Download Lectures on Biostatistics (1971). Corrected and searchable version of Google books edition
Download review of Lectures on Biostatistics (THES, 1973).
Politicians
The Prince of Wales addressed the World Health Organisation in Geneva. Some bits were excellent, but in the end it was irresponsible, dishonest, and perhaps unconstitutional too.
Read full entry on the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.
This letter was sent to the chief executives of 476 NHS Trusts (acute and primary care trusts). It was the main headline in The Times, and the lead item on the BBC’s Today Programme.
| From Professor Michael Baum and others 19th May 2006 Dear Re Use of ‘alternative’ medicine in the NHS We are a group of physicians and scientists who are concerned about ways in which nproven or disproved treatments are being encouraged for general use in the NHS. We would ask you to review practices in your own trust, and to join us in representing our concerns to the Department of Health because we want patients to benefit from the best treatments available. There are two particular developments to which we would like to draw your attention. First, there is now overt promotion of homeopathy in parts of the NHS (including the NHS Direct website). It is an implausible treatment for which over a dozen systematic reviews have failed to produce convincing evidence of effectiveness. Despite this, a recently-published patient guide, promoting use of homeopathy without making the lack of proven efficacy clear to patients, is being made available through government funding. Further suggestions about benefits of homeopathy in the treatment of asthma have been made in the ‘Smallwood Report’ and in another publication by the Department of Health designed to give primary care groups “a basic source of reference on complementary and alternative therapies.” A Cochrane review of all relevant studies, however, failed to confirm any benefits for asthma treatment. Secondly, as you may know, there has been a concerted campaign to promote complementary and alternative medicine as a component of healthcare provision. Treatments covered by this definition include some which have not been tested as pharmaceutical products, but which are known to cause adverse effects, and others that have no demonstrable benefits. While medical practice must remain open to new discoveries for which there is convincing evidence, including any branded as ‘alternative’, it would be highly irresponsible to embrace any medicine as though it were a matter of principle. At a time when the NHS is under intense pressure, patients, the public and the NHS are best served by using the available funds for treatments that are based on solid evidence. Furthermore, as someone in a position of accountability for resource distribution, you will be familiar with just how publicly emotive the decisions concerning which therapies to provide under the NHS can be; our ability to explain and justify to patients the selection of treatments, and to account for expenditure on them more widely, is compromised if we abandon our reference to evidence. We are sensitive to the needs of patients for complementary care to enhance well-being and for spiritual support to deal with the fear of death at a time of critical illness, all of which can be supported through services already available within the NHS without resorting to false claims. These are not trivial matters. We urge you to take an early opportunity to review practice in your own trust with a view to ensuring that patients do not receive misleading information about the effectiveness of alternative medicines. We would also ask you to write to the Department of Health requesting evidence-based information for trusts and for patients with respect to alternative medicine. Yours sincerely   and Professor Frances Ashcroft FRSUniversity Laboratory of Physiology, Oxford Professor Sir Colin Berry Professor Gustav Born FRS Professor Sir James Black FRS Professor David Colquhoun FRS Professor Peter Dawson Professor Edzard Ernst Professor John Garrow Professor Sir Keith Peters FRS Mr Leslie Rose Professor Raymond Tallis Professor Lewis Wolpert CBE FRS |
As soon as this appeared the phone started ringing.
Michael Baum did an excellent job on the Today Programme, and on BBC Birmingham, BBC55, BBC world service, ITN news (interviewed for 20 minutes outdoor in the rain), Sky News live, and as well as all that he saw patients, and missed lunch while in the operating theatre. Michael comments ” How was your day your Royal Highness? “.
Leslie Rose did BBC Breakfast TV interview and various radio stations.
I did interviews for BBC News24, BBC1 News, Chanel 5 News, Sky news, the Jeremy Vine Show (radio 2), BBC Radio Solent, and wrote something for the Scotsman. Today it’s Radio London at 10.35 pm and tomorrow, Radio Foyle (Derry).
Listen to the Today Programme 08.10 interview
John Humphrys, on the Today Programme, interviews Michael Baum (lead signatory on the letter), and Peter Fisher of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (For more on Peter Fisher, see here, and here, and here). Listen to the interview [mp3 file, 4.4 Mb]
Leslie Rose interviewed on BBC
Breakfast TV. Watch the interview (Realplayer file).
Interview for Sky News.
The Jeremy Vine show interview (Radio 2)
The Late Show on BBC Radio London (24 May), host Stephen
Rhodes, DC versus Gary Trainer: click to listen
Radio Foyle (N. Irelend) Talk show with Mark Patterson. The local health
food shop manager told me that ‘arthritis is a build up of toxins in the body’,
and that glucosamine and chondroitin are herbal! Click to listen
Michael Baum’s 2004 Open letter. “An open letter to the Prince of Wales: with respect, your highness, you’ve got it wrong”. Download pdf file.
Coverage in The Times, 23 May 2006. The front page headline.
New International has forced me to remove the pictures of the front page, but the front page headline was
NHS told to abandon alternative medicineTop doctors say money should go to conventional treatment |
Here is Mark Henderson’s article.
NHS told to abandon alternative medicineBy Mark Henderson, Science Editor Top doctors say money should go to conventional treatment A GROUP of Britain’s leading doctors has urged every NHS trust to stop paying for alternative medicine and to use the money for conventional treatments. Their appeal is a direct challenge to the Prince of Wales’s outspoken campaign to widen access to complementary therapies. Public funding of “unproven or disproved treatments” such as homoeopathy and reflexology, which are promoted by the Prince, is unacceptable while huge NHS deficits are forcing trusts to sack nurses and limit access to life-saving drugs, the doctors say. The 13 scientists, who include some of the most eminent names in British medicine, have written to the chief executives of all 476 acute and primary care trusts to demand that only evidence-based therapies are provided free to patients. Their letter, seen by The Times, has been sent as the Prince today steps up his crusade for increased provision of alternative treatments with a controversial speech to the World Health Organisation assembly in Geneva. The Prince, who was yesterday given a lesson in crystal therapy while touring a complementary health unit in Merthyr Tydfil, will ask the WHO to embrace alternative therapies in the fight against serious disease. His views have outraged clinicians and researchers, who claim that many of the therapies that he advocates have been shown to be ineffective in trials or have never been properly tested. The letter criticises two of his flagship initiatives on complementary medicine: a government-funded patient guide prepared by his Foundation for Integrated Medicine, and the Smallwood report last year, which he commissioned to make a financial case for increasing NHS provision. Both documents, it is claimed, give misleading information about scientific support for therapies such as homoeo-pathy, described as “an implausible treatment for which over a dozen systematic reviews have failed to produce convincing evidence of effectiveness”. The letter’s signatories include Sir James Black, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1988, and Sir Keith Peters, president of the Academy of Medical Science, which represents Britain’s leading clinical researchers. It was organised by Michael Baum, Emeritus Professor of Surgery at University College London, and other supporters include six Fellows of the Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, and Professor Edzard Ernst, of the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, who holds the UK’s first chair in complementary medicine. The doctors ask trust chief executives to review their policies so that patients are given accurate information, and not to waste scarce resources on therapies that have not been shown to work by rigorous clinical trials. They conclude: “At a time when the NHS is under intense pressure, patients, the public and the NHS are best served by using the available funds for treatments that are based on solid evidence.” Professor Baum, a cancer specialist, said that he had organised the letter because of his “utter despair” at growing NHS acceptance of alternative treatments while drugs of proven effectiveness are being withheld. “At a time when we are struggling to gain access for our patients to Herceptin, which is absolutely proven to extend survival in breast cancer, I find it appalling that the NHS should be funding a therapy like homoeopathy that is utterly bogus,” he said. He said that he was happy for the NHS to offer the treatments once research has proven them effective, such as acupuncture for pain relief, but that very few had reached the required standards. “If people want to spend their own money on it, fine, but it shouldn’t be NHS money.” The Department of Health does not keep figures on the total NHS spending on alternative medicine, but Britain’s total market is estimated at £1.6 billion. |
There’s no remedy for the Prince of Quacks
This is the title of a piece by Francis Wheen in the London Evening Standard, 16 May 2006. Francis Wheen is the author of the Top ten delusions.
“Prince Charles travels to Geneva next week to deliver the keynote speech at the annual assembly of the World Health Organisation. Some mistake, surely?” “The WHO describes Charles as the president of the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health and “patron of a number of health charities”. It omits to add that his views on medicine are barmy – and pernicious. ”
“WHO delegates from 192 nations have plenty to discuss during their five-day meeting – HIV/Aids, sickle-cell anaemia, preparations for a flu pandemic, the eradication of polio and smallpox. Why waste precious time listening to the heir to the British throne, who has spent more than 20 years displaying his ignorance of medical science?”
“The prince has never met a snake oil vendor he didn’t like. A couple of years ago he urged doctors to prescribe coffee enemas to cancer patients, a suggestion which provoked this rebuke from Professor Michael Baum of University College London: “The power of my authority comes with a knowledge built on 40 years of study and 25 years of active involvement in cancer research. Your power and authority rest on an accident of birth.” ”
The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health publishes Complementary healthcare: a guide for patients which is full of wishful thinking. For example, it tells the unfortunate patient that
“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 says nothing at all about whether or not they work. That is just irresponsible. And to describe pills that contain no trace of the substance on the label as ”very diluted” is plain dishonest .
This item was transferred from the old IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.
This is a topic that I have kept well away from, because I have an obvious vested interest: “no pipe, no algebra”. But the topic does make an interesting example of the effect of political correctness on people who are otherwise impeccable in there attitude to evidence. Tim Luckhurst writes about this in The Independent (2 May, 2006).
“On Desert Island Discs in 2001, Sir Richard Doll, the man who proved the incontrovertible causal link between active smoking and lung cancer, said: “The effect of other people smoking in my presence is so small it doesn’t worry me.”
He was right not to fret. One of the largest studies of the health consequences of secondary smoking was published in the British Medical Journal in 2003. It tracked the health of 118,000 Californians over four decades in a rigorous attempt to identify a causal relationship between environmental tobacco smoke (the scientific term for secondary smoke) and premature death. It concluded: “The results do not support a causal relationship between ETS and tobacco-related mortality.” ”
The paper in question is ‘Environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality in a prospective study of Californians, 1960-98’, James E Enstrom and Geoffrey C Kabat 2003, BMJ , 326, 1057 . The publication was followed by a torrent of abuse, more
reminiscent of religious zealotry than of science. The responses have been analysed in an article in Public Understanding of Science (2005, 14, 5–23) by Ungar and Bray, ‘Silencing science: partisanship and the career of a publication disputing the dangers of secondhand smoke’ [ download pdf ].
I don’t know what the final answer will be about the risks of passive smoking, but as a pharmacologist, the higher levels of damage reported seem barely credible, bearing in mind that
“Reputable research shows that a non-smoker inhales between a 500th and 1,000th of the toxins inhaled by the smoker himself.”
It does seem that it is not only big drug companies, and deluded homeopaths, who are happy to distort evidence for their own purposes. Well-meaning zealots can do it too. That is just as scary.
“Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s 40-a-day cigar habit is held responsible for some of the greatest triumphs of British engineering. Unfortunately, it also represents an upturned middle finger towards the politically-correct mandarins of modern academia. With this in mind, Brunel University has removed the famous stoogie from a new, life-size statue of the eminent Victorian. The bronze is based on the National Portrait Gallery’s iconic photograph of Brunel standing next to the launching chains of his ship, the SS Great Eastern, in 1857. It was unveiled last week, revealing a close likeness, but – to the annoyance of Brunel fans, historians and the smoking lobby alike – no cigar.” The Independent , 18th July 2006.
Some scientific heros. Their longevity tells you absolutely nothing.
Transferred from the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.
Follow-up
An Edinburgh hospital is to supply aromatherapy on the NHS.
Read full entry on the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.
A bizarre organisation called the NHS Trusts Association promotes not only homeopathy, but even wackier things like ‘crystal therapy’.
Read full entry on the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.
The Amsterdam Medical Disciplinary Tribunal has struck off one doctor and suspended two others for their exclusive use of complementary treatments, resulting in the death of a woman.
Read full entry on the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.
Well this beats everything. Following the advice of the PPA, I re-submitted my request under the Freedom of Information Act to the Department of Health (DoH), which is where the PPA claimed to to have sent very single bit of information concerning their decision to make magnetic ulcer treatment available on the NHS.
When I mananged to decode the result (the DoH seem incapable of sending legible emails) this is what they said.
|
As you are aware, the decision by the PPA to allow Magnopulse;s 4Ulcercare on Part IX of the Drug Tarriff is a recent one and the documentation that went along with the application are still very much restricted as “commercially sensitive”. We have therefore decided to withhold this information under the FOI Act.
Section 43: Commercial Interests |
Trade secrets in magnets? They are one of the oldest scams of the health fraud industry! Are the DoH really so enthusiastic to protect these non-existent trade secrets? (The company whose trade secrets the DoH are so eager to protect are under invesitgation by the Office of Fair Trading!) Or is the DoH merely colluding to cover up the cockup at the PPA?
Either way, the Freedom of Information Act 2000 has yet to prove it’s worth the paper it’s written on.
Why not write to your MP to ask them to approach the DoH about this absurd misuse of the Act?
I have requested an internal investigation by the DoH. Next the appeal goes to the Ombudsman.
In the discussion of magnets on the Badscience site, a Michael King says that 4ulcercare will be included in Part IX of the Drug Tariff because it meets the criteria of the Prescription Pricing Authority (PPA).
I presume this Michael King is Director of Planning and Corporate Affairs at the PPA, though he does not say so.
Michael King says
?There is no judgement offered about whether a product in the Drug Tariff
is more (or less) efficacious than any other, or the placebo effect.?
The criteria for inclusion in
Part IX of the Drug Tariff () include, in section 10 iii, ?They are cost
effective?
Will he please explain how a device can be cost-effective, if it is ineffective (relative to placebo)?
What the PPA says
Michael King has replied to my question by email (1 Mar 2006). He says
“The cost-effectiveness threshold for inclusion in the Drug Tariff is met if the ‘effectiveness’ of the device, as seen in data submitted by the manufacturer in support of the application, exceeds its cost to the NHS. ”
Sadly this is still ambiguous. It seems to suggest that that whatever data
are submitted by the manufacturer are taken at face value, without any attempt
to evaluate their quality. So I phoned King to ask if this was the case. He
was helpful, but he said that it was not the case. He told me that
the data were subject
to some sort of low level evaluation, short of the sort of evaluation that
NICE would do. This seems to contradict his earlier statement (above) that
inclusion in the Tariff implies no judgement about whether a device is better
than a placebo.
King said also that listing in the Tariff
“. . . is not a licensing decision nor a recommendation akin to the outcome of a NICE review”
The problem is, of course, that listing is seen as a recommendation by the public, by the Daily
Mail, and certainly by the manufacturer.
One thing, at least, is clear in this case. Whatever evaluation was done,
it was done very badly. But in order to try to find out exactly what evaluation
was done, and by whom, I’m having to resort to the Freedom of Information Act.
Watch this space.
What NICE says
Fraser Woodward (Communications Manager, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)) writes as follows.
“The test of “cost effectiveness” applied by the PPA when determining whether or not a device should go on the tariff is very different to the way cost effectiviness is assessed by NICE”
That is pretty obvious, but how is the public meant to know that, when they hear that the NHS has declared a treatment to be ‘cost-effective’, that statement can mean two entirely different things according to which part of the bureaucracy the statement comes from?
Several of the people who contributed to, and/or appeared in, the BBC2 series on alternative medicine, have complained that they were treated “like marionettesâ€, and that the programme was sensationalised and uncritical,
Read full entry on the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.
The Office of Fair Trading has taken Magno-Pulse Ltd to the High Court after they refused to stop what the OFT regards, quit rightly, as misleading advertising. This is the company whose magnets have just been approved by the PPA for prescription on the NHS!
Read full entry on the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.
Emails in my possession show that the Chiron Clinic is able to decide that nutritional supplements are needed for leg ulcers on the basis of an email (as well as magnets of course).
Read full entry on the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.
Nobody knows the cost! But here is some information that I found by use of the Freedom of Information Act 2000…
Read full entry on the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.
[This post was transferred from the old Improbable Science page]
It’s not just homeopathy. The Sunday Times, (26 February, 2006) reports that the National Health Service has fallen for another scam.
“IT COULD be called the Cleopatra Effect. Magnetic therapy, which has held the rich and powerful in thrall from ancient Egypt to modern Downing Street, is about to be made available on the National Health Service.
NHS accountants are so impressed by the cost-effectiveness of a “magnetic leg wrap” called 4UlcerCare that from Wednesday doctors will be allowed to prescribe it to patients.”
This is nicely timed to coincide with an Editorial in the British Medical Journal, by Finegold & Flamm (2006) (click to download pdf file). The editorial title was “Magnet therapy. Extraordinary claims, but no proved benefits“. They conclude
“Patients should be advised that magnet therapy has no proven benefits. If they insist on using a magnetic device, they could be advised to buy the cheapest – this will alleviate the pain in their wallet,”
For example, Carter et al,, 2002 found no detectable effect of magnet therapy for treatment of wrist pain Attributed to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (30 patients,double blind, careful controls). Winemiller et al., 2003 (Journal of American Medical Association, 290, 1474–78), found no benefit of magnets vs sham-magnets in treatment of plantar heel pain in 101 patients.
Magnets are said to be one of Cherie Blair’s several curious and irrational beliefs. It is alleged, according to the Daily Telegraph, that “Cherie Blair did not allow her youngest child, Leo, to have the controversial MMR vaccine and instead asked a New Age healer to wave a “magic” pendulum over him”. A few more examples are documented here and here.
The accountants at the Prescription Pricing Authority have decided that the “the magnets will save money on bandages and nurses’ time by healing the wounds.” I dare say they could save even more money by removing all effective treatments.
The evidence in favour of the magnetic treatment all seems to come from a Dr Nyjon Eccles. The Sunday Times describes him as an “NHS GP in north London”, but elsewhere he is described as "Founder, CEO and Medical Director of the Chiron Clinic" in Harley Street. A look at their web site shows that they offer a full range of alternative scams. Cancer patients can get
“LYMPH DETOXIFICATION – This is achieved by non-invasive scalar, oxygen-fed light beam therapy. This helps to detoxify the tissues by assisting the body in dissolving lymph blockages and restoring normal lymph flow using the Nobel quantum scalar technology coupled with oxygen for remarkable healing potential.”
This is total gobbledygook, designed to take advantage of the desperate.
The only real evidence to be provided by Dr Eccles that the device works is a small (26 patients) double blind trial that has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and which suffered from a number of problems (dropouts, outliers). What, I wonder, does NICE think of evidence like this?
More on magnets and the PPA
In the discussion of magnets on the Badscience site, a Michael King says that 4ulcercare will be included in Part IX of the Drug Tariff because it meets the criteria of the Prescription Pricing Authority (PPA).
I presume this Michael King is Director of Planning and Corporate Affairs at the PPA, though he does not say so.
Michael King says
“There is no judgement offered about whether a product in the Drug Tariff
is more (or less) efficacious than any other, or the placebo effect.”
The criteria for inclusion in
Part IX of the Drug Tariff () include, in section 10 iii, “They are cost effective”
Will he please explain how a device can be cost-effective, if it is ineffective (relative to placebo)?
What the PPA says
Michael King has replied to my question by email (1 Mar 2006). He says
“The cost-effectiveness threshold for inclusion in the Drug Tariff is met if the ‘effectiveness’ of the device, as seen in data submitted by the manufacturer in support of the application, exceeds its cost to the NHS. ”
Sadly this is still ambiguous. It seems to suggest that that whatever data are submitted by the manufacturer are taken at face value, without any attempt to evaluate their quality. So I phoned King to ask if this was the case. He was helpful, but he said that it was not the case. He told me that the data were subject to some sort of low level evaluation, short of the sort of evaluation that NICE would do. This seems to contradict his earlier statement (above) that inclusion in the Tariff implies no judgement about whether a device is better than a placebo.
King said also that listing in the Tariff
“. . . is not a licensing decision nor a recommendation akin to the outcome of a NICE review”
The problem is, of course, that listing is seen as a recommendation by the public, by the Daily
Mail, and certainly by the manufacturer.
One thing, at least, is clear in this case. Whatever evaluation was done, it was done very badly. But in order to try to find out exactly what evaluation was done, and by whom, I’m having to resort to the Freedom of Information Act.
The results are here and here..
What NICE says
Fraser Woodward (Communications Manager, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)) writes as follows.
“The test of “cost effectiveness” applied by the PPA when determining whether or not a device should go on the tariff is very different to the way cost effectiviness is assessed by NICE”
That is pretty obvious, but how is the public meant to know that, when they hear that the NHS has declared a treatment to be ‘cost-effective’, that statement can mean two entirely different things according to which part of the bureaucracy the statement comes from?
An article on the death of homeopathy, There has been long enough to get evidence, but it is not there.
Read full entry on the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.