Download Lectures on Biostatistics (1971). Corrected and searchable version of Google books edition
Download review of Lectures on Biostatistics (THES, 1973).
Pharmacy
The General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) has been the statutory body responsible for the regulation of pharmacy since 2010. It’s status is similar to that of the GMC and. heaven help us, the GCC. Before that the regulator was the same as the professional body, the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain (RPS). The RPS proved to be as useless as most other regulators, as documented in detail in my 2008 post, At around the time it stopped being a regulator, the RPS started to condemn quackery more effectively, but by then it had lost the power to do much about it (I hope the latter wasn’t the cause of the former). The body that could do something, the GPhC has done essentially nothing. as described in this post.
I did a 2 year apprenticeship in Timothy White’s and Taylor’s Homeopathic (yes, really) Chemists in the 1950s.
My first degree was in pharmacy. I got my interest in pharmacology from reading Martindale’s Extra Pharmacopoeia in the shop. I soon decided that I didn’t really want to spend the rest of my life selling lipstick and Durex. The latter was quite a big seller because the Boots across the road didn’t sell contraceptives (they changed their minds in the 1960s).
In those days, we spent quite a lot of time making up (almost entirely ineffective) ‘tonics’ and ‘cough mixtures’. Now the job consists largely of counting pills. This has exacerbated the ‘chip on the shoulder’ attitude that was present even in the 1950s. For a long time now, pharmacists have wanted to become the a ‘third tier’ in the NHS, alongside GP practices and hospitals., after hospitals and doctors". . Here are a few comments on this proposition.
First let me say that I’ve met some very good and ethical pharmacists. I did a vacation job in a hospital pharmacy where the boss had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the effects and side effects of drugs, and of their dosage. His advice was often sought by doctors, and rightly so. He had no way of knowing at the time that his advice to replace barbiturates with thalidomide would lead to such a tragedy, because the evidence had been concealed by the manufacturer. Some of the problems alluded to here have already been highlighted by two excellent pharmacists, Anthony Cox and @SparkleWildfire, neither of whom work in pharmacists shops. They are absolutely spot on but they seem to be in a minority among pharmacists.
The problems seem to lie mostly in retail shops. Their shelves are laden with ineffective pills and potions. And the pharmacist has every incentive to sell them. His/her income depends on it directly if it’s a privately owned pharmacy. And his/her standing with head office depends on it in chain store pharmacies. This conflict of financial interest is the prime reason why pharmacists are not qualified to form a third tier of healthcare. The avoidance of conflicts of interest among doctors was one of the great accomplishments of the NHS. In the USA there are huge scandals when, as happens repeatedly, doctors order expensive and unnecessary treatments from which they profit. It’s no consolation that such problems are creeping back in the UK as a result of the government’s vigorous efforts to sell it off.
Here are few examples of things that have gone wrong, and who is to blame. Then I’ll consider what can be done.
Ineffective medicines
In any pharmacy you can see ineffective ‘tonics’ and ‘cough medicines’, unnecessary supplements with dishonest claims and even, heaven help us, the ultimate scam, homeopathic pills.
What’s worse, if you ask a pharmacist for advice, it’s quite likely that they’ll recommend you to buy them.
|
I was amazed to discover that a number of old-fashioned ‘tonics’ and ‘cough medicines’ still have full marketing authorisation. That’s the fault of the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Auhority (MHRA) who are supposed to assess efficacy and totally failed to do so, Read about that in “Some medicines that don’t work. Why doesn’t the MHRA tell us honestly?” . It’s hard to blame a pharmacist for the bad advice given by the MHRA, but a good one would tell patients to save their money. |
|
Big corporate pharmacies
Companies like Boots seem to have no interest whatsoever in ethical behaviour. All that matters is sales. They provide “(mis)educational” materials that promote nonsense They advertise ridiculous made-up claims in the newspapers, which get shot down regularly by the Advertising Standards Authority, but by that time the promotion is over so they don’t give a damn. See for example, CoQ10 scam and the ASA verdict on it. And "Lactium: more rubbish from Boots the Chemists. And a more serious problem". And "The Vitamin B scam. Don’t trust Boots"
Recently the consumer magazine Which? checked 122 High Street pharmacies. They got unsatisfactory advice from 43% of them, a disastrously bad performance for people who want to be the third tier of healthcare.
|
Even that’s probably better than my own experience. Recently, when I asked a Sainsbury’s pharmacist about a herbal treatment for prostate problems, he pointed to the MHRA’s kite mark and said it must work because the MHRA approved it -he was quite unaware that you get the THR kite mark without having to present any evidence at all about efficacy. |
|
Of course that is partly the fault of the MHRA for allowing misleading labels, but nevertheless, he should have known. See “Why does the MHRA refuse to label herbal products honestly? Kent Woods and Richard Woodfield tell me” for more on how the MHRA has betrayed its own standards.
When I’ve asked Boots’ pharmacists advice about persistent diarrhoea in an infant, saying I wanted a natural remedy, I’ve usually been guided to the homeopathic display. Only once was I told firmly that I should use rehydration not homeopathy (something every good parent knows) and when I asked that good pharmacist where she’d been educated, she said in Germany (mildly surprising given the amount of junk available in German pharmacies)
Regulators
Anthony Cox, a pharmacist who has been consistently on the side of right, says
"This is something that needs to be dealt with at a regulatory and professional body by the whole profession, and I am certain we have the majority of the UK pharmacy profession on side."
But the regulator has done nothing, and it isn’t even clear that there is a majority on his side.
At a 2009 meeting of Branch Representatives of the RPS a motion was proposed:
“…registration as a pharmacist and practice as a homeopath are not compatible, and that premises registered with the Society should not be used for the promotion of homeopathy”
Although that is obviously sensible to most people, the proposal was followed by a speaker from Leicester who thought it right to keep an open mind about Avogadro’s number and the motion was defeated. So much for the "scientists on the High Street" aspiration.
There have been two major scandals surrounding homeopathy recently. Both were revealed first by bloggers, and both came to wide notice through television programs. None were noticed by the regulators, and when they were brought to the attention of the regulator, nothing effective was done.
The malaria scandal
A lot has been wriitten about this here and on other blogs e.g. here and here. The idea that sugar pills can prevent or cure malaria is so mind-bogglingly dangerous that it was condemned by the Queen’s Homeopathic Physician, Peter Fisher. It was exposed on a BBC Newsnight programme in 2006. Watch the video.
The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing was an article that originally appeared on the excellent Quackometer blog produced by Andy Lewis. "The Society of Homeopaths were so outraged about one of their members flouting the code of ethics so blatantly that they took immediate action. That action was, as expected, not to do anything about the ethics breach but to threaten Andy and his hosting ISP with legal action for defamation. The article is reproduced here as a public service".
Some of the people involved in this bad advice were pharmacists, Very properly they were referred to the RPS in 2006 qnd 2009, the regulator at that time. They sat on the complaint so long that eventually the RPS was replaced by the GPhC as regulator. Nothing much has happened.
The GPhC did precisely nothing. Read their pathetic response.
Homeopathy for meningitis
An equally murderous fraud, "homeopathic vaccines" by Ainsworth’s has long been targeted by bloggers. In January 2013, Samantha Smith made an excellent BBC South West programme about it. Watch it and get angry.
Anthony Pinkus, pharmacist at Ainsworths, has been referred to the then regulator, the RPS, in 2006 and 2009. It’s said that he took "remedial action", though there is little obvious change judged by the video above. No doubt some of the most incriminating stuff has been removed from his web site to hide it from the ASA. It’s safer to mislead people by word of mouth. Since the last video more complaints have been made to the GPhC. So far, nothing but silence.
Why doesn’t the regulator regulate?
This pamphlet is reproduced from the July 2011 Quackometer post, “Ainsworths Pharmacy: Casual Disregard for the Law“
|
It’s almost as though those royal warrants, enlarged on right, acted as a talisman that puts this dangerous company outside the grasp of regulators. I hope that the GPhC Council , and Duncan Rudkin (its chief executive and registrar), are not so worried about their knighthoods that they won’t risk upsetting the royal family, just to save patients from malaria and meningitis. Their CEO, Robert Nicholls is only a CBE so far. |
|
Another reason for their inaction might be that the GPhC Council members, and Duncan Rudkin (its chief executive and registrar), lack critical faculties. Perhaps they have not been very well educated? Many of them aren’t even pharmacists, but that curious breed of professional administrators who inhabit the vast number of quangos, tick their boxes and do harm. Or perhaps they are just more interested in protecting the income of pharmacists than in protecting their customers?
Education
The solution to most problems is education. But there is no real knowledge of how many pharmacists in the UK are educated in the critical assessment of evidence. A recent paper from the USA did not give cause for optimism. It’s discussed by the excellent US pharmacist, Scott Gavura, at Science-based medicine. The results are truly horrifying.
“Few students disagreed with any CAM therapy. There was the greatest support for vitamins and minerals (94%, mean 4.29) which could include the science-based use these products. But there was strong support for demonstrably ineffective treatments like acupuncture, with 64% agreeing it was acceptable. Even homeopathy, which any pharmacy student with basic medicinal chemistry skills ought to know is absurd, was supported by over 40% of students.”
If the numbers are similar in the UK, the results of the Which? magazine survey are not so surprising. And if they are held by the GPhC Council. their inaction is to be expected. We just don’t know, and perhaps someone should find out.
I suspect that sympathy for quackery may sometimes creep in through that old-fashioned discipline known as pharmacognosy. It is about the botany of medicinal plants, and it’s still taught, despite the fact that very few drugs are now extracted from plants. At times, it gets dangerously close to herbalism. For example, at the School of Pharmacy (now part of UCL) a book is used Fundamentals of Pharmacognosy and Phytotherapy by Michael Heinrich, Joanne Barnes, Simon Gibbons and Elizabeth M. Williamson, ot the Centre for Pharmacognosy and Phytotherapy at the School of Pharmacy. The introductory chapter says.
“TRADITIONAL CHINESE MEDICINE (TCM) The study of TCM is a mixture of myth and fact, stretching back well over 5000 years. At the time, none of the knowledge was written down, apart from primitive inscriptions of prayers for the sick on pieces of tortoise carapace and animal bones, so a mixture of superstition, symbolism and fact was passed down by word of mouth for centuries. TCM still contains very many remedies, which were selected by their symbolic significance rather than proven effects; however, this does not necessarily mean that they are all ‘quack’ remedies!”
Well, not necessarily. But as in most such books, there are good descriptions of the botany, more or less good accounts of the chemical constituents followed by uncritical lists of things that the herb might (or might not) do. The fact that even the US National Institutes of Health quackery branch, NCCAM, doesn’t claim that a single herbal treatment is useful tells you all you need to know.
Joanna Barnes is Associate Professor in Herbal Medicines, School of Pharmacy, University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has written a book, Herbal Medicines (“A useful book for learning holistic medicine”) that is desperately uncritical about the alleged theraputic effectiveness of plants. ("Simon Gibbons is on the editorial board of The Chinese Journal of Natural Medicine. Elizabeth Williamson is editor of the Journal of Phytotherapy Research, a journal that has a strong flavour of herbalism (take the infamous snoring remedy). These people aren’t quacks but they are dangerously tolerant of quacks.
The warning is in the title. "Phytotherapy" is the current euphemism for herbalism. It’s one of those red light words that tells you that what follows is unlikely to be critical. Exeter’s fantasy herbalist, Simon Mills, now describes himself as a phytotherapist. What more warning could you need?
Perhaps this explains why so many pharmacists are unworried by selling things that don’t work. Pharmacy education seems not to include much about the critical assessment of evidence. It should do.
Chemist and Druggist magazine certainly doesn’t help. It continually reinforces the idea that there is a debate about homepathy. There isn’t. And in one of its CPD modules Katherine Gascoigne says
"Homeopathic remedies are available, but are best prescribed by a homeopath"
Ms Gascoigne must be living on another planet.
Conclusions
The main conclusion from all of this is that the General Pharmaceutical Council is almost criminally negligent. It continues to allow pharmacists, Anthony Pinkus among them, to endanger lives. It fails to apply its own declared principles. The members of its Council, and Duncan Rudkin (its chief executive and registrar), are not doing their job.
Individual pharmacists vary a lot, from the superb to those who believe in quackery. Some, perhaps many, are embarrassed by the fact that their employer compels them to sell rubbish. It’s too much to expect that they’ll endanger their mortgage payments by speaking out about it, but the best ones will take you aside and explain that they can’t recommend it.
The GPhC itself is regulated by the Professional Standards Authority, the subject of my last post. We can’t expect anything sensible from them.
In the USA there is a shocking number of pharmacists who seem to believe in quackery. In the UK. nobody knows, though judging by their failure to vote against the daftest of all scams, homeopathy, there is no cause for complacency here.
It seems that there will have to be big improvements in pharmacy education before you can have much confidence in the quality of the advice that you get in a pharmacy.
Follow-up
Yesterday a talk was given at the School of Pharmacy, organised by the “The Centre for Homeopathic Education” (an oxymoron if there ever was one). The flyer had all the usual nonsense. Its mention of “Remedies & Tonics for Cancer Recovery” might well have breached the Cancer Act (1939). When I asked whether the amount received in room rental was sufficient to offest the damage to the reputation of the School of Pharmacy resulting from hosting a nutty (and possible illegal) event, I had the greatest difficulty in extracting any sort of response from the school’s director, Duncan Craig. I’m told that he considers “the policy on space rental to be a UCL management issue, rather than a matter of discussion on scientific ethics with a colleague”. Oh dear.
We have listed many reasons hear why you should never trust Boots. Here are the previous ones.
Can you trust Boots?
Don’t Trust Boots
Boots reaches new level of dishonesty with CoQ10 promotion
This post is about a "functional food". That is about something a bit more serious than homeopathy, though I’ll return to that standing joke in the follow-up, because of Boots’ latest shocking admission..
Alternative medicine advocates love to blame Big Pharma for every criticism of magic medicine. In contrast, people like me, Ben Goldacre and a host of others have often pointed out that the differences seem to get ever smaller between the huge Alternative industry (about $60 billion per year), and the even huger regular pharmaceutical industry (around $600 billion per year),
Boots are as good an example as any. While representing themselves as ethical pharmacists, they seem to have no compunction at all in highly deceptive advertising of medicines and supplements which are utterly useless rip-offs.
The easiest way to make money is to sell something that is alleged to cure a common, but ill-defined problem, that has a lot of spontaneous variability.. Like stress, for example.
The Times carried a piece Is Boots’s new Lactium pill the solution to stress?. Needless to say the question wasn’t answered. It was more like an infomercial than serious journalism. Here is what Boots say.
 |
What does it do? This product contains Lactium, a unique ingredient which is proven to help with the stresses of every day life, helping you through a stressful day. Also contains B vitamins, magnesium and vitamin C, which help to support a healthy immune system and energy levels. Why is it different? This one a day supplement contains the patented ingredient Lactium. All Boots vitamins and suppliers are checked to ensure they meet our high quality and safety standards. |
So what is this "unique ingredient", Lactium? It is a produced by digestion of cow’s milk with trypsin. It was patented in 1995 by the French company, Ingredia, It is now distributed in the USA and Canada by Pharmachem. which describes itself as “a leader in the nutraceutical industry.” Drink a glass of milk and your digestive system will make it for you. Free. Boots charge you £4.99 for only seven capsules.
What’s the evidence?
The search doesn’t start well. A search of the medical literature with Pubmed for "lactium" produces no results at all. Search for "casein hydrolysate" gives quite a lot, but "casein hydrolysate AND stress" gives only seven, of which only one looks at effects in man, Messaoudi M, Lefranc-Millot C, Desor D, Demagny B, Bourdon L. Eur J Nutr. 2005.
There is a list of nineteen "studies" on the Pharmachem web site That is where Boots sent me when I asked about evidence, so let’s take a look.
Of the nineteen studies, most are just advertising slide shows or unpublished stuff. Two appear to be duplicated. There are only two proper published papers worth looking at, and one of these is in
rats not man. The human paper first.
Paper 1 Effects of a Bovine Alpha S1-Casein Tryptic Hydrolysate (CTH) on Sleep Disorder in Japanese General Population, Zara de Saint-Hilaire, Michaël Messaoudi, Didier Desor and Toshinori Kobayashi [reprint here] The authors come from France, Switzerland and Japan.
This paper was published in The Open Sleep Journal, 2009, 2, 26-32, one of 200 or so open access journals published by Bentham Science Publishers.
It has to be one of the worst clinical trials that I’ve encountered. It was conducted on 32 subjects, healthy Japanese men and women aged 25-40 and had reported sleeping disorders. It was double blind and placebo controlled, so apart from the fact that only 12 of the 32 subjects were in the control group, what went wrong?
The results were assessed as subjective sleep quality using the Japanese Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI-J). This gave a total .score and seven component scores: sleep quality, sleep latency, sleep duration, habitual sleep efficiency, sleep disturbances, use of sleeping medication, and daytime dysfunction.
In the results section we read, for total PSQI score
"As shown in Table 2, the Mann-Whitney U-test did not show significant differences between CTH [casein tryptic hydrolysate] and Placebo groups in PSQI-J total scores at D0 (U=85; NS), D14 (U=86.5; NS), D28 (U=98.5; NS) and D35 (U=99.5; NS)."
Then we read exactly similar statements for the seven component scores. For example,. for Sleep Quality
As shown in Table 3, the Mann-Whitney U-test did not show significant differences between the sleep quality scores of CTH and Placebo groups at D0 (U=110.5; NS), D14 (U=108.5; NS), D28 (U=110; NS) and D35 (U=108.5; NS).
The discussion states
"The comparisons between the two groups with the test of Mann-Whitney did not show significant differences, probably because of the control product’s placebo effect. Despite everything, the paired comparisons with the test of Wilcoxon show interesting effects of CTH on sleep disorders of the treated subjects. "
Aha, so those pesky controls are to blame! But despite this negative result the abstract of the paper says
"CTH significantly improves the PSQI total score of the treated subjects. It particularly improves the sleep quality after two weeks of treatment, decreases the sleep latency and the daytime dysfunction after four weeks of treatment.
Given the antistress properties of CTH, it seems possible to relate the detected improvement of sleep aspects to a reduction of stress following its’ chronic administration."
So there seems to be a direct contradiction between the actual results and the announced outcome of the trial. How could this happen? The way that the results are presented make it hard to
tell. As far as I can tell, the answer is that, having failed to find evidence of real differences between CTH and placebo, the authors gave up on the placebo control and looked simply at the change
from the day 0 basleine values within the CTH group and, separately, within the placebo group. Some of these differences did pass statistical significance but if you analyse it
that way. there is no point in having a control group at all.
How on earth did such a poor paper get published in a peer-reviewed journal? One answer is that there are now so many peer-reviewed journals, that just about any paper, however poor, can get published
in some journal that describes itself as ‘peer-reviewed’. At the lower end of the status hierarchy, the system is simply broken.
Bentham Science Publishers are the publishers of the The Open Sleep Journal. (pity they saw fit to hijack the name of UCL’s spiritual founder, Jeremy Bentham). They publish 92 online and print journals, 200 plus open access journals, and related print/online book series. This publsher has a less than perfect reputation. There can be no scientist of any age or reputation who hasn’t had dozens of emails begging them to become editors of one or other of their journals or to write something for them. They have been described as a "pyramid scheme” for open access. It seems that every Tom, Dick and Harry has been asked. They have been described under the heading Black sheep among Open Access Journals and Publishers. More background can be found at Open Access News..
Most telling of all, a spoof paper was sent to a Bentham journal, The Open Information Science Journal. . There is a good account of the episode the New Scientist, under the title “CRAP paper accepted by journal”. It was the initiative if a graduate student at Cornell University. After getting emails from Bentham, he said “”It really painted a picture of vanity publishing”. The spoof paper was computer-generated rubbish, but it was accepted anyway, without comment. Not only did it appear that is was never reviewed but the editors even failed to notice that the authors said the paper came from the "Center for Research in Applied Phrenology", or CRAP. .The publication fee was $800, to be sent to a PO Box in the United Arab Emirates. Having made the point, the authors withdrew the paper.
Paper 5 in the list of nineteen stidies is also worth a look. It’s about rats not humans but it is in a respectable journal The FASEB Journal Express Article doi:10.1096/fj.00-0685fje (Published online June 8, 2001) [reprint here].
Characterization of α-casozepine, a tryptic peptide from bovine αs1-casein with benzodiazepine-like activity. Laurent Miclo et al.
This paper provides the basis for the claim that digested milk has an action like the benzodiazepine class of drugs, which includes diazepam (Valium). The milk hydrolysate, lactium was tested in rats and found to have some activity in tests that are alleged to measure effects on anxiety (I haven’t looked closely at the data, since the claims relate to humans).. The milk protein, bovine αS1 casein contains 214 amino acids. One of the many products of its digestion is a 10-amino-acid fragment (residues 91 -100) known as α-casozepine and this is the only product that was found to have an affinity for the γ-amino-butyric acid (GABA) type A receptors, which is where benzodiazepines are thought to act. There are a few snags with this idea.
- The affinity of α-casozepine peptide had 10,000-fold lower affinity for the benzodiazepine site of the GABAA than did diazepam, whereas allegedly the peptide was 10-fold more potent than diazepam in one of the rat tests.
- The is no statement anywhere of how much of the α-casozepine peptide is present in the stuff sold my Boots, or whether it can be absorbed
- And if digested milk did act like diazepam, it should clearly be callled a drug not a food.
What’s the conclusion about lactium?
Here is what I make of it.
Does it relieve stress? The evidence that it works any better than drinking a glass of milk is negligible. Tha advertising is grossly misleading and the price is extortionate.
Corruption of science. There is a more interesting aspect than that though. The case of lactium isn’t quite like the regular sort of alternative medicine scam. It isn’t inherently absurd, like homeopathy. The science isn’t the sort of ridiculous pseudo-scientific ramblings of magic medicine advocates who pretend it is all quantum theory The papers cited here are real papers, using real instruments and published in real journals,
What is interesting about that is that they show very clearly the corruption of real science that occurs at its fringes, This is science in the service of the dairy industry and in the service of the vast supplements industry. These are people who want to sell you a supplement for everything.
Medical claims are made for supplements, yet loopholes in the law are exploited to maintain that they are foods not drugs. The law and the companies that exploit it are deeply dishonest. That’s bad enough. but the real tragedy is when science itself is corrupted in the service of sales.
Big Pharma and the alternative industry. Nowhere is the slose alliance between Big Pharma and the alternative medicine industry more obvious than in the supplement and nutriceutical markets. Often the same companies run both. Their aim is to sell you thinks that you don’t need, for conditions that you may well not have, and to lighten your wallet in the process. Don’t believe for a moment that the dark-suited executives give a bugger about your health. You are a market to be exploited.
If you doubt that, look from time to time at one of the nutraceutical industry web sites, like nutraingredients.com. They even have a bit to say about lactium. They are particularly amusing at the moment because the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has had the temerity to demand that when health claims are made for foods, there is actually some small element of truth in the claims. The level of righteous indignation caused in the young food industry executives at the thought that they might have to tell the truth is everywhere to see. For example, try Life in a European health claims wasteland. Or, more relevant to Lactium, Opportunity remains in dairy bioactives despite departures. Here’s
a quotation from that one.
“Tage Affertsholt, managing partner at 3A Business Consulting, told NutraIngredients.com that the feedback from industry is that the very restrictive approach to health claims adopted by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) will hamper growth potential.”
“Affertsholt said: “Some companies are giving up and leaving the game to concentrate on more traditional dairy ingredients.”
Science and government policy
It may not have escaped your notice that the sort of low grade, corrupted, fringe science described here, is precisely the sort that is being encouraged by government policies. You are expected to get lots of publications, so never mind the details, just churn ’em out; The hundreds of new journals that have been created will allow you to get as meny peer-reviwed publications as you want without too much fuss, and you can very easily put an editorship of one of them on your CV when you fill in that bit about indicators of esteem. The box tickers in HR will never know that it’s a mickey mouse journal.
Follow-up
Boots own up to selling crap
Although this post was nothing to do with joke subjects like homeopathy, it isn’t possible to write about Boots without mentioning the performance of their professional standards director, Paul Bennett, when he appeared before the Parliamentary Select Committee for Science and Technology.. This committee was holding an “evidence check” session on homeopathy (it’s nothing short of surreal that this should be happening in 2009, uh?). The video can be seen here, and an uncorrected transcript. It is quite fun in places. You can also read the written evidence that was submitted.
Even the Daily Mail didn’t misss this one. Fioana Macrae wrote Boots boss admits they sell homeopathic remedies ‘because they’re popular, not because they work’
“It could go down as a Boot in Mouth moment.
Yesterday, the company that boasts shelf upon shelf of arnica, St John’s wort, flower remedies and calendula cream admitted that homeopathy doesn’t necessarily work.
But it does sell. Which according to Paul Bennett, the man from Boots, is why the pharmacy chain stocks such products in the first place.
Mr Bennett, professional standards director for Boots, told a committee of MPs that there was no medical evidence that homeopathic pills and potions work.
‘There is certainly a consumer demand for these products,’ he said. ‘I have no evidence to suggest they are efficacious.
‘It is about consumer choice for us and a large number of our customers believe they are efficacious.’
His declaration recalls Gerald Ratner’s infamous admission in 1991 that one of the gifts sold by his chain of jewellers was ‘total crap’.”
The Times noticed too, with Boots ‘labels homeopathy as effective despite lack of evidence‘.
Now you know that you can’t trust Boots. You heard it from the mouth of their professional standards director.
A commentary on the meeting by a clinical scientist summed up Bennett’s contribution thus
"Paul Bennett from Boots had to admit that there was no evidence, but regaled the committee with the mealy-mouthed flannel about customer choice that we have come to expect from his amoral employer."
Well said
The third session of the Scitech evidence check can be seen here, and the uncorrected transcript is here. It is, in a grim way, pure comedy gold, More of that later.