc degrees in homeopathy were not justified (on TV –see the movie). And he condemned homeopaths who were caught out recommending their sugar pills for malaria. To that extent Fisher represents the saner end of the homeopathic spectrum. Nevertheless he still maintains that sugar pills work and have effects of their own, and tries to justify the ‘memory of water’ by making analogies with a memory stick or CD. This is so obviously silly that no more comment is needed.
Given Fisher’s sensible condemnation of the malaria fiasco, I was rather surprised to see that he appeared on the programme of a conference at the University of Middlesex, talking about “A Strategy To Research The Potential Of Homeopathy In Pandemic Flu”. The title of the conference was Developing Research Strategies in CAM. A colleague, after seeing the programme, thought it was more like “a right tossers’ ball”.
Much of the homeopathy has now vanished from the RLHH as a result of greatly reduced commissioning by PCTs (read about it in Fisher’s own words). And the last homeopathy degree in the UK has closed down. It seems an odd moment for the FIH to be pushing it so hard.
Follow-up
Stop press It is reported in the Guardian (22 May 2009) that Professor Sikora has been describing his previous job at Imperial College with less than perfect accuracy. Oh dear, oh dear.
This fascinating fact seems to have been unearthed first by the admirable NHS Blog Doctor, in his post ‘Imperial College confirm that Karol Sikora does not work for them and does not speak on their behalf‘.
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It seems that bits of good news don’t come singly. First honours degrees in acupuncture vanish, Now a big chain of shops selling Chinese herbs and acupuncture has gone into administration. It seems that, at last, people are getting fed up with being conned out of their hard-earned money |
 Herbmedic Barking |
A local newspaper, The North Herts Comet reported thus.
Customers of Herbmedic, which trades under the name Herbs and Acupuncture, on Queensway in Stevenage have been left counting the cost after shelling out hundreds of pounds for treatment they never received.
The company, which has practices across the country, is now in the hands of receivers, Macintyre Hudson.
Sandra Emery, of The Paddocks in Stevenage, paid £350 for 10 treatment sessions, but only received one before the practice closed.
She said: “A standard course of treatment is 10 sessions, so most customers will have bought this package.
Claudia Gois, of Walden End in Stevenage, paid £240 for 12 treatment sessions but only received four before the practice closed.
She said: “I went there on Friday and it was closed. There was no warning or anything.
“I got in touch with head office and they said it’s very unlikely I will get money back.
This report was on 1st April, The company’s web site shows no sign of any problems, In fact they are still advertising jobs. So was this an April Fool joke?
No it wasn’t. A visit to Companies House soon settled the matter. The whole company is insolvent, as of 27 March 2009..
Download the whole administration notice and the company report.
Criticisms of Herbmedic
This chain of shops was investigated by the BBC’s
Inside Out programme. (September 25th 2006).
“We sent an undercover reporter to branches of the Herbmedic chain in southern England.
On each occasion, the reporter claimed to be suffering from tiredness and was prescribed herbal remedies after a consultation lasting less than five minutes.
The herbalists, who describe themselves as “doctors”, didn’t ask any questions about the patient’s medical history or take any notes.”
This is so bad that even Andrew Fowler, a past President of the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine, described it as “malpractice”.
“Herbmedic has been investigated by the authorities in the past.
In 2002, trading standards officers prosecuted the branch in Southampton for selling herbal remedies with 26 times the permitted legal limit of lead.
And in October 2003, the Advertising Standards Authority banned Herbmedic from describing its practitioners as “doctors”.
Despite the ban, all three of the stores visited by Inside Out referred to the herbalist as the doctor.”
See also the BBC report Herbalists’ customers ‘at risk’, and a report in the Sunday Times, Herbmedic accused of high-pressure selling.
Read the Advertising Standards report. Seven different complaints against Herbmedic were upheld.
This is entirely consistent with my own experience. I went into one of their shops and asked about a cure for diabetes (hoping the be able to refer them to Trading Standards, but the young lady behind the counter had such a poor grasp of English that her reply was incomprehensible. She just kept trying to push me into having a consultation with “the doctor” who appeared to speak no English at all. I left.
The chequered history of Herbmedic
The company that his just gone into administration is Herbmedic Centre Ltd. It has been in existence for only two years. Its predecessor, known simply as Herbmedic, was dissolved on 13 March 2007, Companies House said
Company Filing History Type Date Description Order GAZ2(A) 13/03/2007 FINAL GAZETTE: DISSOLVED VIA VOLUNTARY STRIKE-OFF GAZ1(A) 28/11/2006 FIRST GAZETTE NOTICE FOR VOLUNTARY STRIKE-OFF 652a 16/10/2006 APPLICATION FOR STRIKING-OFF
Another Chinese medicine chain seems to be having a few problems too
Harmony Medical Distribution Ltd (“specialists in acupuncture and holistic medicine”) seems to be still in business(web site here), but several very similar companies have been dissolved, Harmomy Medics Ltd (dissolved 19 Sep 2006) ,, Harmony Medical Services (UK ) Ltd. (dissolved 6 May 2008) and Harmony Medical Services Ltd (dissolved 17 Oct 2008)
Given this history of companies that dissolve every couple of years and then mysteriously reincarnate with a slightly different name, one wonders if this really is the end of herbmedic, or it is just a device for shedding bad debts. Is this just another “pre-pack administration“?
Watch this space for more.
What’s the latest evidence on acupuncture anyway?
A correspondent drew my attention to the 2009 Annual Evidence Update on acupuncture complied by the NHS Complementary and Alternative Medicine Specialist Library. This includes no fewer than 56 systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Although the reviews are complied by alternative medicine sympathisers, they seem mostly to be pretty fair. Well apart form one thing.
Almost all of the reviews fail to come up with any positive evidence that acupuncture works well enough to be clinically useful. Only two come close, and they are the two singled out as “editor’s picks”. Perhaps that’s not entirely surprising given that the editor is Dr Mike Cummings.
Again and again, the results are inconclusive: #8 is pretty typical
Acupuncture for tension-type headache: a meta-analysis of randomized, controlled trials.
This meta-analysis suggests that acupuncture compared with sham for tension-type headache has limited efficacy for the reduction of headache frequency. There exists a lack of standardization of acupuncture point selection and treatment course among randomized, controlled trials. More research is needed to investigate the treatment of specific tension-type headache subtypes.
Vast effort and a lot of money is being put into trials, yet there are very few (if any) positive results. Very often there are no results at whatsoever. All we hear, again and again, is “more research is needed”.
At some point someone will have to decide it is all a charade and start to spend time and money on investigating things that are more promising.
Follow-up
A correspondent checked with Companies House to discover more about two of the directors of Herbmedic, Mr. Li Mao and Mr Xiao Xuan Chen. They have a chequered history indeed. [download the complete list]
Mr. Li Mao is, or has been, on the board of 31 different companies. Of these 6 are active, 5 are in administration, 14 were dissolved, 4 were liquidated and 2 are active with proposal to strike off. Not only is Her Medic centre Ltd in administration, but so is Dr China (UK) Ltd, and Great Chinese Herbal Medicine Ltd
With record like that, my correspondent wonders whether they should be disqualified.
In March 2007 I wrote a piece in Nature on Science degrees without the science. At that time there were five “BSc” degrees in homeopathy. A couple of weeks ago I checked the UCAS site for start in 2009, and found there was only one full “BSc (hons)” left and that was at Westminster University.
Today I checked again and NOW THERE ARE NONE.
A phone call to the University of Westminster tonight confirmed that they have suspended entry to their BSc (Hons) homeopathy degree.
They say that they have done so because of “poor recruitment”. It was a purely financial decision. Nothing to do with embarrasment. Gratifying though it is that recruits for the course are vanishing, that statement is actually pretty appalling It says that the University of Westminster doesn’t care whether it’s nonsense, but only about whether it makes money.
Nevertheless the first part of this post is not entirely outdated before it even appeared, because homeopathy will still be taught as part of Complementary Therapies. And Naturopathy and “Nutritional Therapy” are still there..
According to their ‘School of Integrated Health‘, “The University of Westminster has a vision of health care for the 21st Century”. Yes, but it is what most people would call a vision of health care in the 18th century.
The revelation that the University of Westminster teaches that Amethysts emit high Yin energy caused something of a scandal.
Since then I have acquired from several sources quite a lot more of their teaching material, despite the fact that the university has refused to comply with the Freedom of Information Act.
In view of the rather silly internal review conducted by Westminster’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Geoffrey Petts, this seems like a good moment to make a bit more of it public,
I think that revelation of the material is justified because it is in the
public interest to know how the University if Westminster is spending taxpayers’ money. Another motive is to defend the reputation of the post-1992 universities. I have every sympathy with the ex-polytechnics in their efforts to convert themselves into universities. In many ways they have succeeded. That effort
is impeded by teaching mystical versions of medicine.
If the University of Westminster is being brought into disrepute, blame its vice-chancellor, not me.
Homeopathic spiders
Here are a few slides from a lecture on how good spider venom is for you. It is from Course 3CTH502 Homeopathic Materia Medica II. No need to worry though, because they are talking about homeopathic spider venom, so there is nothing but sugar in the pills. The involvement of spiders is pure imagination. No more than mystical gobbledygook.
You are in hurry, or play with your fingers? You need spider venom pills (that contain no spider venom).
You break furniture? Time goes too fast for you? Try the tarantula-free tarantula pills.
You are preoccupied with sex? You play with ropes? What you need is Mygale (which contains no Mygale)
Much more seriously, the same sugar pills are recommended for serious conditions, chorea, ‘dim sight’, gonorrhoea, syphilis and burning hot urine.
This isn’t just preposterous made-up stuff. It is dangerous.
There is a whole lot more fantasy stuff in the handouts for Homeopathy Materia Medica II (3CTH502). Here are a couple of examples.
Aurum metallicum (metallic gold) [Download the whole handout]
Affinities MIND, VASCULAR SYSTEM, Nerves, Heart, Bones, Glands, Liver, Kidneys, RIGHT SIDE, Left side.
Causations Emotions. Ailments from disappointed love and grief, offence or unusual responsibility, abuse of mercury or allopathic drugs.
Aurum belongs to the syphilitic miasm but has elements of sycosis (Aur-Mur).
Potassium salts are the subject of some fine fantasy, in “The Kali’s” [sic]. (there is much more serious stuff to worry about here than a few misplaced apostrophes.). [Download the whole handout]
“The radioactive element of potassium emits negative electrons from the atom nucleus and is thought to be significant in the sphere of cell processes especially in relation to functions relating to automatism and rhythmicity.”
“Kali people are very conscientious with strong principles. They have their rules and they stick to them, ‘a man of his word’.”
“Potassium acts in a parasympathetic way, tending towards depression”
“They [“Kali people=] are not melancholic like the Natrum’s but rather optimistic.”
Radioactive potassium is involved in automaticity? Total nonsense.
Where is the science?
Yes, it is true that the students get a bit of real science. There isn’t the slightest trace that I can find of any attempt to resolve the obvious fact that what they are taught in the science bits contradict directly what they are told in the other bits. Sounds like a recipe for stress to me.
They even get a bit of incredibly elementary statistics. But they can’t even get that right. This slide is from PPP – Res Quant data analysis.
“Involves parameters and/or distributions”. This has no useful meaning whatsoever, that I can detect.
“Tests hypotheses when population distributions are skewed”. Well yes, though nothing there about forms of non-Gaussian properties other than skew, nothing about normalising transformations, and nothing about the Central Limit theorem.
“Ranks data rather than the actual data itself”. This is plain wrong. Randomisation tests on the original data are generally the best (uniformly most powerful) sort of non-parametric test. It seems to have escaped the attention of the tutor that ranking is a short-cut approximation that allowed tables to be constructed, before we had computers.
The students are told about randomised controlled trials. But amazingly in the lecture PPP-RCTs, the little matter of blinding is barely mantioned. And the teacher’s ideas about randomisation are a bit odd too.
Sorry, but if you fiddle the randomisation, no amount of “careful scrutiny” will rescue you from bias.
An Introduction to Naturopathic Philosophy
Naturopathy is just about as barmy as homeopathy. You can see something about it at the University of Wales. How about this slide from Westminster’s An Introduction to Naturopathic Philosophy.
So if you get tuberculosis, it isn’t caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis? And the symptoms are “constructive”? So you don;t need to do anything. It’s all for the best really.
This isn’t just nonsense. It’s dangerous nonsense.
Traditional Chinese Medicine
Ever wondered what the mysterious “Qi” is? Worry no more. All is explained on this slide.
It means breath, air, vapour, gas, energy, vitalism. Or perhaps prana? Is that quite clear now?
What can we make of this one? Anyone can see that the description is barely written in English and that vital information is missing (such as the age of the woman). And it’s nonsense to suggest that “invasion of cold” (during keyhole surgery!) would cause prolonged constriction of blood vessels (never mind that it would “consume yang qi”). Not being a clinician, I showed it to an oncologist friend. He said that it was impossible to tell from the description whether the problem was serious or not, but that any abdominal pain should be investigated properly. There isn’t anything here about referral for proper investigation. Just a lot of stuff about ginger and cinnamon. Anyone who was taught in this way could be a real danger to the public. It isn’t harmless nonsense It’s potentially harmful nonsense.
And finally, it’s DETOX
Surely everyone knows by now that ‘detox’ is no more than a marketing word? Well not at the University of Westminster. They have a long handout that tells you all the usual myths and a few new ones.
It is written by Jennifer Harper-Deacon, who describes herself modestly, thus.
Jennifer Harper-Deacon is a qualified and registered Naturopath and acupuncturist who holds a PhD in Natural Health and MSc in Complementary Therapies. She is a gifted healer and Reiki Master who runs her own clinic in Surrey where she believes in treating the ‘whole’ person by using a combination of Chinese medicine and naturopathic techniques that she has qualified in, including nutritional medicine, Chinese and Western herbalism, homoeopathy, applied kinesiology, reflexology, therapeutic massage, aromatherapy and flower remedies.
It seems that there is no limit on the number of (mutually incompatible) forms of nuttiness that she believes. Here are a few quotations from her handout for Westminster students.
“Detoxification is the single most powerful tool used by natural health professionals to prevent and reverse disease”
What? To “prevent and reverse” malaria? tuberculosis? Parkinson’s disease? AIDS? cancer?
“When you go on to a raw food only diet, especially fruit, the stored toxins are brought up from the deep organs such as the liver and kidneys, to the superficial systems of elimination.”;
Very odd. I always though that kidneys were a system of elimination.
“The over-use and mis-use of antibiotics has weakened the body’s ability to attack and destroy new strains of resistant bacteria, virulent viruses, which have led to our immune system becoming compromised.”
Certainly over-use and mis-use are problems. But I always thought it was the bacteria that became resistant.
“The beauty about detoxification therapy is that it addresses the very causative issues of health problems”
That is another dangerous and silly myth. Tuberculosis is not caused by mythical and un-named “toxins”. It is caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
“Naturopathy follows the logic of cause and effect therefore believes that we simply need pure food and water, sunshine, air, adequate rest and sleep coupled with the right amount of exercise for health.”
Try telling that to someone with AIDS.
“Colon cleansing is one of the most important parts of any detoxification programme.”
The strange obsession with enemas in the alternative world is always baffling.
“Frankincense: holds the capacity to physically strengthen our defence system and can rebuild energy levels when our immune system is weak. Revered as a herb of protection, frankincense can also strengthen our spiritual defences when our Wei qi is low, making us more susceptible to negative energies. This calming oil has the ability to deepen the breath, helping us to let go of stale air and emotions, making it ideal oil to use inhale prior to meditating.”
This is so much hot air. There is a bit of evidence that frankincense might have some anti-inflammatory action and that’s it.
But this has to be my favourite.
“Remember when shopping to favour fruits and vegetables which are in season and locally grown (and ideally organic) as they are more vibrationally compatible with the body.”
Locally grown vegetables are “more vibrationally compatible with the body”? Pure mystical gobbledygook. Words fail me.
OK there’s a whole lot more, but that will do for now.
It’s good that Westminster is shutting down its Homeopathy BSc, but it seems they have a bit further to go.
Recently I wrote a piece for the National Health Executive (“the Independent Journal for Senior Health Service Managers”), with the title Medicines that contain no medicine and other follies
In the interests of what journalists call balance (but might better be called equal time for the Flat Earth Society), an article appeared straight after mine, Integrating Homeopathy into Primary Care. It was by Rachel Roberts “Research consultant for the Society of Homeopaths”.
This defence was so appalling that I sent them a response (after first doing a bit of checking on its author). To my surprise, they published the response in full [download pdf of printed version]. Their title was
As always, the first step is to Google the author, to find out a bit more. It seems that Rachel Roberts runs a business Integrated Homeopathic Training. (a financial interest that was not mentioned in her article). She will sell you flash cards (‘Matmedcards’) for £70 (+£9 p&p) for 120 cards (yes, seriously). The card for Conium maculatum is remarkable. It says on the reverse side
Yes, it says (my emphasis)
“The poison used to execute Socrates. No 1 remedy for scirrhous breast cancer. Esp after blow to the breast”
No doubt she would claim that the word “remedy” was a special weasel word of homeopaths that did not imply any therapeutic efficacy. But its use in this context seems to me to be cruel deception, even murderous. It also appears to breach the Cancer Act 1939, as well as the Unfair Trading laws.
I asked the Bristol Trading Standards Office, and got a reply remarkably quickly. It ended thus.
“. . . . the use of the card for “hemlock” as an example amounts to advice in connection with the treatment (of cancer)”. I will initially write to IHT and require that they remove this, and any other, reference to cancer treatment from their website.
When I checked again a couple of weeks later, the hemlock sample card had been been replaced by one about chamomile (it is described as the opium of homeopathy. Luckily the pills contain no opium (and no chamomile either) or that would be breaking another law. Bafflingly, it is not (yet) against the law to sell pills that contain no trace of the ingredient on the label, if they are labelled ‘homeopathic’.
Presumably the packs still contain a claim to cure cancer. And what is said in the privacy of the consulting room will never be known.
Political correctness is a curious thing. I felt slightly guilty when I reported this breach of the Cancer Act. It felt almost sneaky. The feeling didn’t last long though. We are talking about sick people here.
It isn’t hard to imagine a desperate woman suffering from cancer reading that Ms Roberts knows the “No 1 remedy for scirrhous breast cancer”. She might actually believe it. She might buy some hemlock pills that contain no hemlock (or anything else). She might die as a result. It is not a joke. It is, literally, deadly serious.
It is also deadly serious that the Department of Health and some NHS managers are so stifled by political correctness that they refer to homeopaths as “professionals” and pay them money.
Ms Roberts, in her article, is at pains to point out that
|
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Well it is already well known that the the Code of Ethics of the Society of Homeopaths is something of a joke. This is just one more example.
The Code of Ethics, para 72 says homeopaths have a legal obligation
“To avoid making claims (whether explicit or implied; orally or in writing) implying cure of any named disease.”
Like, perhaps, claiming to have the “No 1 remedy for scirrhous breast cancer”?
Obviously voluntary self-regulation isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
You don’t need to go to her web site to find “claims . . . implying cure of any named disease”. In her article she says
“Conditions which responded well to homeopathy included childhood eczema and asthma, migraine, menopausal problems, inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis, depression and chronic fatigue syndrome.”
No doubt they will say that the claim that asthma and migraine “responded well” to their sugar pills carries no suggestion that they can cure a named disease. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
I have to say that I find Ms Robert’s article exceedingly puzzling. It comes with 29 references, so it looks, to use Goldacre’s word, ‘sciencey’. If you read the references, and more importantly, know about all the work that isn’t referred to, you see it is the very opposite of science. I see only two options.
Either it is deliberate deception designed to make money, or it shows, to a mind-boggling extent, an inability to understand what constitutes evidence.
The latter, more charitable, view is supported by the fact that Ms Roberts trots out, yet again, the infamous 2005 Spence paper, as though it constituted evidence for anything at all. In this paper 6544 patients at the Bristol Homeopathic Hospital were asked if the felt better after attending the out-patient department. Half of them reported that the felt ‘better’ or ‘much better’. Another 20% said they were ‘slightly better’ (but that is what you say to be nice to the doctor). The patients were not compared with any other group at all. What could be less surprising than that half of the relatively minor complaints that get referred for homeopathy get ‘better or much better’ on their own?
This sort of study can’t even tell you if homeopathic treatment has a placebo effect, never mind that it has a real effect of its own. It is a sign of the desperation of homeopaths that they keep citing this work.
Whatever the reason, the conclusion is clear. Never seek advice from someone who has a financial interest in the outcome. Ms Roberts makes her living from homeopathy. If she were to come to the same conclusion as the rest of the world, that it is a placebo and a fraud, her income would vanish. It is asking too much of anyone to do that.
| This is the mistake made time and time again by the Department of Health and by the NHS. The Pittilo report does the same thing The execrably bad assessment of evidence in that report is, one suspects, not unrelated to the fact that it was done entirely by people who would lose their jobs if they were to come to any conclusion other than their treatments work. |  |
At present , the regulation of alternative medicine is chaotic because the government and the dozen or so different quangos involved are trying to regulate while avoiding the single most important question – do the treatments work?
They should now grasp that nettle and refer the question to NICE.
Follow-up
Shortly after I published my editorial in the New Zealand Medical Journal, Dr Who?, I was delighted to get a letter from someone who had trained in chiropractic and seen it all from the inside.
Sadly this wonderful letter had to be removed within a few weeks of posting it because its author was threatened and bullied by chiropractors. Its author is too young and too vulnerable to risk his future career. As a result of this shameful and vindictive treatment, I was asked to remove the letter and did so immediately. Other copies on the web have now vanished too.
The experiences described in the letter justified much of what I said in the editorial, and in some ways went further. This letter doubtless contributed to dropping of the threatened legal action by chiropractors against the Journal and against me. The letter was posted originally on 21 August 2008, with the permission of its author. See also the follow-up in Chiropractic wars. Part 3: internecine conflict.
Now I have been sent a much more anonymous version, and it is a great pleasure to post this inside information.
| David
I must begin by stating my background in relation to chiropractic. I am a graduate of a chiropractic college and have practiced for several years. I have elected not to register or practice again and have returned to study to begin a new career. Prior to studying chiropractic, I gained undergraduate and postgraduate qualifications in science. First I would like to address your comment about the validity of a qualification from a private chiropractic college, especially in relation to the difference between studying there and studying at a university. A major difference is the education and experience of faculty. At the time I was there, most of the faculty at my college had only undergraduate qualifications (I would suggest that the American DC degree is of undergraduate level as it is the primary qualifying degree for chiropractic in the US and Canada -it is not the equivalent of a doctorate in a British or Australasian university) and have not published in peer-reviewed journals. This is quite different to my experience of universities where the all of the faculty usually have at least a PhD and are actively involved in research. The content of the chiropractic curriculum was voluminous. It included basic sciences, chiropractic subjects and social sciences. The college I attended did not have any laboratory facilities so the experience of learning science from a textbook was quite different to the way I had been taught at university, where each subject had a significant laboratory program that had to be passed separately to pass the subject. As chiropractic is a clinical discipline, the course contained subjects in common with a medical degree. Sadly, the attitude towards medicine and the medical profession was not always the most constructive. For example, I can recall a noticeboard where newspaper clippings of media reports of medical misadventure and adverse effects of pharmaceuticals were posted regularly. Clinical experience was gained by a 2 year internship in the school health centre concurrent with the last 2 years of academic study; so it was not a full-time internship. The requirements for passing this component of the course were complex but centred around seeing a number of patients, a number of visits, performing a number of various kinds of x-rays and reading a number of x-ray films. Every student was responsible for finding all of their own patients to meet the requirements. The result of this was a clinical experience that was quite narrow for most people. This would seem to be quite different to the hospital internship of a medical degree, the clinical internship of a dental degree or the range of placements in a physiotherapy degree in terms of the breadth of experience of different kinds of patients of different ages and states of health. For people who are not aware, there are a range of ideas within chiropractic about what it is and what it is for. The “wellness”, subluxation-based kind of chiropractic is taught by a minority of schools and is what chiropractors call a “philosophical view”. It advocates that chiropractic care be independent from symptoms or treatment and be a regular part of peoples’ lives. The expectation is that healthy, asymptomatic people will be “adjusted” on a regular basis to keep them free from “vertebral subluxation”. To that end, the training at schools that teach this approach is adequate (and probably even excessive). The issue that you wrote about related to the use of the title “doctor” by chiropractors in New Zealand. In licensing chiropractors and allowing them the use of the title “Dr” in front of their names (provided that the title is qualified by the word “chiropractor”) governments have awarded chiropractors with recognition and prestige that has usually been associated with a level of academic achievement or with a medical qualification. It indicates that the bearer of the title can be trusted to give credible advice within their area of expertise. The issue may seem benign, but in allowing chiropractors to use the title, people who would not normally feel safe to submit to the treatment of an alternative health practitioner, choose to try chiropractic. I make this point because at its core, chiropractic is quite different to medicine, dentistry and physiotherapy. A chiropractic office often looks like a lot like a doctor’s surgery. The layout is similar (with waiting rooms and consultation rooms; there are things like stethoscopes and x-ray machines and there are often informative and education posters and brochures. In many cases, the title “doctor” is used in I have found that some people believe chiropractors are medical doctors. Some even believe that chiropractic is a kind of medical speciality. I have seen patients who choose chiropractic as their primary health care and come to a chiropractic office as their first port of call when they are unwell. I Two practices are of particular concern in some chiropractic offices and in my view; these alone should be sufficient reason to prevent chiropractors from calling themselves “doctor”. The first is the systematic and deliberate erosion of a person’s confidence in the medical system. Many offices have anti medical literature in their libraries. Chiropractors are sometimes taught practices to subvert medical credibility. See http://chirobase.org/20PB/top7.html for an example. The second is a subset of the first but is particularly damaging. It is active opposition to vaccination. At chiropractic school, I was taught anti-vaccination information in my paediatrics course. I have seen books written by chiropractors opposing vaccination and I have seen many offices with anti vaccination leaflets and books in abundance. Now I am all for informed choice but this type of material is rarely accurate or balanced. People are being encouraged not to vaccinate their children by professionals who they believe to be a reliable and prestigious source of information. Although it may sound paternalistic to people who have not had the privilege of clinical practice (albeit in a profession I no longer agree with), it made me realise several things. The first is that people who are unwell are vulnerable. The second is that there are people who trust “medical” advice unquestioningly. I believe we should be very careful about who we title as a credible source of advice about health care. Legislation treads a fine line between limiting personal freedom and protecting people from harm. Aside from the qualification being inconsistent with the academic level that is usually required to use the title “Doctor”, the greatest danger, in my opinion, is that the legal recognition and permission to use the title has allowed chiropractors to assume the mantle of a doctor. In the guise of this respectability, some chiropractors are deliberately eroding confidence in doctors and denying children (and possibly populations) the protection of vaccination. David, thank you for having the courage to question the use of the title “doctor” by chiropractors. Historically (and in your case), chiropractors fight their battles through litigation so it takes personal courage and integrity to do so. |
All I can say is, don’t thank me. It doesn’t take much courage at my age. It takes a lot at yours and the world should be grateful to you.
Replies from chiropractors in the NZMJ
The New Zealand Medical Journal, very properly, allowed right of reply to chiropractore. This week’s issue contains three letters, one of which is from Paul Kelly. It is signed “Dr Brian Kelly B App Sci (Chiro), President, New Zealand College of Chiropractic”. This is not quite the same as appears on his College’s web site which shows the president’s welcome.
It seems that Kelly has not been quite so careful about use of his title on the web site because (as of 21 August) the signature on his address looks like this.
“Dr Brian Kelly, President”. That does seem a bit careless, given that his usage of “Dr” was pointed out in my original editorial, published on 25th July.
Replies to these letters appeared in the September 5th issue of NZMJ.
It’s hard enough to communicate basic ideas about how to assess evidence to adults without having the effort hindered by schools.
The teaching of quackery to 16 year-olds has been approved by a maze of quangos, none of which will take responsibility, or justify their actions. So far I’ve located no fewer than eight of them.
[For non-UK readers, quango = Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisation].
A lot of odd qualifications are accredited by OfQual (see here). Consider, for example, Edexcel Level 3 BTEC Nationals in Health and Social Care (these exams are described here), Download the specifications here and check page 309.
Unit 23: Complementary Therapies for Health and Social Care
NQF Level 3: BTEC National
Guided learning hours: 60Unit abstract
“In order to be able to take a holistic view towards medicine and health care, health and social care professionals need to understand the potential range of complementary therapies available and how they may be used in the support of conventional medicine.”
Well, Goldacre has always said that homeopathy makes the perfect vehicle for teaching how easy it is to be deceived by bad science, so what’s wrong? But wait
“Learners will consider the benefits of complementary therapies to health and wellbeing, as well as identifying any contraindications and health and safety issues in relation to their use.”
Then later
“The holistic approach to illnesses such as cancer could be used as a focus here. For example, there could be some tutor input to introduce ideas about the role of complementary therapies in the treatment and management of cancer, this being followed up by individual or small group research by learners using both the internet and the services available locally/regionally. If available, a local homeopathic hospital, for example, would be an interesting place to visit.”
It’s true that to get a distinction, you have to “evaluate the evidence relating to the use of complementary therapies in contemporary society”, but it isn’t at all clear that this refers to evidence about whether the treatment works.
The really revealing bit comes when you get to the
“Indicative reading for learners
There are many resources available to support this unit.Websites
www.acupuncture.org.uk British Acupuncture Council
www.bant.org.uk British Association for Nutritional Therapy
www.exeter.ac.uk/sshs/compmed Exeter University’s academic department of Complementary medicine
www.gcc-uk.org General Chiropractic Council
www.nimh.org.uk National Institute of Medical Herbalists
www.nursingtimes.net The Nursing Times
www.osteopathy.org.uk General Osteopathic Council
www.the-cma.org.uk The Complementary Medical Association”
This list is truly astonishing. Almost every one of them can be relied on to produce self-serving inaccurate information about the form of “therapy” it exists to promote. The one obvious exception is the reference to Exeter University’s academic department of complementary medicine (and the link to that one is wrong). The Nursing Times should be an exception too, but their articles about CAM are just about always written by people who are committed to it.
It is no consolation that the 2005 version was even worse. In its classification of ‘therapies’ it said “Pharmaceutically mediated: eg herbalism, homeopathy “. Grotesque! And this is the examinng body!
The Teacher
This particular educational disaster came to my attention when I had a letter from a teacher. She had been asked to teach this unit, and wanted to know if I could provide any resources for it. She said that Edexcel hadn’t done so. She asked ” Do you know of any universities that teach CT’s [sic] so I could contact them about useful teaching resources?.” She seemed to think that reliable information about homeopathy could be found from a ‘university’ homeopathy teacher. Not a good sign. It soon emerged why.
She said.
“My students are studying BTEC National Health Studies and the link is Edexcel BTEC National Complimentary [sic] studies.”
“I am a psychotherapist with an MA in Education and Psychology. I am also trained in massage and shiatsu and have plenty of personal experience of alternative therapy”
Shiatsu uh? It seems the teacher is already committed to placebo medicine. Nevertheless I spent some time looking for some better teaching material for 16 year-old children. There is good stuff at Planet
Science, and in some of the pamphlets from Sense about Science, not least their latest, I’ve got nothing to lose by trying it – A guide to weighing up claims about cures and treatments. I sent all this stuff to her, and prefaced the material by saying
“First of all, I should put my cards on the table and say that I am quite appalled by the specification of Unit 23. In particular, it has almost no emphasis at all on the one thing that you want to know about any therapy, namely does it work? The reference list for reading consists almost entirely of organisations that are trying to sell you various sorts of quackery, There is no hint of balance; furthermore it is all quite incompatible with unit 22, which IS concerned with evidence.”
At this point the teacher the teacher came clean too, As always, anyone who disagrees with the assessment (if any) of the evidence by a true believer is unmeasured and inflammatory.
“I have found your responses very unmeasured and inflammatory and I am sorry to say that this prejudicial attitude has meant that I have not found your comments useful.”
shortly followed by
“I am not coming from a scientific background, neither is the course claiming to be scientific.”
That will teach me to spend a couple of hours trying to help a teacher.
What does Edexcel say?
I wrote to Edexcel’s science subject advisors with some questions about what was being taught. The response that I got was not from the science subject advisors but from the Head of Customer support, presumably a PR person.
| From: (Bola Arabome) 12/11/2008 04.31 PM
Dear Professor Colquhoun Thank you for email communication concerning the complementary therapies unit which is available in our BTEC National in Health and BTEC National in Health and Social Care qualifications. I have replied on behalf of Stephen Nugus, our science subject advisor, because your questions do not refer to a science qualification. I would like to answer your questions as directly as possible and then provide some background information relating to the qualifications. The units and whole qualifications for all awarding bodies are accredited by the regulator, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. The resource reading list is also produced by us to help teachers and learners. The qualification as a whole is related to the National Occupational Standards for the vocational sectors of Health and Health and social care with consultation taken from the relevant sector skills councils . As you will be aware many of these complementary therapies are available in care centres and health centres under the NHS and in the private sector. The aim of BTEC qualifications is to prepare people for work in these particular sectors. Clearly a critical awareness is encouraged with reference to health and safety and regulation. There are other units, in some cases compulsory, within the qualification with a scientific approach. ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ Stephen Harris Head of Customer Support |
Aha, so it seems that teaching people to treat sick patients is “not a science qualification”. Just a business qualification perhaps?. I haven’t yet managed to reach the people who make these decisions, so I persisted with the PR man. Here is part of the next letter (Edexcel’s reply in italic).
| 19 November
I find it quite fascinating that Edexcel regards the treatment of sick patients as not being part of science (“do not refer to a science qualification”). Does that mean Edexcel regard the “Health” part of “Health and Social Care” as being nothing to do with science, and that it therefore doesn’t matter if Health Care is unscientific, or even actively anti-scientific? I am sorry if my answer lacked clarity. My comment, that I had taken your enquiry on behalf of our Science Advisor because this was not a science qualification, was intended to explain why I was replying. It was not intended as a comment on the relationship between Health and Social Care and science. At Edexcel we use bureaucratic categories where we align our management of qualifications with officially recognised occupational sectors. Often we rely on sector bodies such as Sector Skills Councils to endorse or even approve the qualifications we offer. Those involved in production of our Science qualifications and our (4) You say “The qualification as a whole is related to the National Occupational Standards for the vocational sectors of Health and Health and social care with consultation taken from the relevant sector skills councils”. Are you aware that the Skills for Health specifications for Alternative medicine were written essentially by the Prince of Wales Foundation? The qualification was approved by both ‘Skills for Health’ and ‘Skills for Care and Development’ prior to being accredited by QCA. It uses the NOS in Health and Social Care as the basis for many of the mandatory units. The ‘Complementary Therapies’ NOS were not used. This was not a requirement of a ‘Health and Social Care’ qualification. “Are the NOS in Health and Social Care that you mention the ones listed here? http://www.ukstandards.org/Find_Occupational_Standards.aspx?NosFindID=1&ClassificationItemId=174 If so, I can see nothing there about ‘complementary therapies’. if I have missed it, I’d be very grateful if you could let me know where it is. If it is not there, I remain very puzzled about the provenance of Unit 23, since you say it is not based on Skills for Health.” |
Now we are immediately at sea, struggling under a tidal wave of acronyms for endless overlapping quangos. In this one short paragraph we have no fewer than four of them. ‘Skills for Health’, ‘Skills for Care and Development’ , ‘Quality and Curriculum Authority (QCA) and NOS.
It seems that the specification of unit 23 was written by Edexcel, but Harris (25 Nov) declines to name those responsible
“When I refer to our “Health and Social care team” I mean the mix of Edexcel Staff and the associates we employ on a contract basis as writers, examiners and external verifiers. The writers are generally recruited from those who are involved in teaching and assessment the subjects in schools and colleges. The editorial responsibility lies with the Edexcel Staff. I do not have access to the names of the writers and in any case would not be able to pass on this information. Specifications indicate the managers responsible for authorising publication”
“Edexcel takes full responsibility for its ethical position on this and other issues. However we can not accept responsibility for the opinions expressed in third party materials. There is a disclaimer to this effect at the beginning of the specification. ”
” You have the correct link to the Health NOS . These are the standards, which where appropriate, influence our qualifications. However in the case of Unit 23 I understand that there is no link with the Health NOS. I don’t know if the NOS cover the unit 23 content.”
So, contrary to what I was told at first, neither Skills for Health, nor NOS were involved Or were they (see below)?
So who does take responsibility? Aha that is secret. And the approval by the QCA is also secret.
“I cannot provide you with copies of any correspondence between Skills for Health and Edexcel. We regard this as confidential. “
What does the QCA say?
The strapline of the QCA is
“We are committed to building a world-class education and training framework. We develop and modernise the curriculum, assessments, examinations and qualifications.”
Referring school children to the Society of Homeopaths for advice seems to be world-class bollocks rather than world-class education.
When this matter was brought to light by Graeme Paton in the Daily Telegraph, he quoted Kathleen Tattersall, CEO of the QCA. She said
“The design of these diplomas has met Ofqual’s high standards. We will monitor them closely as they are delivered to make sure that learners get a fair deal and that standards are set appropriately.”
Just the usual vacuous bureaucratic defensive sound-bite there. So I wrote to Kathleen Tattersall myself with some specific questions. The letter went on 2nd September 2008. Up to today, 26 November, I had only letters saying
“Thank you for your email of 12 November addressed to Kathleen Tattersall, a response is being prepared which will be forwarded to you shortly.”
“Thank you for your email of 25th November addressed to Kathleen Tattersall. A more detailed response is being prepared which will be sent to you shortly.”
Here are some of the questions that I asked.
| I wrote to Edexcel’s subject advisors about unit 23 and I was told “your questions do not refer to a science qualification”. This seems to mean that if it comes under the name “Health Care” then the care of sick patients is treated as though it were nothing to do with science, That seems to me to be both wrong and dangerous, and I should like to hear your view about that question.
Clearly the fundamental problem here is that the BTEC is intended as a vocational training for careers in alternative medicine, As a body concerned with education, surely you cannot ignore the view of 99% of scientists and doctors that almost all alternative medicine is fraud. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make a living from it, but it surely does create a dilemma for an educational organisation. What is your view of that dilemma? |
Eventually, on 27th November, I get a reply (of sorts) It came not from the Kathleen Tattersall of the QCA but from yet another regulatory body, OfQual, the office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator. You’d think that they’d know the answers, but if they do they aren’t telling, [download whole letter. It is very short. The “more detailed response” says nothing.
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Ofqual does not take a view on the detailed content of vocational qualifications as that responsibility sits with the relevant Sector Skills Council which represents employers and others involved in the sector. Ofqual accredits the specifications, submitted by sector-skilled professionals, after ensuring they meet National Occupational Standards. Ofqual relies on the professional judgement of these sector-skilled professionals to include relevant subjects and develop and enhance the occupational standards in their profession. The accreditation of this BTEC qualification was supported by both Skills for Health, and Skills for Care and Development, organisations which represent the emerging Sector Qualifications Strategies and comply with the relevant National Occupational Standards Isabel Nisbet Acting Chief Executive |
So no further forward. Every time I ask a question, the buck gets passed to another quango (or two, or three). This letter, in any case, seems to contradict what Edexcel said about the involvement of Skills for Health (that’s the talking to trees outfit),
A nightmare maze of quangos
You may well be wondering what the relationship is between Ofqual and the QCA. There is an ‘explanation’ here.
Ofqual will take over the regulatory responsibilities of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), with stronger powers in relation to safeguarding the standards of qualifications and assessment and an explicit remit as a market regulator. The QCA will evolve into the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA): supporting Ministers with advice and undertaking certain design and delivery support functions in relation to the curriculum, qualifications, learning and development in the Early Years Foundation Stage, and National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage assessments.
Notice tha QCA won’t be abolished. There will be yet another quango.
The result of all this regulatory bureaucracy seems to be worse regulation, Exactly the same thing happens with accreditiation of dodgy degrees in universities.
At one time, a proposal for something like Unit 23 would have been shown to any competent science teacher, who would have said”you must be joking” and binned it. Now a few hundred bureaucrats tick their boxes and rubbish gets approved.
There seems to be nobody in any of these quangos with the education to realise that if you want to know the truth about homeopathy, the last person you ask is the Society of Homeopaths or the Prince of Wales.
What next?
So the mystery remains. I can’t find out who is responsible for the provenance of the appallingly anti-science Unit 23, and I can’t find out how it got approved. Neither can I get a straight answer to the obvious question about whether it is OK to encourage vocational qualifications for jobs that are bordering on being fraudulent.
.All I can get is platitudes and bland assurances. Everything that might be informative is clouded in secrecy.
The Freedom of Information requests are in. Watch this space. But don’t hold your breath.
Follow-up
Here are some attempts to break through the wall of silence.
Edexcel. I sent them this request.
Freedom of Information Act
Hello
I should like to see please all documents from Edexcel and OfQual or QCA (and communications between then) that concern the formulation and approval of Unit 23 (Complementary Therapies) in the level3 BTEC (page 309 in attached document). In vew of the contentious nature of the subject matter, I believe that is is in the public interest that this information be provided
David Colquhoun
The answer was quite fast, and quite unequivocal, Buzz off.
| Dear Mr Colquhoun,
Thank you of your e-mail of today’s date. I note your request for information pursuant to The Freedom of Information Act. As you may know this Act only applies to public bodies and not to the private sector. Edexcel Limited is privately owned and therefore not subject to this Act. Edexcel is therefore not obliged to provide information to you and is not prepared to give you the information you seek. Please do not hesitate to contact me again if you have any further queries. Kate Gregory |
This lack of public accountability just compounds their appalling inability to distinguish education from miseducation.
International Therapy Examination Council (ITEC)
Mojo’s comment, below, draws attention to the Foundation degree in Complementary Therapies offered by Cornwall College, Camborne, Cornwall (as well as to the fact that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution has been wasting money on ‘research’ on homeopathy –write to them).
At least the courses are held on the Camborne campus of Cornwall College, not on the Duchy campus (do we detect the hand of the Quacktitioner Royal in all this nonsense?).
Cornwall College descends to a new level of barminess in its course Crystal Healing VTCT Level 3
“Who is this course for?
This course is designed to enhance the skills of the Holistic Therapist. Crystals may be used on their own in conjunction with other therapies such as Indian Head Massage, Aromatherapy and Reflexology. Due to the nature of the demands of the holistic programme this course is only suitable for students over the age of 18.”
“What will I be doing on the course?
Students will study the art of Crystal healing which is an energy based treatment where crystals and gemstones are used to channel and focus various energy frequencies.”
| .VTCT stands for the Vocational Training Charitable Trust.
It is yet another organisation that runs vocational exams, and it is responsible for this particular horror |
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The crystals are here. I quote.
Objectives
- the use of interpersonal skills with client
- how to complement other therapies with crystals
- the types and effects of different crystals
- uses of crystals including cleansing, energising, configurations
- concepts of auras and chakras
This is, of course, pure meaningless nonsense. Utter bollocks being offered as further education
Cornwall College has many courses run by ITEC.
The College says
“You will become a professional practitioner with the International Therapy Examination Council (ITEC), study a number of essential modules to give a vocational direction to your study that include: Homeopathy and its application,”
| Who on earth, I hear you cry, are ITEC? That brings us to the seventh organisation in the maze of quangos and private companies involved in the miseducation of young people about science and medicine. It appears, like Edexcel, to be a private company though its web site is very coy about that. |  |
After the foundation degree you can go on to “a brand new innovative BSc in Complementary Health Studies (from Sept 2009)”
The ITEC web site says
- ITEC qualifications are accredited by the Office of the Qualifications and Examination Regulator (OFQUAL)
- ITEC qualifications are funded in the uk by the on behalf of Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS)
- ITEC qualifications have been mapped to the National Occupational Standards, where they exist
Oddly enough, there is no mention of accreditation by a University (not that that is worth much). So a few more Freedom of Information requests are going off, in an attempt to find out why are kids are being miseducated about science and medicine.
Meanwhile you can judge the effect of all that education in physiology by one of the sample questions for ITEC Unit 4, reflexology.
The pancreas reflex:
A Extends across both feet
B Is on the right foot only
C Is on the left foot only
D Is between the toes on both feet
Uhuh, they seem to have forgotten the option ‘none of the above’.
Or how about a sample question from ITEC Unit 47 – Stone Therapy Massage
Which organ of the body is associated with the element fire?
A Heart
B Liver
C Spleen
D Pancreas
Or perhaps this?
Which incantation makes hot stones work best?
A Incarcerous
B Avada Kedavra,
C Dissendium
D Expelliarmus.
(OK I made the last one up, with help from Harry Potter, but it makes just about as much sense as the real ones).
And guess what? You can’t use the Freedom of Information Act to find out how this preposterous rubbish got into the educational system because ” ITEC is a private organisation therefore does not come under this legislation”. The ability to conduct business in secret is a side effect of the privatisation of public education is another reason why it’s a bad idea.
Ofsted
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Ofsted has inspected Cornwall College. They say “We inspect and regulate to achieve excellence in the care of children and young people, and in education and skills for learners of all ages.”. I can find no mention of this nonsense in their report, so I’ve asked them. |
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Ofsted has admitted a spectacular failure in its inspection of child care in the London Borough of Haringey. Polly Curtis wrote in the Guardian (6 Dec 2008) “We failed over Haringey – Ofsted head”. It was the front page story. But of course Ofsted don’t take the blame, they say they were supplied with false information,
That is precisely what happens whenever a committee or quango endorses rubbish. They look only at the documents sent to them and they don’t investigate, don’t engage their brains.
In the case of these courses in utter preposterous rubbish, it seems rather likely that the ultimate source of the misinformation is the Princes’ Foundation for Integrated Health. Tha views of the Prince of Wales get passed on to the ludicrous Skills for Health and used as a criterion by all the other organisations, without a moment of critical appraisal intervening at any point.
2 December 2008 A link from James Randi has sent the hit rate for this post soaring. Someone there left are rather nice comment.
“A quango seems to be a kind of job creation for the otherwise unemployable ‘educated ‘( degree in alternative navel contemplation) middle classes who can’t be expected to do anything useful like cleaning latines ( the only other thing they seem qualified for ). I really hate to think of my taxes paying for this codswollop.”
Today brings a small setback for those of us interested in spreading sensible ideas about science. According to a press release
“The BMJ Group is to begin publishing a medical journal on acupuncture from next year, it was announced today (Tuesday 11 November 2008).
This will be the first complementary medicine title that the BMJ Group has published.”
And they are proud of that? What one earth is going on? The BMJ group is a publishing company which says, of itself,
“Our brand stands for medical credibility. We are one of the world’s best known and most respected medical publishers.”
Well perhaps it used to be.
They have certainly picked a very bad moment for this venture. In the last year there have been at least five good books that assess the evidence carefully and honestly. Of these, the ones that are perhaps the best on the subject of acupuncture are Singh & Ernst’s Trick or Treatment and Barker Bausell’s Snake Oil Science. Both Ernst and Bausell have first hand experience of acupuncture research. And crucially, none of these authors has any financial interest in whether the judgement goes for acupuncture or against it.
Here are quotations from Singh & Ernst’s conclusions
“Reliable conclusions from systematic reviews make it clear that acupuncture does not work for a whole range of conditions, except as a placebo.”
“There are some high quality trials that support the use of acupuncture for some types of pain and nausea, but there are also high quality trials that contradict this conclusion. In short, the evidence is neither consistent nor convincing – it is borderline.”
The House of Lords’ report in 2000 tended to give acupuncture the benefit of the (very considerable) doubt that existed at the time the report was written. Since that time there have been a lot of very well-designed trials of acupuncture.
Now it is quite clear that, for most (and quite possibly all) conditions, acupuncture is no more than a particularly theatrical placebo. Perhaps that is not surprising insofar as the modern western practice of acupuncture owes more to Chinese nationalistic propaganda that started in the time of Mao-Tse Tung than it owes to ancient wisdom (which often turns out to be bunk anyway).
The BMJ Group has decided to endorse acupuncture at a time when it is emerging that the evidence for any specific effect is very thin indeed. Well done.
The journal in question is this.
Acupuncture in Medicine is a quarterly title, which aims to build the evidence base for acupuncture. It is currently self-published by the British Medical Acupuncture Society (BMAS).
One good thing can be said about the Society and the Journal. That is that they don’t espouse all the mumbo-jumbo about ‘meridians’ and ‘Qi’. This, of course, puts them at odds with the vast majority of acupuncture teaching. This sort of internecine warfare between competing sects is characteristic of all sorts of alternative medicine. But that is just ideology. What matters is whether or not sticking needles in you is actually anything more than a placebo.
British Medical Acupuncture Society (BMAS)
The British Medical Acupuncture Society (BMAS). is “a registered charity established to encourage the use and scientific understanding of acupuncture within medicine for the public benefit.”. The phrase “encourage the use” suggests that they do not even envisage the possibility that it might not work. Their web site includes these claims.
Acupuncture can help in a variety of conditions:
- Pain relief for a wide range of painful conditions
- Nausea, especially postoperative nausea and vomiting
- Overactive bladder, also known as bladder detrusor instability
- Menstrual and menopausal problems, eg period pains and hot flushes
- Allergies such as hay fever and some types of allergic rashes
- Some other skin problems such as ulcers, itching and localised rashes
- Sinus problems and more
Presumably the word “help” is chosen carefully to fall just short of “cure”. The claims are vaguely worded, but let’s see what we can find about them from systematic reviews. It appears that the BMAS is being rather optimistic about the evidence.
BMJ Clinical Evidence is considered reliable and is particular interesting because it is owned by the BMJ Publishing Group.
Low Back Pain (chronic) Acupuncture is listed as being of “unknown effectiveness”.
Dysmenorrhoea Acupuncture is listed as being of “unknown effectiveness”.
Osteoarthritis of the knee. Acupuncture is listed as being of “unknown effectiveness”.
Psoriasis (chronic plaque) Acupuncture is listed as being of “unknown effectiveness”.
Neck pain “Acupuncture may be more effective than some types of sham treatment (not further defined) or inactive treatment (not further defined) at improving pain relief at the end of treatment or in the short term (less than 3 months), but not in the intermediate term (not defined) or in the long term (not defined)”
Headache (chronic tension-type) Acupuncture is listed as being of “unknown effectiveness”.
What about the greatest authority, the Cochrane Reviews?
Cochrane Reviews
Low back pain The data do not allow firm conclusions about the effectiveness of acupuncture for acute low-back pain. For chronic low-back pain, acupuncture is more effective for pain relief and functional improvement than no treatment or sham treatment immediately after treatment and in the short-term only. Acupuncture is not more effective than other conventional and “alternative” treatments. The data suggest that acupuncture and dry-needling may be useful adjuncts to other therapies for chronic low-back pain. Because most of the studies were of lower methodological quality, there certainly is a further need for higher quality trials in this area.
Chronic asthma. There is not enough evidence to make recommendations about the value of acupuncture in asthma treatment. Further research needs to consider the complexities and different types of acupuncture.
But most of the vaguely-worded claims made by BMAS have not been the subject of Cochrane reviews. The obvious interpretation of that is that there is not enough evidence to make it worth writing a review. In which case, why does BMAS claim that acupuncture can “help”?
Bandolier is another excellent source of high quality information, This was their view in September 2006
“Large, high-quality randomised trials of acupuncture have been published since the reviews. In fibromyalgia, chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, breech presentation, tension headache, and migraine, all were negative compared with sham acupuncture. One in osteoarthritis of the knee, had statistical improvement over sham acupuncture at three months, but not later. Both large trials and this review of reviews come to the same general conclusion; that over a whole range of conditions and outcomes acupuncture cannot yet be shown to be effective.”
After thousands of years of acupuncture (or at least almost 40 years in the West) there seems to be very little to show for it.
The journal: Acupuncture in Medicine
What about the journal in question? Like all journals devoted to alternative medicine, it claims to be evidence-based. And like all journals devoted to alternative medicine it suffers from a fatal conflict of interest. If this journal were ever to conclude that acupuncture is a placebo, it would destroy the journal and the livelihoods of many of the people who write for it.
Scanning the first three issues of 2008 shows that it is very much like other alternative medicine journals. Most of the papers don’t address the critical question, is it a placebo. And most papers end up rather limply, with a statement along the lines “acupuncture may be useful for ***. More research is needed.”
The editor in chief of the journal is Dr Adrian White, and its editor is Michael Cummings. White is quoted by Ernst in the Guardian in 2004.
“We need to provide hard evidence to support what we all see in our clinics every day: that the modern approach to acupuncture works, and is highly relevant to the new, patient-centred NHS.” .
That means the answer is assumed in advance. That just isn’t science.. ‘We know the answer, all we have to do now is get some evidence’.
Why should the BMJ Group want to do a thing like this?
The press release says
Commenting on the move, BMJ and BMJ Journals Publishing Director, Peter Ashman, said “The journal is a good complement for our existing portfolio of journals and we’re certain that the Society’s members and other subscribers will appreciate the benefits of the decision the BMAS has made on their behalf.”
He continued: “The BMAS is ambitious for its journal to grow and flourish and we’re looking forward to working with the Society to develop an editorial and commercial strategy which will achieve the aims of BMAS and those of its members, while reaching out to the wider global community interested in this fascinating area of medicine.”
Yes, you got it. Money. The same motive that causes some vice-chancellors to bring their university into disrepute by awarding BSc degrees in subjects that are not only not science, but which are oftenly openly anti-science.
Conscience doesn’t seem to bother these people, so let’s put the problem in purely cash terms.
Both the BMJ Group and the vice-chancellors will have to decide whether the cash they gain is sufficient to counterbalance the corrosive effects of their actions on their own reputations.
Follow-up
Only a couple of days later, two new trials show acupuncture is no different from sham controls for helping IVF pregnancy rates. James Randerson in the Guardian writes thus.
“Acupuncture aimed at improving IVF success rates is widely offered by fertility clinics in the UK. In the first of the studies, researchers in Hong Kong split 370 women receiving IVF into two groups. One group received real acupuncture before and after having an IVF embryo implanted into their uterus. The other had the same procedure, except the treatment used retractable needles that did not penetrate the skin.”
“Of the 185 who received the sham treatment, 91 achieved a clinical pregnancy (foetal heartbeat identified using ultrasound) and 71 had a successful delivery. This compared with 72 clinical pregnancies in the true acupuncture group and 55 live births. The differences between the groups were not statistically significant.”
“In a second study, researchers in Chicago used a similar design in which 124 women received true or sham acupuncture. The control group had their skin punctured by real acupuncture needles, but not at genuine “Qi-lines” on the body. In the true acupuncture group, 43.9% achieved a clinical pregnancy, compared with 55.2% of the women given the sham treatment. “
The original paper for the first study can be seen here.