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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.

Steve Jones

It is not uncommon for bloggers to be critical of science reporting in the mainstream media. Now is our chance to do something constructive about it.     If you have opinions about this, please leave them in the comments here, and/or email them to

trust.science@bbc.co.uk

Here are some of my own opinions, to get things going.  Many programmes I haven’t seen/heard, so my selection may not be representative, but it is wide enough to include examples that are superb and examples of some that I think are not good enough.

Problem areas

There are two particular topics that are real problems for broadcasters.  One is the whole area of alternative medicine and the ‘supplement’ industry.  The other is anything to do with climate change.  Both have formidable lobby groups which, to the inexperienced journalist, may sound like quite plausible scientists (some even have academic titles).  Creationists can also be a problem. though not many programmes take them very seriously.  Both quacks and climate deniers rarely have anything to say that is real science. They have different motivations.  Examples are given below.

Many programmes are superb

David Attenbrough is an obvious example.  His programmes can’t be bettered.  The photography is breathtakingly beautiful and the science is always accurate.  For me, they alone are worth the licence fee, and I don’t want the licence fee to be reduced. It helps that Attenborough knows the science so well.  It also helps that most of the time the science isn’t very difficult and isn’t very controversial either.

There have been many other superb programmes. Steve Jones own 6-part TV series "In the blood" was a beautiful example. The fact that his comments are sought frequently by the BBC is greatly to their credit. Much depends on producers being sufficiently well-informed to know whom to ask.

More recently Brian Cox’s "Wonders" series has provided an excellent example of how science programmes can be made popular without being inaccurate,

Also excellent were Jim Al-Khalili’s Chemistry: A Volatile History and Michael Moseley’s Medical Mavericks.

Simon Singh has made consistently good programmes. His wonderful documentary on Fermat’s Last Theorem was a masterpiece.. He is a master at making programmes that make really difficult subjects accessible to the public, without making them misleading.

Tim Harford’s programm, More or Less has made a great contribution to public understanding of statistics.

Ben Goldacre‘s two part Radio 4 Programme, The Rise of the Lifestyle Nutritionists was a superb explanation of a contentious area.

It would be useful if all presenters of programmes with any scientific content had to listen to Harford or Goldacre. It might make them a bit more critical about the problem of causality that beset the observational epidemiology items that predominate among the items picked out from press releases by so many news programmes.

These programmes were so successful because they were made by people who know what they are talking about. They confirm the view that the best science programmes are made by scientists, not by journalists. There are exceptions of course. It could be argued that some of Robert Winston’s programmes have strayed too far from his area of expertise to reach the same high standards. And some journalists have produced excellent programmes. Two examples follow.

Geoff Watts has kept up a consistently high standard on Radio 4. from Science Now, through Medicine Now to Leading Edge, the standard has always been high.  It is good straight science in its social context. He avoids controversies, for example his excellent programme about Charles Darwin does not include a creationist to provide (phony) ‘balance’.

After the demise of Medicine Now in 1998, Watts wrote in the BMJ thus.

In the early days of the programme you could have listened for several weeks in a row without hearing from patients. I used to defend this on the grounds that Medicine Now was there to talk about disease and its treatment, not the experience of disease and its treatment. I was wrong. To make that distinction is simply to parallel the fault for which doctors themselves take a deal of stick—being interested in the illness to the exclusion of the person who’s suffering from it. I was persuaded, reluctantly, to accept more lay voices, and I am now embarrassed that I didn’t sooner see the need for them.

The swing of the pendulum may push the whole patient experience thing too far: to a point at which it’s professional knowledge and objective analysis that is elbowed into the wings. One of the vogue concepts among BBC managers in recent years has been “accessibility”. But this is a weasel word, too easily used as justification for editing out anything that might require the audience to concentrate and think. If a patient has a rash, it’s a lot simpler for the reporter to inquire about the urge to scratch than to explore the events in the immune system that caused the skin to redden, swell, and itch in the first place. How sad if people lose an opportunity to hear from the researchers, speaking their own words, who are actually trying to find out.

This summarises a lot of the problems of science programmes. They too easily become trivial vox pops, and Watts resisted this tendency very successfully.

A great problem for programmes about medicine arises from the pressure exerted by the alternative medicine industry (ot which more later).  Watts would not tolerate nonsense. He says

Medicine Now was stabled in the BBC’s Science Unit, and it was the broad acceptance of science and its methodology which shaped editorial choices. When complementary medicine was on the agenda, we expected evidence from our contributors not testaments of faith.

Material World is another good Radio 4 programme. Quentin Cooper does, on the whole, a good job.  But sometimes even he falls foul of the phony balance argument   After my piece in Nature  on the shameful degrees in pseudo-scientific medicine got discussed on Material World, (audio here) but my opponent was not a scientist at all, but the head of “Complementary Therapies” at the University of Westminster, a man who presides over courses that teach “amethysts emit high Yin energy“. It is simply impossible to have a proper scientific discussion with people who believe nonsense like that. They don’t accept the ground rules at all.  It is a good example of phony balance (see below).

Some programmes are quite bad

Alternative Medicine: the evidence. This series if three TV programmes was shown in February 2006 on BBC 2, in conjunction with the Open University. It illustrates well three problems with science programming. (1) Despite the title, tt was surprisingly weak at showing evidence, (2) It showed the defensive and unhelpful response that, only too often, the BBC shows when complaints are made. And (3) it showed that association with a university is not, per se, enough to guarantee quality.

Because of the title, I’d looked forward to this programme, and made minute by minute notes, which are recounted in BBC2 and the Open University on Alternative Medicine.  It turned out that the evidence was thin on the ground, and what there was was not always accurate I complained to the BBC, but got nowhere [download my complaint and some subsequent correspondence].  I was fobbed off with defensive PR.  (Much the same happened when I complained to the Open University.)

Worse still, a letter in defence of the programme that appeared in the Guardian, turned out to have been written by the BBC and was not even seen by some of its "signatories" -see .Alternative Medicine series: dirty tricks at the BBC?  All this took a lot of work and got nowhere.

Simon Singh, the eminent science author, wrote two articles that exposed the very misleading portrayal of anaesthesia with acupuncture In the Guardian he wrote A groundbreaking experiment … or a sensationalised TV stunt?, and in the Daily Telegraph he wrote Did we really witness the ‘amazing power’ of acupuncture?. Singh also sent complaints to the BBC, but he persisted after the complaints were fobbed off and eventually his complaints reached the BBC Trustees.  Two of his three serious complaints were upheld.

Phone-in programmes are notoriously bad for both balance and phony balance. In the alternative medicine field, equal time is always given to scientists, astrologers and crystal healers. The presenters are usually ill-informed and the callers are usually even less well informed.  A particularly bad example follows.

Call You and Yours.  The Radio 4 programme, You and Yours, at its best, can be quite good.  It did a good job on a "snoring remedy" that I’d investigated, though it omitted some things that should, in my view, have been included.  But they also have phone in versions of the programme. On 29th February 2010, they ran a phone-in programme about herbal medicine, hosted by  Julian Worricker, someone who clearly was totally unaware of the controversies that surrounded this subject and, particularly, its regulation.  The worst thing about this programme was that it featured a resident ‘expert’  That was Michael McIntyre who is chair of the European Herbal & Traditional Medicine Practitioners Association. McIntyre is a well known advocate of alternative medicine, who constantly fudges the need for proper evidence.

I went through the programme carefully, making detailed notes, which appear at Some truly appalling reporting of science by the BBC. It was one of the most biassed programmes on the topic I have ever heard. i sent a complaint to the BBC, referring to the detailed analysis which had already appeared here. To my dismay, they wouldn’t accept a complaint in the form. They wanted me to type the whole thing in a little box on the complaint site. where there is no formatting and no live links. I protested in vain that if they wanted a printed version, all the had to do was print the web page. At this point I decided that there was no point in spending yet more time to cope with the inflexibility of the complaints procedure.

Today programme.  I’m an avid listener toToday, the best news programme on radio   John Humphrys has no greater fan than I.  For politics it is superb.  But for science it is, sad to say, not always so good.  One reason is that the presenters don’t know enough about the topics to ask the same sort of tough questions that they fire at politicians.  Another reason  is that they suffer badly from the phony balance problem (see below).  A third reason is that they tend to pick up on silly survey press releases (the sort of ‘men with long big toes are better in bed’ pseudo-science);  They may quite rightly laugh at them but this sort of thing doesn’t count as science reporting.. The Today programme is admirably serious about politics, but the science is often dumbed down and uncritical.

What needs to be done to improve BBC science

Link to the sources. Despite pressure from bloggers, the BBC web site still does not usually link to original sources, the paper on which claims are based.  The whole virtue of the web is that it makes this very easy to do.

Anonymity of reporters. Too often reports of science on the BBC web site are anonymous.  There is no excuse for that.  Every report should carry the name and email address of the person who wrote it,  Most newspapers do this, but the BBC is lagging behind.

Reaction to criticism.  In most cases that I’ve tried, the reaction to constructive criticism has been obstructive and defensive.  Producers seem very reluctant to admit that any mistakes were made.  That needs to be changed.

Science correspondents are too often uncritical.  A few more with the approach of investigative journalists would improve standards. An example is provided by a recent report “It’s good to think – but not too much, scientists say“. This is typical of the sort of work that many people find a bit hard to take seriously, but the report reads a bit like a regurgitation of press releases. There is no link to original sources and no attempt at evaluation.

Press releases.  One reason for misleading reports stems from misleading press releases.  Press releases often come from media departments who regard their job as getting their university into the headlinse, rather than explaining science. Worse still, sometimes the misleading hyps stems from the authors themselves (one example here, but there are hundreds to choose from).  This makes it very important that science reporters should read the paper and have good enough critical faculties to read through the hype.

Complaints procedure needs to be improved. Complaints should be accepted in any form, The present web form is suitable only for short and simple criticicisms. An email address should be provided and it should accept attached documents. Certainly complaints in the form of web pages should be welcomed, because the live links provide the simplest way to refer to source documents.

The problem of phony balance. This is biggest problem of the lot.

In the wake of the report by the Science and Technology Committee (STC) on the lack of evidence for homeopathy, and the Chinese medicine poisoning, the BBC carried at least three very bad reports. Being a strong supporter of the BBC that saddens me.  These cases are summarised at Some truly appalling reporting of science by the BBC. The worst was the case of Call You and Yours. There was also a totally imbalanced and ill-informed report on statutory regulation, and a very irresponsible video of a woman who claimed homeopathy cured her cancer. .

The question of balance is important. Ofcom imposes an obligation that reporting should reflect  the balance of viewpoints. Section 5 of Ofcom’s broadcasting code says (emphasis is mine).

“Section 5: Due Impartiality and Due Accuracy and Undue Prominence of Views and Opinions”

“To ensure that news, in whatever form, is reported with due accuracy and presented with due impartiality.”

“Meaning of “due impartiality”: “Due” is an important qualification to the concept of impartiality. Impartiality itself means not favouring one side over another. “Due” means adequate or appropriate to the subject and nature of the programme. So “due impartiality” does not mean an equal division of time has to be given to every view, or that every argument and every facet of every argument has to be represented.”

The BBC Trust has a very similar definition of “due impartiality”.

Thus the rules stare quite explicitly that "impartial" does not mean giving equal time to any view, however batty,

In practice, though, producers often seem to play it too safe, and choose to give the same time time to the view that the earth is flat as is does to the view that the earth is spherical (OK, an oblate ellipsoid). This often gives a quite misleading impression of the state of play of informed opinion. Inappropriate use of “equal time” is the most common cause for misleading reports
on science.

Minority views should be heard of course, but they should not be given equal prominence to views that are held by the vast majority of informed people. Inevitably the worst cases arise in the areas of quack medicine, climate change and evolution.

Somebody said recently, it is as though after an air crash one gave equal time to the air accident investigator and a representative gravity-deniers association.  That is scarcely an exaggeration of what happens on the BBC too often.

Worse still, far more time was given (especially on ‘Call You and Yours’) to the viewpoint that any scientist, indeed any informed person, would regard as quackery.

One thing that could be done about this false balance is to have better informed producers, or, more likely, to have better informed science reporters who can give advice on the state of opinion (and to make sure that their advice is sought).

Unless the BBC starts to be more critical in some of its reports, it could lose its preeminence. In the last few years it has become increasingly the case that the best critical evaluations of science are to be found not in the BBC or other mainstream media, but on blogs written by working scientists. Perhaps the BBC should ask them more often than it does at present.

Now give your opinions, below or email them to trust.science@bbc.co.uk

Follow-up

The Open University is a wonderful institution

I should have made it clear the Open University has played a big role in producing some of the best programmes. I was, quite rightly, corrected by a letter from an OU scientist. I’ll quote from it.

David Attenborough’s series on Life In Cold Blood, Charles Darwin and the Tree Of Life, Life – these are all Open University commissions. Life In Cold Blood also won a BAFTA and we have a string of other awards. I believe this is some of the very best science broadcasting the Open University puts out and I’m not surprised to see it at the top of your list.

More Or Less is an Open University commission – see e.g. http://www.open2.net/moreorless/

Material World is another one of our occasional commissions -see e.g. http://www.open2.net/materialworld/index.html

Geoff Watts contributed to the BBC Darwin season last year, which was heavily supported by Open University programmes.
See for example http://www.bbc.co.uk/darwin/

We support the series with a considerable amount of on-line material both for credit and not for credit. This material is accessible to the public at these open2.net sites, and at http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn/.

It is clear that the criticisms levelled at the Alternative Medicine series are very much the exception to the usual excellent work of the OU.  I’m told that that programme had nothing to do with the science faculty. Clearly it was an unusual aberation.  I presume it was connected with the OU’s course K221, which I wrote about in 2006, under the title Open University Quacks.  That sort of thing is quite atypical of the Open University, and something of an embarrassment to the many top rate people who work there. As usual, the blame lies not with scientists but with senior managers.  After hearing about course K221, I had a long correspondence with Professor David Vincent, a pro-vice chancellor.  He made sympathetic noises, but did absolutely nothing.  That’s par for the course with senior administrators.

The Open University has been a magnificent success from the outset.  Its first vice-chancellor was Walter Laing Macdonald Perry . Before he took that job, he was professor of Pharmacology in Edinburgh (and one of my Ph.D. supervisors). He did a great job.

Failure to report negative results

A classic example of a sin of omission by the BBC (and the rest of the mainstream media too) occurred recently in the reporting of the alleged effect of B vitamins on the development of Alzheimer’s disease. A positive trial was widely reported, but two weeks later a trial appeared that measured the eight thing -cognitive deficiency – and that showed no effect at all. As far as I can tell it was barely reported at all, The details are at https://www.dcscience.net/?p=3516

Vince Cable, the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, said on the Radio 4 Today programme on September 8th 2010

“There was some estimate on the basis of surveys done recently that something in the order of 45 per cent of the research grants that were going through was to research that was not of excellent standard. So the bar will have to be raised.”

The suggestion that 45 percent of research is mediocre provoked a storm, first on Twitter, than in blogs. One of the earlier blogs was In one day, Vince Cable has become an object of ridicule and loathing  Those that followed were scarcely more flattering. The number he quoted was simply wrong.

Unravelling Cable says "when the text of the speech was released, I was shocked by what it revealed about the Secretary of State’s grasp of his brief.".

A legion of people have tried to decode what he meant. The purpose of this post is to go a bit further, to investigate the problem of mediocre research and to suggest a change of policy that might help.

This appears to be what Cable should have said.

(1) His comments don’t refer to the main source of money for research at all. They refer to "quality-related" (QR) money given to universities by the Higher Education Finding Council. It is intended to support the infrastructure for support, but it vanishes into the ever-expanding administration and most researchers don’t see a penny of it.

(2) QR money is not given to individual researchers to do research, it is given to the university retrospectively, on the basis of the score in a vast, time-consuming, assessment known as the Research Assessment exercise. This grades departments on the basis of the amount of grade 1 2 3 or 4 research they do.

(3) Cable’s comment . on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme that  “45% of research grants were not of excellent standard", caused uproar, and rightly so, because it shows a total lack of grasp of how science is funded, The "45%" doesn’t refer to grants at all, but it is the percentage of work that was judged in the RAE to be grade 1 or 2 (less good) rather than 3 or 4 (very good).

(4) Work that is graded 2 gets little QR money, and 1 gets none at all. David Sweeney, a HEFCE bureaucrat not generally noted for his understanding of research, points out that the 45 percent of 1 and 2 work gets only 7 percent of the funds. Using Cable’s criterion his number should have been 7% not 45%.

(5) In physics at least, the RAE panel claims it was told to use norm-referencing. This means that they are told roughly what fractions 3 and 4 grades to produce. HEFCE deny this is the case, but it is quite usual for big organisations to lie about this sort of thing. Insofar as norm-referencing was imposed, the fraction of research that is labelled mediocre is pre-determined, and is quite independent of quality. It means no more than saying that half the people are below average. It is just a statistical inevitability (if the distribution is symmetrical). It tells you absolutely nothing about the quality of research,

(6) A figure far more important than any of these is that only 10 – 20% of research grant applications get funded. It takes a long time to write a research grant application, something like two months. That is a major time-consuming activity for scientists, who should be thinking about science and doing experiments. Around 85% of that effort is fruitless. The cost in salaries and lost output of writing grants that fail is enormous. Being high alpha rated is certainly no guarantee of getting funds. That is the number that Cable should have produced, but didn’t.

So what did Cable get right, and why?

This is the bit that hasn’t been discussed much in the comments so far.

If it so hard to get a grant, why is there a widespread perception that quite a lot of published work is, if not wrong, at least trivial?

(1) Most work has always been trivial. Great breakthroughs are very rare events. But let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that the widespread view that it is worse now that in used to be, or at least that quality hasn’t improved.

(2) There is now enormously more research than before. That means more top-rate work, but, perhaps, even more bad or trivial work

(3) The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is on of the main reasons why the fraction of good papers is perceived to have decreased. It has probably done more harm to research standards than any other single change in my lifetime.

(4) Although it is tempting to blame politicians for the harm done by the RAE, the greatest harm is actually done by senior academics and other ex-researchers, and their numerous administrative hangers-on, who apply intolerable pressure on their juniors to publish large numbers of papers, preferably in one of three ‘top’ journals. This inevitably leads to large numbers of trivial papers being produced, because people think they won’t be promoted if the don’t go along with the senior bullies,

(5) The fate of young researchers is made even worse by HR’s attempts at "well-being" (major post coming up on that topic), the money wasted on ‘Roberts agenda’ skills training and the utterly vacuous Concordat

(6) A consequence of this sort of pressure is that anyone who wants to think deeply, or to understand properly, the basis of what they are doing, is quite likely to be fired for lack of "productivity" before they produce their best work (I speak here of biomedical sciences. I presume that physicists can’t get way so easily with poor understanding of principles of their subject).

(7) The result is a system that is not just over-competitive, but positively cruel to young scientists. The miracle to me is that anyone wants to work in science at all in the present state of universities. It is a sign, I guess, of just how wonderful it is to find something new, that people still put up with a system that seems, at times, not much different from slavery. See, for example, The Mismeasurement of Science by Peter A. Lawrence

.

(8) Not all the slavery is, of course, quite was bad as the famous chemist at Caltech who berated his slaves for not working (for his glory) seven days a week (though things not far short of this are quite common). And not all universities are quite so stupid as the Texas A&M University, which is reported to be thinking of hiring on the basis of the amount of grant income you bring in, although Imperial College London got alarmingly close to this sort of insanity. I guess I shouldn’t feel bad about other universities behaving in a way that makes anyone who is any good not want to work for them, but the matter is too important for one to worry about inter-university rivalry.

(9) The over-competitiveness and encouragement of trivial science, quantity rather than quality, has been going on for long enough now, that people who have risen on that basis now have power, and are to be found even on review panels of grant-giving bodies.

(10) Organisations like the Medical Research Council used to have permanent staff who developed a high level of expertise in the subjects they dealt with, and a great deal of expertise in the critical duties of knowing which referees to select, and how to judge what they wrote. More recently, the turnover of MRC staff has been too great for that sort of expertise to be well-developed, I have no axe to grind myself. My last program grant as PI (1999 – 2004) was funded, as was its successor (2004 – 2009, in which I was co-applicant). But recently I have seen feedback on failed grant applications (not mine) that suggest that the review panel either hadn’t read or hadn’t understood them.

(11) There is an enormous shortage of money for ‘response-mode’ grants. That means grants submitted by individuals to fund projects that the individual thinks will work. One reason for that is the research councils and charities have, increasingly, ring-fenced funds for work in a particular area, which some committee has decided ie important. Often this results in money being given to projects that don’t work very well (as I have seen at first hand when on the panel for the BBSCR Neuron initiative). These "initiatives" may sound good on paper to politicians, but they result in mis-spending of taxpayers’ money.

(12) One thing that Cable is dead right about ir that the ‘graduate tax’ is by far the fairest way to fund degrees. Sadly vice-chancellors line up to condemn it (you can’t get the staff these days).

So what can be done?

I’ve listed a lot of criticisms, but what can be done about it?

I can see a couple of things that could be done. The main thing is to reduce the intense competitiveness that leads to low quality. The competitiveness arises in part because of the large increase in the number of universities that took place in 1992, when the then Conservative government converted at a stroke polytechnics and technical colleges into universities, This was done largely to increase the number of undergraduate students, something of which I advocate strongly. I also feel strongly that teaching at an advanced level should be done by people who are doing research in the area they are teaching about. This is what governments have tried to do since 1992, but the numbers just don’t add up. There are simply not enough good researchers to teach half the population, yet the promotion of everyone has been made to depend largely on research.

One way would be to retain honours degrees but make the post-1992 universities into teaching only institutions. That would be the wrong solution in my view. It would result in a lot of teaching being done by people barely able to cope with advanced stuff.

My proposal.

(1) The conservatism of some senior academics has meant that they have failed to recognise that the traditional honours degree is quite unsuitable for a mass education system in which 50% of people do a degree.

(2) We should abandon altogether the honours degree system, which attempts in 3 years to take people from high school level to research level in 3 years (even with smaller numbers of people it often failed to do that anyway).

(3) We should start with much wider general degrees where teaching could be at a lower level and be done in universities that did little research. Such degrees would still aim at critical thinking rather than being purely vocational. Reluctant though I am to see teaching and research separated, it has become an economic necessity and the harm should not be too great if the separation applies only to general first degrees,

(4) After this general first degree, students would either do vocational training, or if they wished to continue along the academic line, they would go to graduate school.

(5) By graduate school, I mean teaching in the advanced aspects of their chosen subject, as is done in the USA. Most UK universities now have something called a graduate school, but they are largely charades which teach advanced powerpoint presentation but nothing intellectual. Our own summer school was originally taught as part of the UCL graduate school, but was dropped by them on the grounds that it was education not training. Protests that a knowledge of mathematics was the ultimate transferable skill in science, fell on deaf ears.

(6) The graduate schools would be the place where the advanced teaching was done, and also where most research was done. To make this feasible for the staff, they would have little, or even no, undergraduate teaching. They’d be more like ‘institutes of advanced studies’.

(7) This proposed system is, of course, much more like the system in the USA than the present UK system. It’s worked rather well there. We should try it.

On Friday 25 August 2006, Michael Baum and I went to visit the rather palatial headquarters of the UCL Hospitals Trust (that is part of the NHS, not of UCL).  We went to see David Fish, who was, at that time, in charge of specialist hospitals.  That included world-leading hospitals like the National Hospital Queen Square, and Great Ormond Street children’s hospital.  It also includes that great national embarrassment, the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (RLHH).

It came as something of a surprise that the man in charge did not know the barmy postulates of homeopathy and he looked appropriately embarrassed when we told him.

Michael Baum is not only a cancer surgeon. but he has also taken the lead in thinking about palliative and spiritual needs of patients who suffer from cancer. Listen to his Samuel gee lecture: it is awe-inspiring. It is available in video, Concepts of Holism in Orthodox and Alternative Medicine.

The problem for UCLH Trust is that the RLHH has royal patronage   One can imagine the frantic green-ink letters that would emanate form the Quacktitioner Royal, if it were to be shut down.  Instead, we suggested that the name of the RLHH should be changed. Perhaps something like Hospital for palliative and supportive care?  Well, four years later it has been changed, but the outcome is not at all satisfactory. From September it is to be known as the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine.

What’s wrong with that?  You have to ask what is to be "integrated" with what?.  In practice it usually means integrating things that don’t work with things that do.  So not much advance there.  In fact the weasel word "integrated" is just the latest in a series of euphemisms for quackery.  First it was ‘alternative’ medicine. But that sounds a bit ‘new age’ (it is), so then it was rebranded ‘complementary medicine’.  That sounds a bit more respectable.  Now it is often "integrated medicine" (in the USA, "integrative").  That makes it sound as though it is already accepted.  It is intended to deceive. See, for example, Prince of Wales Foundation for magic medicine: spin on the meaning of ‘integrated’, and What ‘holistic’ really means.

Of course the amount of homeopathy practised at the RLHH has fallen considerably over the last few years. Already by 2007 there were signs of panic among homeopaths, They are beginning to realise that the game is up. Some of the gaps were filled with other sorts of unproven and disproved medicine.

What the hospital is called matters less than what they do, The current activities can be seen on the UCLH web site.

Services:

It would be tedious to go through all of them, but here are some samples.

The Children’s Clinic

"The mainstay of treatments offered include Homeopathy, Herbal remedies, Flower essences, Essential oils, Tissue salts and Acupuncture. We also assess nutritional status, provide dietary advice and supplementation. Psychotherapeutic techniques including Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and Visualisation are sometimes used where indicated, to gain better understanding of the presenting problems".

So a wide range of woo there. And they claim to be able to treat some potentially serious problems

"What can be treated

A wide variety of clinical conditions are being treated including:

  • Recurrent infections
  • Skin diseases such as eczema
  • Allergic disorders including asthma
  • Food intolerances and eating disorders
  • Functional developmental and learning problems
  • Behavioural disorders including ADHD (hyperactivity) and autism."

There is, of course, no evidence worth mentioning thar any of these conditions can be treated effectively by “Homeopathy, Herbal remedies, Flower essences, Essential oils, Tissue salts and Acupuncture”.

They describe their success rate thus:

An internal audit questionnaire showed that 70% of children responded well to homeopathic treatment

So, no published data, and no control group. This is insulting to any patient with half a brain.

These claims should be referred to the Advertising Standards Authority and/or Trading standards. They are almost certainly illegal under the Consumer Protection Regulations (May 2008). The UCLH Trust should be ashamed of itself.

Education Services offers mainly courses in homeopathy, the medicines that contain no medicine,

Pharmacy Services stock thousands of bottles of pills, most of which are identical sugar pills. It’s hard to imagine a greater waste of money.

The Marigold Clinic – Homeopathic Podiatry and Chiropody 

I was rather surprised to find this is still running. In 2006, I wrote about it in Conflicts of interest at the Homeopathic Hospital. It turned out that the prescription costs if the clinic were spent on Marigold paste, made by a company owned by the people who run the clinic. UCLH claimed that they were aware of this conflict of interest, but had no obligation to make it public. That is an odd ethics in itself. Even odder when I discovered that the Trust had been notified of the conflict of interest only after I’d started to ask questions.

The same people are still running the clinic. They may well be good chiropodists, If so why surround the service with woo. There are, almost needless to say, no good trials of the efficacy of marigold paste (and it isn’t homeopathic).

Conclusion

At the moment, it appears that the renaming of the RLHH is empty re-branding. No doubt UCLH Trust see homeopathy as something that brings shame on a modern medical service. But to remove the name while retaining the nonsense is simply dishonest. Let’s hope that the name change will be followed by real changes in the sort of medicine practised, Changes to real medicine, one hopes.

Other blogs on this topic

Gimpyblog was first, with Farewell to the RLHH, hello to the RLHIM

Quackometer posted An Obituary: Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, 1849-2010

Follow-up