DC's Improbable Science

It’s hard to know what to make of  David Tredinnick MP (Cons, Bosworth). He is certainly an extreme example of the scientific ignorance of our parliamentary representatives, but he isn’t alone in that. Our present minister of Education, Michael Gove, memorably referred to Newton’s Laws of Thermodynamics, blissfully unaware that thermodynamics was a 19th century [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up 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 [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up This is a very important book. Buy it now (that link is to Waterstone’s Amazon don’t pay tax in the UK, so don’t use them). When you’ve read it, do something about it. The book has lots of suggestions about what to do. Stolen from badscience.net   Peter Medawar, the eminent biologist, [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up 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. [...]

[Read more →]

Our undercover investigation finds evidence of nutritional therapists giving out advice that could seriously harm patients’ health Jump to follow-up That’s the title of an article in February’s Which? magazine. (That’s similar to Consumer Reports in the USA). “When Which? sent researchers to investigate the quality of advice from nutritional therapists, some was so bad [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up Since writing about anti-scientific degrees in Nature (March 2007), much has been revealed about the nonsense that is taught on these degrees. New Year’s day seems like a good time to assess how far we’ve got, five years on. At the beginning of 2007 UCAS (the universities central admission service) offered 45 [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up Almost all the revelations about what’s taught on university courses in alternative medicine have come from post-1992 universities. (For readers not in the UK, post-1992 universities are the many new univerities created in 1992, from former polytechnics etc, and Russell group universities are the "top 20" research-intensive universities) It is true that [...]

[Read more →]

As promised in my last post about Edinburgh Napier University, I wrote to the vice-chancellor of the university, Professor Dame Joan K. Stringer DBE, BA (Hons) CertEd PhD CCMI FRSA FRSE, to invite her to respond. 7 February, 2011 Dear Professor Stringer, I should be grateful if you could let me know about your opinion [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up I’m bored stiff with that barmiest of all the widespread forms of alternative medicine, homeopathy. It is clearly heading back to where it was in 1960, a small lunatic fringe of medicine. Nevertheless it’s worth looking at a recent development. A paper has appeared by that arch defender of all things alternative, [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up The mainstream media eventually catch up with bloggers. BBC1 TV (Wales) produced an excellent TV programme that exposed the enormous degree validation scam run by the University of Wales. It also exposed the uselessness of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA). Both these things have been written about repeatedly here for some years. [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up Steve Jones, UCL’s star geneticist, has been commissioned by the BBC Trust to write a report on the impartiality of science journalism on the BBC.  It covers both TV and radio, and all channels. Current programmes can be found by the BBC Science home page. It is not uncommon for bloggers to [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up There is something very offensive about the idea that a ‘bachelor of science’ degree can be awarded by a university, as a prize for memorising gobbledygook. Once the contents of the ‘degrees’ has been exposed to public ridicule, many universities have stopped doing it. All (or nearly all) of these pseudo-degrees have [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up This post recounts a complicated story that started in January 2009, but has recently come to what looks like a happy ending.  The story involves over a year’s writing of letters and meetings, but for those not interested in the details, I’ll start with a synopsis. Synopsis of the synopsis In January [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up Every single request for information about course materials in quack medicine that I have ever sent has been turned down by universities, It is hardly as important as as refusal of FoI requests to see climate change documents, but it does indicate that some vice-chancellors are not very interested in openness. This [...]

[Read more →]

Jump to follow-up I don’t know about you, but I’m bored stiff with homeopathy. There are a lot more important things. Nevertheless, it remains a gross insult to reason, and there has been such enormous success in combating it over the last five years so, this is not the moment to stop. Hats off to [...]

[Read more →]