DC's Improbable Science

Jump to follow-up Yes, it’s that most boring of non-medicine topics, homeopathy, again.  At lunchtime on Thursday I got a call from a Times journallst, Fay Schopen, to ask if I could do 500 words on the Science and Technology Committee’s Evidence Check report on homeopathy. Bang goes another evening.  The (im)balance was provided by [...]

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Jump to follow-up What follows is mostly from the press release for the report of the Science and Technology Select Committee’s report on homeopathy. Comments on their hearings can be found in Comedy gold in parliament and tragedy from Prince of Wales: editorial in British Medical Journal (Although published before Christmas, the comments on this [...]

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Jump to follow-up The Yuletide edition of the BMJ carries a lovely article by Jeffrey Aronson, Patent medicines and secret remedies. (BMJ 2009;339:b5415). I was delighted to be asked to write an editorial about it, In fact it proved quite hard work, because the BMJ thought it improper to be too rude about the royal [...]

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Jump to 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 [...]

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Jump to follow-up This is another short interruption in the epic self-destruction of chiropractors.  In a sense it is more serious.  One expects quacks to advocate quackery.  What you don’t expect is that the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) will endorse it.  Neither do you expect the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) [...]

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First the MHRA lets down the public by allowing deceptive labelling of sugar pills (see here, and this this blog). Now it is the turn of NICE to betray its own principles. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) describes its job thus “NICE is an independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance [...]

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Jump to follow-up This letter appeared in the Times on Friday 30 January, 2009. It was prompted by the news from the University of Salford, but its main purpose was to try to point out to the Department of Health that you can’t hope to regulate alternative treatments in any sensible way while continuing to [...]

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Congratulations to the vice-chancellor of the University of Salford, Michael Harloe. Times Higher Education announced on 15th January 2009 Salford to shut complementary medicine BSc. “The University of Salford is to stop offering undergraduate degrees in acupuncture and complementary medicine because they are no longer considered “a sound academic fit”.” This is the first time [...]

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Jump to follow-up I’m perfectly happy to think of alternative medicine as being a voluntary, self-imposed tax on the gullible (to paraphrase Goldacre again). But only as long as its practitioners do no harm and only as long as they obey the law of the land.  Only too often, though, they do neither. When I [...]

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Jump to follow-up Alfred Joseph Clark FRS held the established chair of Pharmacology at UCL from 1919 to 1926, when he left for Edinburgh.  In the 1920s and 30s, Clark was a great pioneer in the application of quantitative physical ideas to pharmacology.   As well as his classic scientific works, like The Mode of [...]

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Thanks to a correspondent for alerting me to a medical emergency in France. You can read the press release here, from Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Produits de Santé (AFSSAPS, the French equivalent of the MHRA or FDA). Withdrawal of batches of Gingko biloba and Equisetum arvense AFSSAPS has been informed by Laboratoires Boiron [...]

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How irrational thinking in government and universities has led to the rise of new-age nonsense in the name of science. This article appeared on 15th August 2007, on the Guardian Science web site. The Guardian made very few cuts to the original version, but removed a lot of the links. If you want to have [...]

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In the course of a long correspondence with the MHRA about their endorsement of a dishonest label for a herbal preparation, arnica gel, I eventually got an admission from them that the stuff doesn’t work. For earlier episodes in this saga, see part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4. “As you have clearly [...]

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The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is an executive agency of the Department of Health). It is roughly the UK equivalent of the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) in the USA. The MHRA has just betrayed the trust placed in it by the public by allowing untrue claims to be put on the [...]

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The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) acts un direct breach of its brief my allowing unjustified claims to be made for the efficacy of Arnica gel. . Read full entry on the original IMPROBABLE SCIENCE page.

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