DC's Improbable Science

Malaria in the news, yet again. Today I had a not-very-friendly letter from Kate Birch From: kate birch <katebhom@hotmail.com> To: david colquhoun <d.colquhoun@ucl.ac.uk> Subject: FW: Abha Light Products: Announcing NEW MalariX InfoSheet As I said we keep on working. while you and your kangaroo committee put on a good show. Try to take this one [...]

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JJump to follow-up Update 12 March. Six more dimwits signed. An‘early day motion1 (EDM 908) has been tabled in parliament which opposes the conclusions of the science and technology committee report on the evidence for homeopathy. After two weeks it has been signed by an amazing 55 MPs. That is 8.5% of all 646 MPs.  [...]

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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 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 [...]

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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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Homeopathy has become boring, so I’ll keep this short. It’s clear that the public have rumbled the fraud and that homeopathy is heading back to where it was in the 1960s, a small lunatic fringe on the High Street. All university ‘degrees’ in homeopathy have closed their doors in the last two years.  Even Peter [...]

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Jump to follow-up Latest from ABC News (Australia) Parents guilty of eczema baby manslaughter There have been emotional scenes at a Sydney court where a homeopath and his wife were found guilty of the manslaughter of their baby daughter. Thomas Sam and his wife Manju Sam were convicted over the death of their nine-month-old Gloria. [...]

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Jump to 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 [...]

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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. [...]

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Jump to follow-up It’s only a matter of weeks since a lot of young scientists produced a rather fine pamphlet pointing out that the “detox” industry is simply fraud.  They concluded “There is little or no proof that these products work, except to part people from their cash.” With impeccable timing, Duchy Originals has just [...]

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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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This is a short guide, adapted and expanded from the list published here. It isn’t exactly a scientific review. but it seems to me to sum up most of what a patient needs to know.  At least it is more accurate than HRH’s guide. The guide has now been reproduced in the Financial Times (apart [...]

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Jump to the homeopathy debate Jump to follow-up: Brian Kaplan Obama wins! Bush and Blair have gone. Could this mark the beginning of the end of the fashion for believing things that aren’t true? Trinity College Dublin: the Phil. “Creationism is a valid world view” This is the 324th year of the Trinity College Philosophical Society [...]

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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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Jump to follow-up During the last year, there has been a very welcome flurry of good and informative books about alternative medicine. They are all written in a style that requires little scientific background, even the one that is intended for medical students. CAM, Cumming | Trick or Treatment | Snake Oil Science | Testing [...]

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