Download Lectures on Biostatistics (1971). Corrected and searchable version of Google books edition
Download review of Lectures on Biostatistics (THES, 1973).
David Colquhoun
This is part 2 of a critique of Steiner Waldorf schools. Part 1 was The true nature of Steiner (Waldorf) education. Mystical barmpottery at taxpayers’ expense. Part 1
The part 3 is Steiner Waldorf Schools Part 3. The problem of racism.
|
This essay is largely devoted to the methods used by the Steiner movement in the hope of getting state funding. That involves concealing from ministers and inspectors some of the less desirable aspects of the cult. That is sadly easy to do, because ministers and inspectors usually use a tick box approach that can easily be corrupted (just have a look, for example, at what goes on at the University of Wales). It is a classical case of bait and switch, a method that was used by chiropractors and acupuncturists to pervert the normally high standards of NICE. The technique is standard in alternative medicine, as described by the excellent Yale neurologist Steven Novella, in The Bait and Switch of Unscientific Medicine.. |
The involvement of a few universities with Steiner training is every bit as disgraceful as their involvement with quack medicine, In fact Anthroposophical medicine is among the barmier forms of quackery.
Here is part 2 of the essay by two of the most knowledgeable people on the topic. They are known on Twitter as @thetismercurio and @lovelyhorse_.
Steiner Waldorf Free Schools – ‘Do we have to mention Steiner, or Anthroposophy?’
At the time of writing we are aware of 16 Steiner Waldorf schools and new initiatives in the UK applying for or publicly expressing interest in Free School Funding. The established schools are:
- Brighton Steiner School
- Cambridge Steiner School
- Elmfield Steiner ‘Academy’ Stourbridge (see weekly news sheet)
- Exeter Steiner School
- Meadow School, Bruton, Somerset
- Michael House, Steiner Waldorf School, Derbyshire
- Norwich Steiner School
- Rudolf Steiner School Kings Langley, Hertfordshire
- Rudolf Steiner School South Devon
- St Michael Steiner School, Wandsworth
- St Paul’s Steiner School, Islington
Initiatives & kindergartens:
- Leicestershire
- Lincoln
- Mulberry Tree kindergarten, South Gloucestershire
- Beachtree kindergartens Leeds
- Cragg Vale, near Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire
The umbrella organisation for Steiner Waldorf schools in the UK is the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship. The Chief Executive Director of the SWSF is Christopher Clouder but another prominent figure is Development Director Sylvie Sklan. As representatives of the SWSF they have been the plausible public face of Anthroposophy, working for many years within the establishment to create the conditions for wholesale public funding of Steiner Waldorf schools in the UK. As pragmatists they see Michael Gove’s Free Schools Initiative as the Movement’s big chance.
We will take you into the woods to show how the Steiner edifice of nonsense has been obscured by smoke and mirrors. A government report indicates the truth, but the schools themselves are reluctant to share their Special Knowledge.
Into the Woods. A government report, and a very special inspection service
There is no independent evidence to support the pedagogy of Steiner Waldorf education. But supporting the funding of the Steiner Academy Hereford, the only state funded Steiner school to date (created under New Labour), is a government report from 2005, The Woods Report ‘Steiner Schools in England’. Mike Collins of UK Anthroposophy, home to some meticulous investigative work, demonstrates how the Woods Report describes Steiner Waldorf as Anthroposophical education.
In fact the Report’s authors are unusually candid about the occult nature of Steiner schools. They also, elsewhere, make no secret of their own immersion in the ‘spiritual’ assuming a common understanding of that ambiguous word, a word which is rarely defined. But whether or not they are themselves to any degree adherents of Anthroposophy, they clearly believe that education would benefit from Steiner’s spiritual vision, stating in the Forum Journal in 2006:
"The point is that Steiner education offers a distinctive process of opening and nurturing children and educating the whole child in the twenty-first century."
There is, in the Woods Report, an elaboration of the pivotal role of karma and reincarnation [p93] a description of the use of ‘temperaments’ to classify children [p89] and of the variance in the precise nature of allegiance to Anthroposophy amongst teachers [p94] (as observed in our first post: reflecting the nature of an esoteric religion). But ‘Steiner says’ is nevertheless the dominant code:
"Steiner’s lectures are referred to and teachers constantly update themselves on the pedagogical principles outlined by Steiner, testing these in the practice of collegial discussion.” [p105]"
This should be no surprise:
“Steiner education takes a particular perspective and entails a set of practices which relate to each other in order to give Steiner schools their character. These include the role of the teacher understood as a sacred task in helping each child’s soul and spirit grow, which underpins the commitment to each pupil and is the basis of sustaining the class teacher-pupil relationship over eight years” [p120]
This may strike the reader as rather an unusual educational aim, especially if a school is not formally classed as a ‘faith’ or religious school. Would it not take sophistry to maintain that this is not an essentially religious impulse? (It does. p97/125/129) But we must remember that we are handicapped by our ignorance of Spiritual Science. The clue is given by one of the Steiner teachers quoted, who suggests what is needed is to:
“communicate to [the] wider educational community that in essence Steiner education is a spiritual approach beyond religion” [p116]
To do them justice, in other published work the Woods are cautious, although this problem strikes us as inevitable:
“None of this should be taken to mean that Steiner schools achieve their ideals or are entirely without their flaws. Many teachers, in our view, are too dependent on following the guidance and ideas of Steiner as if they were ‘sacred’ directions.” ‘In Harmony with the child’: Philip A Woods & Glenys J Woods: Forum 48/3 2006
The Woods Report ignores the consequences for children of teachers’ adherence to the anthroposophical belief in karma and reincarnation. It is obvious that the potential for harm has not been recognised, nor taken seriously by those who should have read the Report. Instead it has been accepted that because the pedagogy is ‘spiritual’ it must be good: and the Hereford Academy has been handed funds, allowed exemptions (including the freedom to teach Steiner’s ‘Goethean science’) and stands as the precedent for further expansion of Steiner Waldorf into the State sector.
What kind of barmpottery would be too extreme for the Woods? The fact that Glenys Woods maintains she is a Reiki Healer (Angelic and Atlantaen) suggests that her beliefs about what is real would seem extravagant to those working within even the most complex and nuanced concepts of modern neuroscience.
The Woods Report suggests that Anthroposophy should be better understood by educationalists and parents; the writers clearly believe that, as a spiritual entity, it is of value. But they also attempt to diffuse the presence of Anthroposophy by stating that the “curriculum is not designed to guide and encourage young people into becoming adherents of anthroposophy…” [p120] which may appear to lessen the obligation to know what it is. When we are told the disingenuous line: ‘Anthroposophy is not taught to the children”, we should not forget that it is not explained to prospective parents either, even if there may be a few (ill-attended & bewildering) study groups for parents who have already joined. It isn’t explained to the government officials who anyway appear so incurious, or to taxpayers. We have none of us earned the right to the Movement’s Special Knowledge.
But Ofsted understands this. It knows it is not qualified.
As of September 2009 Steiner schools in the UK have been inspected not by Ofsted, who used to do so but by the Schools Inspection Service. The SIS inspects only two types of schools: those run by the Exclusive Brethren and now Steiner Waldorf.
The lay Inspectors in each case are expected to understand the distinct character of the schools. In the case of Steiner Waldorf, they have all been connected in some way with Steiner schools or with the Anthroposophical Movement.
Ofsted, which we believe feels unqualified to understand the pedagogy, has effectively allowed Steiner Waldorf schools greater powers to inspect themselves.
Free school funding relies on these inspections: the results of which are rather more positive under the new regime.
The Hereford Steiner Academy – the Academy nobody wanted.
The only state funded Steiner school in the UK has already caused controversy. Francis Beckett wrote in the Guardian in 2008 that former director of education Eddie Oram had turned down initial plans submitted on his watch because “he did not think the Steiner staff had the right expertise to deal with pupils with individual needs.”
Oram’s proof of evidence: to the Public Inquiry for the original applications by the DCSF to build a new school for the Steiner Academy, is comprehensive. There is no need, no desire and no justification for such a school in Herefordshire, especially in the village of Much Dewchurch. The Project Lead for the DCSF, sponsoring the Academy, was the Rev. Mark Evans, a church of England priest on secondment to the Department. His proof of evidence glowed with praise for Dr. Steiner:
“The outcomes of this education can be seen in the quiet confidence of its pupils, their balanced approach to life and their capacity for innovative thinking.”
But the Rev. Evans produced no evidence for this assertion, nor did he mention karma, or reincarnation. This seems a significant omission; he was in all probability unaware of the nature of the pedagogy he was selling.
The Hereford Steiner Academy site does mentions Anthroposophy, although to find it involves a little searching. The assertion that “Anthroposophy is a developing body of research”, as stated here by Hereford, should rightly be disputed. Essentially Anthroposophy is dogma; gained through ‘clairvoyance’, inherited by studying Steiner’s words, comprehended by those ascending the ladder of esoteric Knowledge. But something has to be said about it, now the Movement is forced to do so.
The Steiner Academy followed one of the recommendations of the Woods Report: unusually for a Steiner school it has a Principal, Trevor Mepham. In a long exposition to ‘Herefordshire Life’ on the nature of Steiner Waldorf education, Mepham misses the chance to satisfy another of the Woods Report’s suggestions: he doesn’t explain, by name, the system’s fundamental credo.
Free School Hopefuls
The current group of Steiner Free School hopefuls vary in their willingness to discuss Anthroposophy. As an example, on the website of the Norwich Steiner School Anthroposophy is not mentioned, although in reality it is never absent. The Norwich curriculum policy describes the pedagogy without mentioning its essence but we catch stray glimpses of angelic forms. So, a moral aim is to cultivate ‘reverence’ for nature, the children stand not in a doorway but on a ‘threshold’ and ‘The narrative thread for Ancient civilisations often begins with the fall of Atlantis’.
In the March 2010 newsletter from Norwich (‘Talking Trees’) there is an observation by a class teacher which exemplifies the Steiner Waldorf attitude to less spiritual forms of education:
“I look at the children in Oak Class and see a luminosity that cannot be measured. When we do measure children, we diminish that luminosity. The world seems to be full of children whose inner light has been subdued, if not entirely extinguished.”
There is at the time of writing no mention of Anthroposophy on the website of the Rudolf Steiner School South Devon, except towards the end of the parents’ handbook. Although this is hard for outsiders to find, the handbook’s author still neglects to describe karma and reincarnation and includes the unusual proviso that this is ‘not a cult’. South Devon has stated on its site:
“The department [DofE] appears to be impressed by our application, in particular what they call our "strong educational vision". But before they can proceed to the next step they have asked to see stronger evidence of demand for Steiner education in the area, including from those outside the school community. They would prefer this to be in the form of a petition.”
Many of those who have agreed to sign the South Devon petition have done so in ignorance of even the name of the ‘philosophy’ that is so vital to the school, imagining that their plausible description of Steiner Waldorf is sufficient.
In a ‘circle meeting’ held at the South Devon School in 2008, found on the web, someone even asks the question: “Do we need to mention Steiner, or Anthroposophy?” It’s hard to lose the guru’s name without changing all the signs. But surely local people might be put off if they understood how the education at this school is intimately informed by the clairvoyant visions of the Mystic Barmpot. We’ve screenshot the site, in case there are any alterations.
This concern about mentioning Anthroposophy is driven by a fear that an undercurrent of critical analysis will become mainstream.
Critics
We trust we presented in our previous post a description of Steiner Waldorf Education that identifies the intrinsic role of Anthroposophy, making the system and its flaws intelligible, but we are not suggesting that our observations are original.
Not only have there been comprehensive posts about Steiner schools on the popular political blog Liberal Conspiracy (with much additional material from Unity, including the 5 Big Ideas of science that Steiner education can’t handle); there has been in the last few years an international stream of criticism from those who have experienced Waldorf pedagogy and its effects on families. Ex-parents, students and teachers of Steiner Waldorf schools have appeared on-line, seeking answers; making sense of their own distressing experiences, expressing bewilderment and anger and frequently offering support to others.
Their words appear on blogs, on internet forums and in the press in some countries, although no UK journalist has so far grasped the significance of their warnings. What should be reiterated is that it is difficult to make sense of an esoteric (hidden) philosophy in action, even if you have chosen to be involved at its aesthetically pleasing outer edges. For many parents, Waldorf is a form of bait and switch.
mumsnet: “You don’t expect a school to lie,”
In the New Schools Network document cited in our previous post, Free School hopefuls are advised how to advertise their projects: “Post something on mumsnet, netmums, or facebook.” If the NSN had done their homework, they would know that mumsnet Steiner threads have been so controversial (and incomprehensible to those not involved) that in 2008 parents were asked by mumsnet’s co-founder Justine Roberts not to post about Steiner education at all. Indeed the forum was threatened with legal action by Sune Nordwall, (also known as Thebee, Tizian, Excalibur, Mycroft etc) a Swedish anthroposophist; since discovered to be in the employment of the Swedish Waldorf School Federation. Blogger Alicia Hamberg aka zooey quotes (in translation):
“In England, the attacks on [waldorf] pedagogy have led to parents withdrawing their children from the waldorf schools. The [Swedish Waldorf School] Federation has employed Sune on a part-time basis to monitor the debate.”
We do not suggest on this blog that the Swedish Waldorf School Federation are responsible for or complicit in Nordwall’s activities on mumsnet or elsewhere, although as Alicia Hamberg points out, they have not sought to distance themselves from his behaviour. What is notable though is that representatives of Waldorf education in Sweden were concerned to monitor a UK debate held not in the press but in the relative obscurity of the supposedly safe, supportive world of mothers‘ chatrooms. The Steiner Waldorf movement understands the importance of a positive profile on the UK’s most influential meeting place for parents; the very people who form their customer base. But their tactics are counterintuitive. In anthro-speak everywhere, critics, the majority of whom are parents who have had children in Steiner schools, become attackers.
Even the Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship’s Communications Officer Jeremy Smith felt drawn to issue a call-to-arms to rebuff those who dared to question Waldorf’s ‘good intentions’:
“I would be very grateful if teachers and parents who share these concerns would be willing to join me in posting replies to anti-Waldorf threads in an attempt to give a more accurate picture to the outside world of what Steiner education is all about. We are also co-ordinating this internationally through the European Council for Steiner Waldorf Education. Please contact me at smithj@rsskl.org if you are interested in becoming involved.”
We invite them to answer us here, instead.
Stockholm University: “scientifically unacceptable… simply untrue”
There are other interesting comparisons with Sweden. A recent announcement that UK Free Schools will not be required to employ qualified teachers indicates that the UK is traveling in the opposite direction to Sweden which, in an attempt to raise standards has just introduced more stringent teacher training requirements for all its schools, including Waldorf (the state funding of which pre-dates Sweden’s own Free Schools experiment). Swedish Waldorf schools will have to apply for exemptions from these guidelines (as well as from new requirements regarding early years literacy and numeracy), since there are no university accredited Waldorf teacher training courses in Sweden.
Indeed the aspirations of Swedish anthroposophists suffered a blow in 2008 when Stockholm University closed the Waldorf teacher training courses in the Institute of Education it had recently taken over. The VC of Stockholm, Kåre Bremer, agreed with his Education Faculty that the Waldorf literature did not satisfy the University’s standards of “scientific validity” and that “Some of the content is not only scientifically unacceptable, it is simply untrue.”
Alicia Hamberg described the ensuing outcry from the Waldorf community; quoting the dean of the faculty of natural sciences and professor of bio-chemistry, Stefan Nordlund, who stated in a Swedish newspaper article:
“In parts, the students’ course literature is not simply unscientific. It is in fact dangerous, and it conveys misconceptions which are worse than muddled. We are supported by the department of natural sciences as well as the department of humanities in taking this position.”
A relaxation of teaching qualifications here in the UK is essential if Steiner Free Schools are to be given the green-light, since the UK’s only Steiner BA and the Foundation Course in Steiner Early Years education at the University of Plymouth are also closing. Plymouth’s new VC, Prof Wendy Purcell, herself a scientist, can claim credit for ejecting the Mystic Barmpot from her faculty of education. It is certainly true that the course didn’t attract sufficient numbers to be viable, even though it appears that Steiner trainee teachers were supported by the beneficence of a ‘godparents anthroposophical training fund.’
Mike Collins posted a fascinating investigative report into the Plymouth closures in November last year. At the time of writing this, a representative of the University told us that they have no plans to reintroduce Steiner teacher training.
However: in a plot twist which links both countries, it is not Stockholm University (which had rejected their Steiner courses for being unscientific) but the University of Plymouth which is accrediting a European Masters Programme in Eurythmy, described as an anthroposophical ‘dance form’: in collaboration with Rudolf Steiner University College Järna, 50 km South of Stockholm. Except that Rudolf Steiner College, Järna is not regarded as a university college by the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education, nor can it issue formally recognized degrees. We do not imagine that anyone at Plymouth outside the dwindling Steiner BA is familiar with eurythmy, or its therapeutic arm, curative eurythmy.
One of the aims of the European Masters course is: “to place Eurythmy in the context of modern education,” but this can only apply to Waldorf.
Eurythmy is a physical expression of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophical image of the relationship between the ‘spirit’ and the physical worlds. It is steeped in the supernatural. Of course what is happening in reality as participants sway and dash is not exactly what eurythmists imagine is happening, as anyone familiar with CAM will understand. But an intention clearly exists. Once again, in Steiner Waldorf schools, there is that anthroposophical concern for the ‘incarnating’ child. As Steiner told his teachers:
“You cannot teach anthroposophy directly to children but they can do eurythmy. And they will face life in quite a different way than if they didn’t do eurythmy.”
From “Times of Expectation: New Forms of Ancient Beauty out of the World of the Spirit.” Lecture, Dornach, 7th October 1914 (final section). Steiner introduces eurythmy to the anthroposophists
Where are the teachers to come from for these new UK Steiner Free Schools? More to the point: will taxpayers have any access to the content of their courses?
Waldorf Critics: criticism and scandal
|
Steiner Waldorf causes scandals across the world. In Norway earlier this year, Kristín Sandberg and Trond Kristoffersen, both former Steiner Waldorf teachers, published their book: "What They Don’t Tell Us = The Occult Foundation of the Steiner School." They have been part of a fierce debate, subject to threats from certain elements of the Steiner community, but Kristin is positive. What really matters to her, she says, are the many messages of support:
|
In Germany too, Steiner Waldorf has many critics. It’s interesting to reflect on the German Waldorf demographic, which suggests that their appeal lies in their status as ‘elite’ (although not academically elite) institutions.
In Australia, the introduction of ‘Steiner’ streams into public schools in the State of Victoria: ‘The Steiner Cult’s Grab for Schools’ has caused great controversy (see The delusional world of Rudolf Steiner). A document by the Australian Rationalist Society mirrors our initial post. After serious concerns were raised in a government report as long ago as 2000, and ignored; great division has been caused between parents in the schools involved and academic standards have proved to be low. Australian newspaper reports rehearse what will be in the news in the UK if Free School funding goes ahead for Steiner Waldorf. To quote from The Age:
“One parent, who did not wish to be named, said she moved her son out of the school after a Steiner teacher recommended he repeat prep "because his soul had not been reincarnated yet".
"I just don’t believe it is educationally sound," she said.”
Humanists are not the only Waldorf critics in Australia: some worry that Anthroposophy doesn’t sit happily with their Christian beliefs. Plus, independent Steiner schools have been accused of misappropriating Federal grants designed for new classrooms and libraries. It’s tempting to ask what use anthroposophists have for books.
In New Zealand, flaws in the accountability of independent schools compounds one family’s alarming treatment at the Titirangi Steiner School. Whether or not their experience is a direct consequence of Steiner pedagogy, the school’s reported ineptitude, delaying tactics and exclusion of children reflects behaviour familiar to many other Steiner Waldorf parents.
But by far the most well-known site for analysis of Steiner Waldorf is the US based PLANS: People for Legal and Non-Sectarian Schools, an organization which opposes the presence of religious schools: Steiner Waldorf, informed by Anthroposophy, in American public education. It is difficult to imagine that any UK government intending to spend millions on funding a school system within Academy or Free Schools funding (and concerned with a responsibility to children regardless of the mantra ‘parent choice’) can have entirely overlooked the presence of such criticism, or of the existence of a Waldorf Survivors’ Group. Indeed, if they read the Woods Report, they will find PLANS featured there. (p35)
There are clues to the reasons for the generally positive Waldorf press in the US in a series of posts by artist and animation art director Carol Wyatt:
“The vast majority of parents at PWS [Pasadena Waldorf School] work in entertainment. Actors, producers, art directors, writers, and all others in TV, film and technology. Almost all tuitions are paid for by media. They could not function without our industry.”
The most comprehensive (and readable) critical guide to Anthroposophy’s relationship to Steiner Waldorf schools is at Roger Rawling’s ‘Waldorf Watch’. Rawlings was for many years a pupil at a New York Waldorf school, so he’s familiar with how it feels to be inside the system. His pages on Karma, central to Steiner’s doctrines, as well as those on the background to Waldorf’s distinct attitude to Special Educational Needs (including the use of Curative Eurythmy) are particularly instructive.
Steiner Waldorf – “We must worm our way through”
Steiner Waldorf Schools all over the UK are applying for Free School funding. Millions could be diverted from local schools to support them. The decision to fund lies ultimately with the Secretary of State. We have every reason to believe that he is now personally aware of Anthroposophy, even of the critical role of karma and reincarnation within Steiner schools and the content of the course literature that forms a central part of Steiner Waldorf teacher training courses. We would like to ask him: who would be served by the funding of these schools? We do not believe it can be the children, or the families (many involved with hopeful, small initiatives) who do not understand what Steiner education really is. So, Mr Gove: cui bono?
“We must worm our way through…[I]n order to do what we want to do, at least, it is necessary to talk with the people, not because we want to, but because we have to, and inwardly make fools of them.”
Rudolf Steiner, Conferences with Teachers of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, vol.1, 1919 to 1920 Forest Row, East Sussex, England: Steiner schools Fellowship Publications, 1986 [pp. 125]
Follow-up
Very sorry to see that the University of Aberdeen is running what seems to be a very dubious Steiner course.
The proposals made here are intended to improve postgraduate education with little harm to undergraduate education and no extra cost. It is not intended to get the government off the hook when it comes to funding of either teaching or research. The recent Royal Society report, The Scientific Century: securing our future prosperity, makes it very clear that research funding in the UK is already low.
|
There is a good summary of the financial case at Science is Vital. Even before cuts the UK invested only 1.8% of its GDP in R&D in 2007. This is short of the UK’s own target of 2.5%, and further behind the EU target of 3.8%. If you haven’t already, sign their petition. |
|
The article reproduced here is the original 800-word version of proposals made already on this blog.
It was published today in The Times, in a 500 word version that was skilfully shortened by Times journalist, Robbie Millen [download web version, or print version] . It made the Thunderer column (page 22) It was written before I had seen the Browne report on University finance, Comments on that will be added in the follow-up.
Honours degrees have had their day
Universities have problems. The competition for research money is already intense in the extreme, and many excellent research applications get turned down. Vice-chancellors want students to pay huge fees. A financial crisis looms. It is time for a rethink the entire university system.
The traditional honours degree has had its day
The UK’s honours degree system is a relic left over from the time when a tiny fraction of the population went to university. The aim is now for half the population to get some sort of higher education, and the old system doesn’t work. It tries to get children from school to the level where they can start research in only three years. Even in its heyday it often failed to do that. Now teachers in vastly bigger third year classes try to teach quite advanced stuff to students most of whom have long since decided that they don’t want to do research. It’s just as well they decided that, because academia doesn’t have jobs for half the population.
The research funding system is strained to breaking point
Vince Cable’s cockup over the amount of money spent on mediocre science has long since been corrected But despite the intense competition for research funds, anyone who listens to Radio 4’s Today Programme (I do), or reads the Daily Mail (I don’t) might get the impression that some pretty trivial research gets published. One reason for this is that science reporters always prefer the simple and trivial to basic research. But another reason is that the system places enormous pressure to publish vast amounts. Quantity matters more than quality. The Research Assessment Exercise determines the funds that a university gets from government, and although started with the best of intentions, it has done more to reduce the quality of research than any other single change in the last 20 years.
Promotion in universities is dependent on publication, and so is university funding. Since 1992, when John Major’s government converted polytechnics into universities at a stroke of the pen, their staff too have been expected to publish to be promoted. We need a lot of teachers to cope with 50 percent of the population, but there just aren’t enough good researchers to go round. It is a truth universally acknowledged that advanced teaching should be done by people who are themselves doing research, but the numbers don’t add up. So what can be done?
Another way to organise higher education
The first essential is to abolish the honours degree (cue howls of outrage from the deeply conservative vice-chancellors). It is simply too specialist for an age of mass education. Rather, there should be more general first degrees. They should still, by and large, aim to produce critical thinking rather than being vocational, but cover a wider range of subjects to a lower level,
If this were done, the necessity to have the first degrees taught by active researchers would decrease. Many of them could be taught in ‘teaching only’ institutions. They could do it more cheaply too, if their staff were not under pressure to publish papers constantly. It would take fewer people and less space. It isn’t ideal, but I see no other way to increase the numbers in higher education without spending much more than we do now.
After the first degree, that modest fraction of students who had the ability and desire to get more specialist knowledge would go to graduate school. There they could be taught at a rather higher level than the present third year of an honours degree, and be prepared for research, if that is what they wanted to do.
Hang on though, isn’t it the case that UK Universities already have graduate schools? Yes, but they are largely offshoots of HR that provide courses in advanced powerpoint and life-style psychobabble. Vast amounts of money have been wasted in the “Roberts Agenda”. What we need is real graduate schools that teach advanced stuff. Education not training.
There is another problem. It is very hard now for anyone in research to find time to think about their subject. Most of their time is occupied writing grant applications (with 15% chance of success), churning out trivial papers and teaching. If much of the lower level undergraduate teaching were to be done, more cheaply, in places that did little or no research, the saving would, with luck, fund the extra year for the minority who go on the graduate school. The research intensive universities would do less undergraduate teaching. Their staff would have more time to do research and teach the graduate school. They would turn into something more like Institutes of Advanced Studies.
A lot of details would have to be worked out, and it isn’t ideal, just the least bad solution I can think of. It has not escaped my attention that this system has some resemblance to that in the USA. The USA does rather well in science. Perhaps we should try it.
What we should not copy is the high fees charged in the USA. Education is a public good, and the costs should be met by people paying according to their means. I think that is called income tax.
Follow-up
The Browne report is a retrogressive disaster
As I understand it. the recommendations not only remove the cap on fees but also make it more expensive for most people to repay loans. It is the most retrogressive thing that has happened in education in my lifetime. According to an analysis cited in the Guardian
“Graduates earning between £35,000 and £60,000 a year are likely to have to pay back more in fees and interest than those earning more than £100,000”
That is far to the right of anything that Mrs Thatcher contemplated. If it were to be adopted, it would be a national disgrace.
The Lib Dems are our only hope to stop the recommendations being implemented. They must hold the line.
15 October 2010.
It is getting clearer now. Numbers from the Social Market Foundation (SMF) were quoted in the Financial Times as showing that the rich pay less than the poor for their degrees. At first the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) seemed to disagree. Now the IFS has rethought the analysis and there is little difference between the predictions of the liberal (SMF) and conservative predictions, There is, unsurprisingly, some difference in the spin. ISF says that you only pay less in the top two deciles of lifetime income, ie. the top 20 percent. That’s not quite the point though.
Both analyses agree that anyone above the median income pays back much the same (until it decreases for the top 20 percent). In other words, unless you earn less than around £22k. there is little or no progressive element whatsoever.
It is an ill thought-out disaster.
The part 2 is The Steiner Waldorf cult uses bait and switch to get state funding. Part 2.
The part 3 is Steiner Waldorf Schools Part 3. The problem of racism.
I have to admit that until a few years ago I had thought of Steiner schools as being rather cuddly experiments in progressive education. Perhaps a bit like Montessori schools or A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School.
But then I discovered that they advocate "biodynamic farming". That includes utterly barmy doctrines about how the phase of the moon affects crops and such like astrological baloney (as well as some possibly sensible stuff about compost). Then I had a series of mails from a correspondent that made me realise that Steiner schools have some much more unpleasant ideas than a bit of astrological baloney, including the dangerous ideas about anthroposophical medicine.
Faceless dolls used in Steiner schools. Waldorfwatch comments "In part, the goal is to stimulate children’s imaginations, which Anthroposophists believe contribute to clairvoyance. The deeper reason is the Anthroposophical belief that young children are incompletely incarnated in the physical world — they still live partially in the spiritual world, where nothing has sharply defined limits, edges, or details.". " many children find faceless dolls creepy and unsatisfactory". . ." Sometimes, indeed, the dolls come with pointed “elf” hats sewn on, suggesting that these are not human dolls by gnome dolls. Steiner taught that gnomes are real", Picture from Senderling Waldorf School.
The matter has acquired new urgency now that Steiner schools are seeking government support via the Tory’s "free schools" programme. It is important that both ministers and parents should know what goes on in these schools.
I’ve wanted to write about it for a while, but was deterred by the sheer amount of information. My only contribution so far was to add Rudolf Steiner to my Patients’ Guide.
"Anthroposophical medicine: followers of the mystic barmpot, Rudolf Steiner, for whom nothing whatsoever seems to strain credulity"
Luckily I became acquainted with two of the most knowledgeable people on the topic. They are known on Twitter as @thetismercurio and @lovelyhorse_. After meeting them it occurred to me that I should ask them to write a guest post or two. Here is part one.
The true nature of Steiner Waldorf education
In a document produced this September by the New Schools Network, the (avowedly) politically neutral organisation set up to assist groups interested in Education Minister Michael Gove’s much vaunted and highly criticised Free Schools revolution, there is a question:
"..what do you want your school to be? A traditional school with a highly academic curriculum, setting and streaming? Or a school following the Montessori method or Steiner-Waldorf?"
This seems straightforward; in the case of Montessori it is so. The two school systems are often linked as ‘progressive’ alternatives but differ greatly. Montessori is a popular, predominantly early years education method, represented amongst the first wave of 16 Free Schools by the Discovery Free School, Crawley. Described as education adapted for each individual child, in the UK Montessori places itself within the remit of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) guidelines.
Steiner Waldorf schools are similarly called "child-centred" but are in reality underpinned by a fantastical edifice of nonsense which directs the teachers in the way they work with individual children. The schools have a distinct pedagogy in the context of which government guidelines are anathema; thus exemptions to the EYFS have been sought for the kindergartens at all Steiner settings. The Open Eye Campaign, championed by Steiner teacher Dr Richard House of Roehampton
University, stated in 2007 that they feared the EYFS was potentially harmful and ‘a breach of the human right of parents to have their children educated in accordance with their own philosophies’.
Few early years teachers reject the importance of play or would welcome an overly prescriptive regime, many support the review of the EYFS currently being undertaken by Dame Clare Tickell. But they may be surprised at the rhetoric of Richard House and Graham Kennish, Steiner teacher trainer and science advisor:
"Monoculture of children’s minds. Strip mining of children’s imaginative forces for short-term aims. The deep ploughing which destroys the soil and crushes individuality with heavy machinery. The application of fertiliser which turns childhood aspirations to dust which then blows away, leaving the barrenness of violence in adolescence. …. Education as the cultivation of inner resources for which an inner ecology is needed."
Anthroposophy
To make sense of this histrionic language, parents and policy makers must understand the philosophy that informs all Steiner Waldorf schools (Waldorf in the US and Europe): Anthroposophy. Wikipedia will not help here (it has been ‘cleansed’), parents who ask are told the literal meaning: ‘wisdom of man’. Anthroposophy’s inventor, Austrian Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is presented by his proponents as a profound philosopher, a polymath; an expert in agriculture and architecture, medicine, social care, art and education. Triodos Bank, Camphill Communities, biodynamic agriculture (including wine) and the newly labelled ‘Social Pedagogy’ are all expressions of Steiner’s anthroposophical ideas. The first ‘Steiner’ school, named Waldorf after its cigarette factory patron, was opened in Stuttgart in 1919. With typical bravado the Movement has for some time proclaimed Waldorf ‘the fastest growing school system in the world’.
Applying Anthroposophy to his subject, Science Advisor Dr Graham Kennish can be read some time before the Open Eye Campaign asking the important questions:
"How valid is the current popular and medical perception of the heart as a pump? What sustains this model and how much is lost in maintaining it?"
And in his: Teaching Biology in a Human Context he describes Waldorf adolescents learning anatomy with a ‘sense of wholeness and meaning’.
Kennish was until recently the Science advisor for the University of Plymouth Steiner BA course (now closing) and is still featured on the University site as a researcher for the Steiner Waldorf Academy Research Network, linked to the only UK state funded Steiner Waldorf Academy, Hereford. Amongst the set texts at Plymouth (obtained through a recent FoI request) was a book called ‘Secrets of the Skeleton, Form in Metamorphosis’, the jaw-dropping fantasy of which presumably misled hosts of trainee Steiner Waldorf teachers. But this isn’t science: it’s Steiner’s ‘Spiritual Science’. As an advocate of this world view Dr Richard House made a plea in a comment on the TES website for an understanding of the supersensible world through Steiner’s ‘upgrading’ of science. But this is not, he suggests, for the intellectually lazy.
What is not mentioned by the Steiner teachers taking your child into their care is that Steiner was by the time he wrote and lectured about education an occultist, an ex-theosophist whose insights were gained, it is stated, through clairvoyance. Nor will they be honest about the core beliefs of Anthroposophy, described by historian Dr Peter Staudenmaier:
"Spiritual advancement through karma and reincarnation, supplemented by the access to esoteric knowledge available to a privileged few".
The influence of Anthroposophy on Steiner Waldorf education
The pedagogy of Waldorf schools is informed by Steiner’s esoteric scheme of karma and reincarnation. The child ‘incarnates’ in 7 year cycles: the ‘etheric’ body is born at 7, the astral body at 14 and the ‘ego’ or the individuality that returns from past lives, at 21. Abstract reasoning is discouraged too early (before 14) because it interferes with the anthroposophical – spiritual – vision of human development. If parents are surprised at this information, or believe it to be a charming metaphor, we know that Steiner advised his teachers to be coy:
"[W]e have to remember that an institution like the Independent Waldorf School with its anthroposophical character, has goals that, of course, coincide with anthroposophical desires. At the moment, though, if that connection were made official, people would break the Waldorf School’s neck."
Rudolf Steiner, Faculty Meetings with Rudolf Steiner (Anthroposophic Press, 1998) p. 115
In this interview the late Joan Salter, author of ‘The Incarnating Child’, (standard Waldorf recommended reading), explains the importance of her anthroposophical studies:
"JS: What appeals to me about Steiner is that he is thoroughly practical. We’re inclined to think of babies as children, but they have been old people. Our “little treasures” have been here many times. I think we need to be aware of this. You can see this if you observe the child. That is why I think observation is so important.
LM: Can you say more about this in relation to caring for young children?
JS: The reason we come here again is to redeem old karma and to establish new karma. We need to ask ourselves: If this is why the human being has come, how can we bring up the child, or what can we do, to help the child do this?
LM: That sounds like the key to parenting!"
The role of the Steiner kindergarten teacher is to facilitate the ‘incarnation’ of the spirits and souls of children into their physical bodies. If there is here a philosophy that the EYFS guidelines might “breach”: in our direct experience the significance and implications of this philosophy are inadequately understood by most Steiner parents. Teachers, if pressed, may repeat that ‘Anthroposophy is not taught to the children’ but this is disingenuous or naive. The transmission of Anthroposophy is subtle, through verses, stories and images. Every aspect of Steiner education is informed by Steiner’s clairvoyant ‘insight’ or ‘intuition’ and has occult implications. Thus the Waldorf categorisation of children according to their ‘temperaments’ and their ’soul type’, school readiness linked to the ‘change of teeth’, the dance form eurythmy, the oddly uniform artwork, the gnomes (or elementals) and the faceless dolls, are all embodiments of the anthroposophical impulse.
Labeling of children according to a spurious philosophy could be seen as insignificant were it not for the pedagogical response of those Steiner teachers who, instead of acknowledging a child’s real, individual emotions and behaviour, respond to body-type, hair colour, gait and ‘humour’ in formulaic (occult) and potentially detrimental ways.
The way Steiner Waldorf schools want classify your children (from openwaldorf.com). Click to enlarge.
Eugene Schwartz, a Waldorf Educational Consultant with his own US site Millennial Child, gave a series of lectures called ‘The Karma of Education’ at Rudolf Steiner House, London in April this year at the invitation of St. Michael Steiner School in Wandsworth. The podcast is available to download and is essential listening for Michael Gove. Schwartz is candid and even entertaining; if anyone could make Steiner’s Saturn/Sun/Moon evolution, Lemuria and Atlantis palatable it might be him. But this is adult fantasy, theosophical science-fiction; it is not a basis for the education of children, however well-meaning or well connected some of its proponents may be.
As Anthroposophy is an esoteric movement with an ‘inner circle’, it is not surprising that the undeclared hierarchy of Steiner schools includes practicing anthroposophists as well as some teachers making attempts to work assiduously for the benefit of their classes, trying even to ignore Anthroposophy. The turnover of the latter type of teacher is high. For those who imagine they will ‘take the good bits & ignore the rest’ of Steiner in any possible UK Free Schools, there are indications in this document from the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America, directed at the many ‘Waldorf inspired’ initiatives budding in the States, that without Anthroposophy there is no Steiner Waldorf. Readers are instructed that essential to the "art" of teaching is: "an openness to reckon with the unseen spiritual realities which live behind the physical world and developing the perceptivity to experience what this reality is."
In addition, those concerned can buy a copy of the most recent (2007) edition of The Class Teachers’ Handbook’ by Kevin Avison, available from the bookshop of the UK Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship:
"…without active recall the teacher cannot claim to be including the spiritual world, the activity of the night, in the lesson. Recall time is the moment in the lesson when what is beginning to individualise itself in the child through their unconscious communication with the hierarchies (especially the Angels, Archangels and Archai – see for example, The Hierarchies as the Source of Action Speech and Thought, April 28, 1023 – GA224) during sleep can express itself."
In the same Handbook, Avison advises teachers: "anything indicating what the class might have learnt or covered in Morning Lesson should be ‘lost’ before you leave the school," Many have taken him seriously, since the ‘loss’ of notes is a complaint made repeatedly by Waldorf parents all over the world.
The implications of spiritual science
So why are parents asking for these schools? Steiner Waldorf schools offer an apparently creative, ‘unhurried’, authentic childhood experience free from our dominant exam culture and from technology. They stress the ecological and holistic. They are alluring. The distinct aesthetic within the Steiner kindergarten: natural materials, wool, washed peach-coloured walls and gentle voices creates for some parents a lost garden of childhood, in contrast to which the brash plastic of the average nursery becomes an affront to the senses. There’s no reason to suspect anything odd, so Michael Gove can hardly be blamed for his positive reaction to the Bruton Steiner School, which appears to have been his moment of zen.
But the Steiner dream ends for many families with the realisation that their child is academically far behind his or her peers. Susan Godsland, an independent reading intervention expert, has helped many ex-Steiner children learn to read at 8, 9 and 10. Though she acknowledges that some children can blossom in Steiner school, that a percentage will learn to read earlier in spite of the pedagogy, she believes it’s cruel to deny a child the chance to read until so late. In the last paragraphs of her Room 101 she explains why early reading isn’t encouraged. A child is ‘blessed’ with not being able to read and write, since Steiner says early reading will hinder the later spiritual development of children. She adds: ‘this is simply mumbo-jumbo and should be treated with the contempt it deserves.’
While it is evident that this failure in basic teaching could cause low self esteem, the influence of anthroposophical medicine within Waldorf schools is an added concern (for example, mistletoe as a ‘treatment’ for cancer). In addition the measles epidemics linked to European Waldorf schools are an indication of an anti-vaccination culture. In the US Microbe Magazine, Bernard Dixon states:
"Steiner believed that febrile illnesses such as measles and scarlet fever were related to a child’s spiritual development. Adherents assert that the use of vaccines (especially measles vaccine) deprives infants of the opportunity to benefit from the experience of having those diseases."
In Norway, homeopath Gro Lystad enlists Steiner’s concept of a ‘transforming illness’.
"I am quite sure that it is positive for a child who is healthy. It is conceivable that some will die, but this applies to children who are impaired in advance,"
In our opinion, the disclaimer issued by the European Council for Steiner Waldorf Education regarding vaccination is not entirely candid, since it states only that opposition to vaccination is not a part of their “specific educational objectives”, omitting Steiner’s belief that if children are vaccinated they will need a ‘spiritual education’. And it makes no mention of Karma.
The rejection of evidence in favour of a ‘spiritual paradigm’ by adherents of Anthroposophy is not surprising given that it is a belief system which is essentially anti-scientific. Peter Staudenmaier, a historian who has written extensively about Anthroposophy, explains that: ‘like other esotericists, anthroposophists regularly view themselves as privy to special knowledge which distinguishes them from the unenlightened — and an aggravated resentment against ‘intellectualism’ and critical thought and the ostensibly materialist cast of modern science and scholarship.’
These beliefs mean that the emotional and physical health of children is potentially being put at risk. We cannot agree that the satisfaction of lobbying groups or parent choice is enough to justify the public funding of Steiner Waldorf schools.
Follow-up
The last few weeks have produced yet another example of how selective reporting can give a very misleading impression.
As usual, the reluctance of the media to report important negative results is, in part, to blame..
The B vitamins are a favourite of the fraudulent supplements industry. One of theit pet propositions is that they will prevent dementia. The likes of Patrick Holford were, no doubt, delighted when a study from Oxford University, published on September 8th, seemed to confirm their ideas. The paper was Homocysteine-Lowering by B Vitamins Slows the Rate of Accelerated Brain Atrophy in Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Randomized Controlled Trial. (Smith AD, Smith SM, de Jager CA, Whitbread P, Johnston C, et al. (2010)).
The main problem with this paper was that it did not measure dementia at all, but a surrogate outcome, brain shrinkage. There are other problems too. They were quickly pointed out in blogs, particularly by the excellent Carl Heneghan of the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, at Vitamin B and slowing the rate of Brain Atrophy: the numbers don’t add up. Some detailed comments on this post were posted at Evidence Matters, David Smith, B vitamins and Alzheimer’s Disease.
This paper was reported very widely indeed. A Google search for ‘Vitamin B Alzheimer’s Smith 2010’ gives over 90,000 hits at the time of posting. Most of those I’ve checked report this paper uncritically. The Daily Mail headline was 10p pill to beat Alzheimer’s disease: Vitamin B halts memory loss in breakthrough British trial, though in fairness to Fiona MacRae, she did include at the end
“The Alzheimer’s Society gave the research a cautious welcome. Professor Clive Ballard said: ‘This could change the lives of thousands of people at risk of dementia. However, previous studies looking at B vitamins have been very disappointing and we wouldn’t want to raise people’s expectations yet.’ “
That caution was justified because a mere two weeks later, on September 22nd, another paper appeared, in the journal Neurology.. The paper is Vitamins B12, B6, and folic acid for cognition in older men, by Ford et al. It appears to contradict directly Smith et al. but it didn’t measure the same thing. This one measured what actually matters.
“The primary outcome of interest was the change in the cognitive subscale of the Alzheimer’s Disease Assessment Scale (ADAS-cog). A secondary aim of the study was to determine if supplementation with vitamins decreased the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia over 8 years.”
The conclusion was negative.
“Conclusions: The daily supplementation of vitamins B12, B6, and folic acid does not benefit cognitive function in older men, nor does it reduce the risk of cognitive impairment or dementia.”
Disgracefully, this paper has hardly been reported at all.
It is an excellent example of how the public is misled because of the reluctance of the media to publish negative results. Sadly that reluctance is sometimes also shown by academic journals, but not in this case.
Two things went wrong, The first was near-universal failure to evaluate critically the Smith et al paper. The second was to ignore the paper that measured what actually matters.
It isn’t as though there wasn’t a bit of relevant history, Prof Smith was one of the scientific advisors for Patrick Holford’s Food for the Brain survey. This survey was, quie rightly, criticised for being uninterpretable. When asked about this, Smith admitted as much, as recounted in Food for the Brain: Child Survey. A proper job?.
Plenty has been written about Patrick Holford, here and elsewhere. There is even a web site that is largely devoted to dispelling his myths, Holford Watch. He merited an enture chapter in Ben Goldacre’s book, Bad Science. He is an archetypal pill salesman and the sciencey talk seems to be largely used as a sales tool.
It might have been relevant too, to notice that the Smith et al. paper stated
|
Competing interests: Dr. A. D. Smith is named as an inventor on two patents held by the University of Oxford on the use of folic acid to treat Alzheimer’s disease (US6008221; US6127370); under the University’s rules he could benefit financially if the patent is exploited. |
There is, of course, no reason to think that the interpretation of the data was influenced by he fact that the first author had a financial interest in the outcome. In fact university managers encourage that sort of thing strongly.
Personally, I’m more in sympathy with the view expressed by Strohman (1997)
“academic biologists and corporate researchers have become indistinguishable, and special awards are given for collaborations between these two sectors for behaviour that used to be cited as a conflict of interest”.
When it comes to vitamin pills, caveat emptor.
|
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 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
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:
- Allergy Environmental and Nutritional Medicine
- Autogenics Training
- Children’s Clinic
- Complementary Cancer Care Programme
- Education services
- Musculoskeletal Medicine Clinic
- Pharmacy Services
- Skin Services
- Stress and Mood Disorders Clinic
- The Marigold Clinic – Homeopathic Podiatry and Chiropody
- Womens Clinic
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
Systems biology is all the rage, No surprise then, to see the University of Westminster advertising a job for a systems biologist in the The Department of Molecular and Applied Biosciences. Well, no surprise there -until you read the small print.
Much has been wriiten here about the University of Westminster, which remains the biggest provider of junk sciencne degrees in the UK, despite having closed two of them.
 Senior Lecturer in Systems BiologyUniversity of Westminster – Department of Molecular and Applied Biosciences, School of Life SciencesCavendish Site Salary £37,886 – £50,751 (Inc. LWA) The Department of Molecular and Applied Biosciences wishes to appoint a Senior Lecturer in Systems Biology. The post-holder will teach on the undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes within the School of Life Sciences, particularly in the areas of Molecular Biology, Bioinformatics and/or statistics, establish their own and participate in ongoing research programmes and undertake external income generation activities. The candidate should have an active interest in bridging the gap between western life sciences and Chinese medicine using emerging systems biology approaches, specifically in metabolomics and proteomics with a goal of developing novel diagnostic technologies facilitating the creation of a personalised approach to medical care. They should therefore be willing to work closely with colleagues in the life sciences as well as with clinicians and clinical researchers from within the East Asian medical tradition. The post is available from 1st October 2010 or as soon as possible thereafter. The closing date for applications, together with a short statement on why you believe you are suitable for the position and a description of your research plans, is Monday 6th September 2010. Interviews are expected to be held later in September. Administrative contact (for queries only): Tayjal Tailor (t.tailor1@wmin.ac.uk) Reference Number: 50000360 Closing Date: Friday 3 September 2010 |
A note about systems biology
Systems biology is about about how whole organs behave, as opposed to single cells or single molecules, It has to be the ultimate aim of biology. There is one case in which this has been done with some success, That is the modelling of the behaviour of the whole heart by Denis Noble and his colleagues in the Phyiology department (now gone) in Oxford. They adopted a bottom up approach. They measured the currents that flow though many sorts of ion channels in single cells from various parts of the heart, and how individual cells communicate with each other. Starting from this solid basis, together with a lot of computer power, they were able to model successfully a lot of phenomena that occur in the whole heart, but can’t be investigated in single cells. For example their work cast light on abnormal heart rhythms like ventricular fibrillation, and on the effect of drugs on heart rhythm.
This work was mostly done before the term ‘systems biology" thought of. It was called physiology. It is impressive work, and systems biology became a fashionable buzzword among research administrators and funding agencies. Despite the amount of money thrown at the problem, I’m not aware of any success that remotely approaches Noble’s.. One reason for that is that people have not been willing to put in the groundwork. In the case of the heart, the models were built on -many years of basic research on the electrophysiology of single heart cells. People have tried to model from the top down, without doing the spade work first. There has developed a perception that computing power can compensate for lack of basic knowledge about things work. It can’t. The usual aphorism applies: garbage in, garbage out.
Here’s an example, which eas noted in the diary pages for 29 June, 2008. While in Edinbuurgh, to give a talk to the European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology, I noticed a poster. It described an attempt to model on a computer the entire metabolic network of yeast.
“81 of the 662 intracellular concentrations were defined . . . The remainder were set to the median concentration of c. 0.2 mM.”
Ahem. We didn’t know the concentrations so we just made them up so we could run the program.
It’s interesting that even people in the business seem to realise that even that it isn’t living up to the hype. The Fixing proteomics web site shows why.
Put another way, if you try to run before you can walk, you risk falling falling on your face.
For these reasons, it seems to me that that most attempts at system biology have been disappointing (please correct me if I’m wrong)
Systems biology for Chinese medicine
If systems biology suffers from trying to run before it can walk in regular biology, where at least something is known about the functions of cells, how much more true that must be of Chinese medicine. In Chinese medicine almost all the treatments have never been tested properly in man. The odds are that most don’t work at all, and some are very poisonous (not to mention the cruelty and destruction of endangered species that is involved in making some of their more bizarre medicines). The idea that you can explain it with systems biology, is ludicrous in the extreme.
One can’t imagine any vaguely competent biologist who’d want to touch a project as bizarre as this with a bargepole.
Eastmedicine
This advertisement stems presumably from EASTmedicine is the University of Westminster’s research centre for East Asian Sciences and Traditions in Medicine. The proclaimed aims are to focus on “understanding, development and evaluation of East Asian medicines as living traditions”. The director of EASTmedicine, Volker Scheid, is a herbalist and acupuncturist and, as such, a firm believer in alternative medicine. When he isn’t at the University he has a private practice, the Traditional Acupuncture Centre, in London.
The website of his private practice makes some astonishing claims
"Acupuncture is effective in the treatment of numerous conditions including headache, migraine, digestive problems, menstrual disorders, indeterminate aches and pains, asthma, hayfever, stress, tiredness, depression and anxiety. Also commonly treated are chronic conditions such as arthritis, back pain, ulcerative colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, eczema, sinusitis, high blood pressure and repetitive strain injuries."
These claims simply cannot be justified by any worthwhile evidence. It will be interesting to see what Trading Standards make of them.
Dr Scheid describes himself as a "scholar physician". Physician seems a rather pretentious description for someone whose qualifications are stated to be PhD, MBAcC, FRCHM. But in similar vein he describes himself thus "I am one of the West’s leading experts on Chinese medical formulas and treatment strategies".
Although Scheid sells acupuncture treatments to patients, he seems ro be more anthropologist than medical. In a discussion of two acupuncture papers
"From the Perspective of the Anthropologist –
Volker Scheid, London, UK
From a perspective anchored in the cultural studies of science, technology and medicine my main interest in these papers is their status as cultural artifacts that provide access to the lifeworlds of a particular research community. If any, life-world debate and argument marks sites of contestation." Forsch Komplementärmed 2007;14:371–375
Scheid shows not the slightest interest in whether acupuncture works other than as a placebo. Since he is selling acupuncture, he presumably starts from the premise that it works.
Volker Scheid has had a £205,000 Wellcome Trust for the History of Medicine Project Grant: 2009 2012; Treating the Liver: Towards a Transnational History of East Asian Medicine; There’s nothing wrong with writing the history of long-outdated systems of medicine, though one could hardly imagine that the history would be very impartial, when it is written by a true believer. Another taste of his style can be found in his paper on Globalising Chinese Medical Understandings of Menopause. There is lots of rather pretentious stuff about culture, but very little about what actually works, Towards the end of the paper we come to the usual feeble excuse.
" . . once traditional medicines allow themselves to be evaluated by biomedical research methods, the odds against receiving fair treatment are heavily stacked against them."
The translation of that into plain English is something like ‘when we test our treatments properly we find they don’t work, so we blame the methods and carry on with selling them anyway’.
Judging from its web site, EASTmedicine does not to do any serious clinical trials to test whether the treaments work in man, They just know that they do. But they are hoping to add some spurious scientific background to their dubious claims by hiring someone to do compuations that will cast no light whatsoever on the question that really matters, Do they work or not?
The agenda is made clear by the statement
EASTmedicine seeks to describe and analyse the dynamics of these transformations with a specific view of managing their integration into contemporary health care.
So it is just yet another group of people pushing to have unproven and disproved treatments accepted by real medicine.
The University of Westminster appears to be determined to make itself the laughing stock by persisting in promoting junk science at a time when most other universities have realise that the harm done to their reputations is not worth the income it generates, Plenty of it has been revealed here.
The vice-chancellor of Westminster, Prof Geoffrey Petts, made into the pages of Private Eye (see Crystal balls. Professor Petts in Private Eye when he announced that he wouldn’t get rid of the junk, but would make it more ‘scientific’. Well, credit where it’s due, They have dropped homeopathy. see The last BSc (Hons) Homeopathy closes! But look at what they still teach at Westminster University For 2010 they still off ten different “BSc (Hons)” degrees in pre-scientific forms of medicine. It will take more than a bit od talk about systems biology to make anyone believe that these courses have anything to do with science.
For example, look at some slides from their lectures on “energy medicine”, Westminster University BSc: “amethysts emit high yin energy”
More make-believe from the University of Westminster. This time it’s Naturopathy , or
Why degrees in Chinese medicine are a danger to patients
The Dean of the School of the Life Sciences, Jane Lewis, is an entirely respectable marine biologist. She has had the thankless task of merging the real science with the alternative medicine in a single school. I phoned her to get a reaction
" outcome of merger of the school and trying to bring various parts of the school together" " "things are much more rigorous than they were".
DC: "Why don’t you just phase it out?"
"I’m not in a poition to do that. i move things forward as seems best -for the whole school I have to say". We’re retaining those bits thatI think have some good standing -I see NICE has approved the use of acupuncture for lower back pain and some other bits and pieces so I see acupuncture as something that does have some standing, andwe make sure it rigorously taught"
"DCHave you looked at the stuff on naturopathy?" "Are amethysts emit high Yin energy still taught?" " i don’t think so".
It seems, as so often in this case, that the senior people don’t really know what’s being taught under their noses. Prof
Lewis says she has not read about the background
to the (unusually) daft advice from NICE. Neither has she read Barker Bausell’s book on acupuncture research. If she had done any of these things,I suspect she would not have such a high opinion of it as appears to be the case.
Bait and switch. Astonishingly there is a now a whole organisation devoted to the respectabalisation of Traditional Chinese Medicine Good Practice in Traditional Chinese Medicine Research in the Post-genomic Era It sounds nice and sciencey but, as usual, they are trying to run before they can walk. The first thing has to be to do good clinical trials to find out if there is anything there to be investigated. If, and only if, this is the case, would there be any case for fancy talk about "proteomics"
and "the post-genomic era".
I do hope that no funding agency would be fooled into parting with money on the basis of the present vacuous rhetoric.
Professor Lewis said that I have I have quoted things like "amethysts emit high Yin energy" out of context. There is a simple solution to that. I have asked Westminster to make available the entire contents of the courses. Then we shall all be able to see the context of what their sudents are being taught.
Follow up
A brief report of this matter has appeared in Times Higher Education. In a statement, the University of Westminster says “its research into Chinese medicine is following the lead of “top research institutions”. I’m not aware of anyhting quite like this from anywhere else. In any case, Westminster should be able to think for themselves.
Having recently been fired from Ofquack, the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC). I found I was missing the constant dribble of double-speak, Then, as luck would have it, a friend emailed me to draw my attention to a lucrative job at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee. On August 11th I put out a tweet, just in case any of my friends were interested.
How to save money. NHS Scorland (Tayside) advertises for homeopathic doctor http://bit.ly/9Ou9Yo Pathetic #fail
After the story appeared in the Daily Express it occurred to me that I should apply. It seems that NHS Scotland
Tayside) is determined to look idiotic in the eyes of the world. They advertised for a homeopathic doctor, The upper level of salary, £68,000 for two sessions a week, is a great deal more than I ever got paid as holder of the established chair of pharmacology at UCL, Then I discovered that a crystallographer, David Briggs (@xtaldave on twitter) had applied for the job. If he can, why not I? I found it hard to match the wit of his supporting statement, but just in case others want to apply, here’s my attempt. The more the merrier.
.
|
As a Fellow of the Royal Society for the last 25 years, and author of a textbook on statistics, I feel sure that I am capable of dealing with the intellectual rigours of handing out placebos to patients. I feel that my academic qualifications, and my authorship of many research papers, including several articles about homeopathy, should more than make up for my lack of formal qualifications in medicine or homeopathy. Indeed I have spent more time than I care to remember on reading the extensive literature on homeopathy. Having some expertise in the statistical analysis of clinical trials, my reading of the literature has equipped me well to impress gullible patients with sciencey sounding words like “succussion”, “energy medicine” and “quantum theory”. As an additional qualification, I have read widely about crystal healing, magnetic bracelets, aura photography and other such fairground paraphernalia which are designed, like homeopathy, to impress those with no knowledge of science or medicine. I have had over two years’ experience of serving on the Conduct and Competence Committee of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council, which has provided me with valuable insights into the world of alternative medicine. Indeed I have been told that my name is well known in Clarence House itself. If appointed to this job, I should like to combine it with research in homeopathy. I would approach this by using systems biology, in the hope that proteomics and metabolomics would be able to explain the still mysterious ability of medicines that contain no medicine to satisfy patients. People whom I know at the University of Westminster have proposed to use systems biology to explain Traditional Chinese Medicine, and I imagine that its application to homeopathy will be every bit as successful as theirs. To have cutting edge research of this sort will, I believe, give NHS Scotland a reputation that will spread around the world. I would also propose to save the Tayside PCT a lot of money, something not to be ignored in these hard times. At present, homeopathic pharmacies stock many thousands of sorts of pill. Recognising that the majority of them contain nothing at all, I’d retain the labels but fill all the bottles with sugar pills. This would save huge amounts of time and money, while having no effect at all on the outcome for patients. Despite my lack of formal qualifications, I hope you will agree that I’m qualified intellectually to meet the rigours of your job. |
Follow-up
I was not the only person to follow the example of David Briggs (@xtaldave). So far I’ve seen Dean Burnett (@garboy) on Science Digestive, Peter Harrison on Reality is My Religion, and Torgwen.
Three days on, there are at least eleven applications, and the three earliest ones have been read something like 12.000 times.
18 August 2010. Astonished to receive by snail-mail a straight-faced acknowledgment of my application from NHS Tayside [download pdf]. They ask me to send four copies of my CV and fill in forms for Equal Opportunities and Fitness to Practise. Does this mean I’ve been short-listed? This gets more surreal by the minute.
|
Yesterday I was fired from the Conduct and Competence Committee of the CNHC. That is the organisation that was very quickly dubbed Ofquack in the blogosphere. So now I am free to write what I like about about it. |
|
It has now become clear that voluntary self-regulation can not work. Recent events at the CNHC show how it has become a victim of its own rules [skip the background].
Background | Complaints | Why CNHC won’t work |
Background
The CNHC was the product of the late unlamented Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Integrated Health. The Prince’s Foundation was paid a large amount of taxpayers’ money, £900,000, by the Department of Health to come up with a scheme for voluntary self-regulation of various sorts of alternative medicine.
There is, as usual, an enormous amount of relevant information can be found on the ebm-first site.
I posted a bit about Ofquack just before I joined them. There were two main points. One was to draw attention to the wonderful account of CNHC by Polly Toynbee, "Quackery and superstition – available soon on the NHS", The other was to point out an obvious problem with the job they were supposed to do.
“What won’t work is to insist that homeopaths are “properly trained”. If one takes the view that medicines that contain no medicine can’t work, then years of being trained to say that they do work, and years spent memorizing the early 19th century mumbo-jumbo of homeopathy, does not protect the public, it imperils them.”
On 25 September 2008, someone sent me an advertisement for a job on the conduct and competence committee. The job description seemed to fit me quite well, so I applied. I presumed they wouldn’t take me, and then I could write a blog about it. But after a phone interview with co-chair Maggy Wallace, I was amazed to be offered the job.
Since joining them I haven’t actually done anything whatsoever, apart from offering a few general ideas, because no cases have actually reached the Conduct and Competence Committee.
This was the first time I had encountered a quango at first hand. Several of the members seemed to have no great interest in medicine, or even in alternative medicine. They were more interested in regulation per se, or at least the sort of pseudo-regulation that most of these bodies mostly seem to offer. They seem to suffer from the well-known delusion that you can manage/regulate something without knowing anything about it. In cases such as this one, where what is being regulated is largely nonsense, there are bound to be problems.
There were two people, whom I did come to like particularly, Maggy Wallace and John Lant. They were both willing to talk and to listen.
The anonymous emails
The alternative medicine community took a surprisingly long time to notice my presence, but on 19 May 2010 a pretty vicious anonymous email arrived at the CNHC, complaining about me. Here it is.
|
Received: from exprod8mo105.postini.com ([64.18.3.61]) by cnhc.org.uk with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.4675); Wed, 19 May 2010 10:45:24 +0100 Received: from exprod8mc102.postini.com (exprod8mc102.postini.com [64.18.3.241]) by exprod8mo105.postini.com (Postfix) with SMTP id D80135A8726 for <info@cnhc.org.uk>; Wed, 19 May 2010 02:45:23 -0700 (PDT) Received: from source ([72.14.220.155]) by exprod8mx290.postini.com ([64.18.7.10]) with SMTP; Tue, 18 May 2010 08:56:11 MDT MIME-Version: 1.0 Return-Path: <colquhounalertcnhc@gmail.com> X-OriginalArrivalTime: 19 May 2010 09:45:25.0002 (UTC) FILETIME=[019176A0:01CAF738]
Thread-Topic: CNHC and Colquhoun
From: “Sara McGlouglan” <colquhounalertcnhc@gmail.com> Colquhoun and the CNHC (Complementary and Natural Health Care Council) What is the CNHC and why does it exist? REFLEXOLOGY IS BOLLOCKS! Nutritional therapy self-styled ‘nutritionists’; making untrue claims about diet in order to sell you unnecessary supplements. Reiki: tea and sympathy, accompanied by arm-waving. Shiatsu uh? It seems the teacher is already committed to placebo medicine. [All the above quotes; and many more stated by David Colquhoun, CNHC Panel member] Contents 1: Colquhoun and CNHC 2: More statements from Colquhoun 3: Want some more!!! 4: What to do 1. Colquhoun and CNHC Colquhoun is a man who has steadfastly attacked, denigrated and taken all steps he can to undermine those involved in natural health. Yet Colquhoun is now (and has been for more than a year) a member of the CNHC’s Conduct and Competence Committee. The role of CNHC is to regulate the professions of their members. But what is the rational behind allowing an avowed critic of natural medicine onto the Conduct and Competence Committee. Isn’t this like asking racist to be objective about the circumstances of racist crime? Would you, as a practitioner having to answer to a complaint, be happy to have one of the panel members think your profession is ‘bollocks’ or that everything you practice is fraudulent from the start? Latest moves from the government now aim at putting all Herbal Practitioners under the authority of CNHC. Do you want your personal and confidential data, and that of your patient/client in the hands of Colquhoun? What might happen to it? Certainly every practitioner has to be responsible for their actions and practice but since when has it been standard practice to weigh the scales against you rather than be assessed by a panel of independent peers? 2. More statements by Colquhoun ‘ nonsense, untrue, unnecessary, rectal obsession, mystic barmpot, fraud, theatrical placebo‘ In his "Patients’ guide to Magic medicine” [https://www.dcscience.net/?page_id=733] Colquhoun summarizes many of the CNHC members’ professional activities (and other professions too) as follows: * Reflexology: plain old foot massage, overlaid with utter nonsense about non-existent connections between your feet and your thyroid gland. * Nutritional therapy: self-styled ‘nutritionists’ making untrue claims about diet in order to sell you unnecessary supplements. * Spiritual healing: tea and sympathy, accompanied by arm-waving. * Reiki: ditto. * Angelic Reiki. The same but with added Angels, Ascended Masters and Galactic Healers. Excellent for advanced fantasists. * Colonic irrigation: a rectal obsession that fails to rid you of toxins which you didn’t have in the first place. * Anthroposophical medicine: followers of the mystic barmpot, Rudolf Steiner, for whom nothing whatsoever seems to strain credulity * Alternative diagnosis: kinesiology, iridology, vega test etc, various forms of fraud, designed to sell you cures that don’t work; for problems you haven’t got. * Homeopathy: giving patients medicines that contain no medicine whatsoever. * Herbal medicine: giving patients an unknown dose of an ill-defined drug, of unknown effectiveness and unknown safety. * Acupuncture: a rather theatrical placebo, with no real therapeutic benefit in most if not all cases. So what kind of organisation is CNHC and why have they put him on to their Conduct and Competence panel? Being a CNHC member seems to be like inflicting pain on yourself. CNHC also received funding from the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health (FIH). Yet Colquhoun regularly lambasts the FIH and Prince Charles himself categorizing him as a ‘champion of endarkenment’ [https://www.dcscience.net/?p=2544] and calling the FIH the Foundation Fellows of the Prince of Wales Foundation for Magic Medicine, an organisation that is at the forefront of spreading medical misinformation. [https://www.dcscience.net/?p=2131] Of course, no one expects that because an organisation provides funding it should be exempt from criticism but surely, if you are working for an organisation whose purpose is to represent standards in a certain field, why would you have someone on your management team who fires out carping criticism at the supporting organisation, its practitioners and its practices unless perhaps, it is your purpose to spread discord and cut the funding. No wonder the CNHC has problems. Their business plan (contingent on funding) was initially to have more than 10,000 enrolled members. This has been revised down to 2,000 and by all counts they have not even made this. Not surprising if the practitioners whom you represent don’t have any trust in the organisation that is supposed to represent the standards of your profession. 3. Want some more!!! fantasists, wrong and dangerous, largely quackery, lies, mumbo-jumbo, made-up fantasies, placebo medicine On nutritional therapy It is interesting to compare the high standards of the Nutrition Society with the quite different standards of BANT (the British Association for Applied Nutrition and Nutritional Therapy).& They bill themselves as the “Professional Body for Nutritional Therapists”. Nutritional therapists are those fantasists who believe you can cure any ill by buying some supplement pills. [https://www.dcscience.net/?p=1391] [On quotes taken from Nutritional Therapy text] That must be about as close as you can get to claiming you can prevent cancer by taking vitamin pills. It is wrong and t is dangerous, Sigh. What century are we living in? [https://www.dcscience.net/?p=555] Everyone is for good nutrition of course, but ‘nutritional medicine’, or ‘nutritional therapy’ pretends to be able to cure all sorts of diseases by changes in diet or by buying expensive nutritional supplement pills. It has no perceptible relationship to the very important subjects of ‘nutrition’ or ‘dietetics’.. ‘Nutritional therapy’ is very firmly part of alternative medicine, in other words it is largely quackery. If you don’t believe that, read on. https://www.dcscience.net/?p=260 On Reflexology As usual, not many seemed to care very much about the secondary consequences of employing a ‘reflexologist’, namely that some poor kid has to memorise a bunch of lies to get the piece of paper demanded by HR (and the taxpayer has to fund it). https://www.dcscience.net/?page_id=237 What is the evidence about ‘spiritual healing’ ? Very little it seems. No doubt, mumbo-jumbo can make some people feel better, and to that extent it is justified. But it can and should done be honestly (for example, foot massage is fine, ‘reflexology’ isn’t). Lies to patients should be minimised and universities should not be tempted to hand out certificates in mumbo jumbo. https://www.dcscience.net/?p=34 Michael McIntyre has the first of several long speeches, advocating more research. There was an advertisement for his web site “promotes best practice” (allegedly). He talks quite seriously about “reflexology” and so on, as though it were real subject (it isn’t; its “principles” are made-up fantasies). https://www.dcscience.net/?p=2813 Much of what they do at the Christie is straightforward massage, but they also promote the nonsensical principles of ‘reflexology’ and acupuncture. https://www.dcscience.net/?p=1466 The hilarious Radio 4 programme, The News Quiz had a good joke. Jeremy Hardy was asked which patients are hoping for a more robust constitution?. This referred to the £1m PR exercise mounted by the NHS to launch the NHS constitution. Hardy said that in the week when Barack Obama was inaugurated, and the word constitution have a whole different sort of gravitas in a week like that. "I think the constitution should open with the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident REFLEXOLOGY IS BOLLOCKS" https://www.dcscience.net/?page_id=237 On Shiatsu Shiatsu uh? It seems the teacher is already committed to placebo medicine. https://www.dcscience.net/?p=454 4. What to do Why join an association that condones the above? Many have never joined CNHC because of this and other issues whilst existing CNHC members do not want to remain members. 1. Contact your professional association and insist that they do not join CNHC. 2. If your association is already a member then make a complaint and insist that your personal details are not supplied to CNHC. 3. There are other associations in existence that have the same purpose as CNHC. Find out about them. You (or your professional association) have the option to join them and 4. Please pass on this information to anyone else that you know. It is important that we are represented honestly and with integrity. The actions of CNHC do not add up. ooOOoo |
Nobody seems to know the real name of Sara Glougan (aka Sam McGlougan. The letter is, I suppose, fair enough. I did say most of those things. What’s objectionable is that the anonymous writer seems to think that my opinions disqualify me from judging dispassionately a Conduct and Competence case. What this letter really says is that "we don’t want anyone who cares about the truth of claims to have any power over us". They just don’t want to be regulated in any effective way. The co-chair, Maggy Wallace, is a bit more sensible than that. The reason that I was appointed by her was because of my knowledge about how to assess evidence. But that isn’t a topic that interests alternative medicine advocates.
The fact of the matter is that the CNHC has been signing up people at a far slower rate than it hoped originally. It is in dire financial trouble (see, for example, Will the government bail out Ofquack?>, and CNHC’s report to the Department of Health in June 2009, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.. The last thing they can afford is anything like this letter, which might reduce the registration rate still further. So it was inevitable that they had to get rid of me. Initially I was invited to resign on grounds of bad health. I didn’t, so on 10 August 2010 I was asked to appear before the board to be fired (in the nicest possible way). The CNHC now has nobody with any statistical expertise. Needless to say I’m not heartbroken about it. It was a waste of time for me, but it did provide a valuable insight into how voluntary self-regulation works, or rather fails to work.
The complaints against reflexologists
The CNHC has a complaints procedure, though its operation is somewhat tortuous.. As soon as they started to register reflexologists, several complaints were sent by the indefatigable Simon Perry (read his account)
“The ad suggests that reflexology is suitable for treating babies with colic, IBS and arthritis. She also claims to have experience in treating fertility issues. There is no reliable evidence to suggest that reflexology is capable of treating [these] issues.”
This complaint never came to to the Conduct and Competence Committee. It didn’t get past the preliminary Investigating Committee (chaired by John Lant), the job of which is to see if there is a case to answer. They decided that the advertisements in question did indeed breach paragraph 15 of the CNHC’s Code of Conduct, Performance and Ethics (see below). All 14 of Simon Perry’s complaints were upheld. However the Investigating Committee Panel’s report went on to say, apparently on the advice of the ‘Profession specific boards’ that
“The ICP found that the registrants’ Fitness to Practise was not impaired, because they did not deliberately seek to mislead their clients or to exaggerate the benefits of the therapy which they described in good faith. However they found that the registrants had made claims about the therapy offered which appeared to imply more efficacy than evidence necessarily provides.”
That, presumably, is why the complaints never reached the Conduct and Competence Committee. There was no case to answer.
One must admire Maggy Wallace’s statement that she “place on formal record their thanks to Simon Perry for bringing this matter to their attention.”. Never the less the problem is glaringly obvious and it shouldn’t have need a complaint.
Why ofquack can never work
The complaint episode is fascinating. The CNHC has clearly painted itself into a corner. It has brought to the fore all the contradictions that are inherent in what they are trying to do.
They have decided that reflexologists make false claims about what they can achieve.
But they decided it wasn’t the fault of the reflexologists because that is what they had been taught
Therefore the CNHC has judged that fitness of reflexologists to practise is not affected by the fact that they make false health claims.
That means that the CNHC judges that the public safety is not affected by whether their members make false health claims. That seems ludicrous enough, but it goes further
In the initial publicity it was often said that the job of the CNHC was safety -their job to protect the public, not to judge whether treatments worked or not. That sort of statement is contradicted directly by paragraph 15 of their Code of Conduct, Performance and Ethics, which reads thus.
15. You must follow CNHC guidelines in relation to advertising your services
Any advertising you undertake in relation to your professional activities must be accurate. Advertisements must not be misleading, false, unfair or exaggerated. You must not claim that your personal skills, equipment or facilities are better than anyone else’s.
If you are involved in advertising or promoting any other product or service, you must make sure that you use your knowledge, healthcare skills, qualifications and experience in an accurate and professionally responsible way. You must not make or support unjustifiable statements relating to particular products or services. Any potential financial rewards to you should be made explicit and play no part at all in your advice or recommendations of products and services that you give to patients, clients and users.
This paragraph places on the CNHC the responsibility for judging whether or not a treatment does what’s claimed for it. With my departure, there is really nobody left who is well-qualified to do that,
but nonetheless, their judgement on claims made by reflexologists was quite right.
The assertion by the CNHC that the false claims were OK because that is what reflexologists are taught is a direct admission that the courses that ‘train’ reflexologists are teaching them to say things that are not true. Of course the rest of the world knew that already, but to have it admitted by the CNHC is amazing.
Part of the job of the CNHC is to judge whether registrants are properly trained. But they have just decided that courses for reflexologists teach them to say things that aren’t true, That leaves the CNHC it an impossible position. By accepting reflexologists, they are saying that it doesn’t really matter that they are taught to make false claims, The criteria for entry include
“Have undertaken a programme of education and training which meets, as a minimum, the National Occupational Standards for that profession/discipline”
This shifts the responsibility for deciding what’s acceptable to National Occupational Standards and Skills for Health. Neither of these quangos is in the least concerned about what’s true and what isn’t. That’s not surprising when you realise who drafted all the HR style nonsense to be found at Skills for Health? None other than the late Prince of Wales’ Foundation. The stuff produced by them isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. There is something about Skills for Health in the post where I recount a phone call with them, When I asked whether they would produce standards for talking to trees, I was referred, in all seriousness, to LANTRA, the Land based skills council. You couldn’t make it up.
The National Occupational Standards (NOS) directory leads to the NOS for reflexology. The preamble says
Reflexology is the study and practice of treating reflex points and areas in the feet and hands that relate to corresponding parts of the body. Using precise hand and finger techniques a reflexologist can improve circulation, induce relaxation and enable homeostasis. These three outcomes can activate the body’s own healing systems to heal and prevent ill health.
There is, if course, not a shred of reason to think that “areas in the feet and hands that relate to corresponding parts of the body”. This statement alone would fail the CNHC’s code of conduct. National Occupational Standards in this area are simply a farce.
What will the CNHC do about these paradoxes? The complaint report said
“The ICP have asked Maggie Dunn, the CNHC Registrar, to initiate, as a matter of priority, discussions with the CNHC’s Profession Specific Boards and the Professional Fora to agree advice to registrants in relation to paragraph 15.”
I was told that this might take between 3 and 5 years to do. But I have a strong feeling that it will never be done in any effective way. If the CNHC prevented training courses from teaching students to make claims that aren’t justified by evidence, just about every course would close and the CNHC would crumble to dust. The result would be the ultimate irony. Alternative medicine would be abolished, not by skeptics, but by the CNHC.
That follows inevitably from the complaint judgement combined with paragraph 15 of the code of conduct.
It will be fascinating to see how the CNHC tries to escape from the grave that it has dug for itself.
If the CNHC implements properly its own code of conduct, few people will sign up and CNHC will die. If it fails to implement its own code of conduct it would be shown to be a dishonest sham.
Follow-up
Interview for Pod Delusion on the CNHC case
Suggested twitter tag: #buckgate
|
Number 19 Buckingham Street, London WC2N 6EF.is to be the home of the proposed "College of Medicine" that has arisen from the ashes of the late unlamented Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health (their last accounts can be seen at Quackometer). Naturally one must ask if the "College of Medicine" will propagate the same sort of barmy ideas as the Prince’s Foundation used to do, A visit to Companies House shows the auguries are not good |
 19 Buckingham Street |
For one thing, the name College of Medicine has existed only since May 2010. The company was registered originally 19th November 2009 as The College of Integrated Health, but after a teleconference on 5th May 2010 it changed its name, presumably to make itself sound more like real medicine. This happened immediately after the closure of the Prince’s Foundation on April 30th.
There is no doubt that the "College of Medicine" is the direct descendent of the Prince of Wales’ Foundation. In a powerpoint show dated 9th November 2009 (before the name change) this slide is to be found.
The author of the slide show is specified as "Linda". That, it is a fair bet, must be Linda Leung, who was Operations Director of the Prince’s Foundation until it closed, and is now Company Secretary for the "College of Medicine".
The final form of the "College" is still being argued about, but guess who will open it?
When ask about how Charles’ relationship with the College, The Office of TRH The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall declined to make any comment, but simply referred me to Michael Dixon, who, in turn referred me to Pat Goodall.
Recently a statement from Clarence House to the Guardian said that "the Prince of Wales was aware of the college, but “has not been involved with setting-up the college, is not launching it and has no official role with it". That’s the official line anyway.
It is, of course, almost impossible to find out exactly what the relationship is between Prince Charles himself and the new "College". He operates largely out of sight, and the Freedom of Information Act, disgracefully, excludes his interference in the democratic process from public scrutiny.
Who is paying?
Flat 5 at 19 Buckingham Street was recently valued at half a million pounds. There is some serious money behind this venture. The rumour is that it’s from a ‘private donor’. Small prize for anyone who finds out who it is.
Aims of the College
The stated object of the College is "to advance health for the public benefit". Sounds good, but what does it mean? It doesn’t take long to find out. It is laid out in the document from Companies House.
To further its objects the Charity may:
7.1 engage with and develop communities of health professionals, health care providers and patients;
7.2 set standards and promote excellence in the fields of health and care;
7.3 lead, represent, train and support stakeholders so that they are better equipped to serve the public in improving the health ofthe public;
7.4 establish an evidence base for integrated health and for individual complementary modalities;
7.5 promote, foster and advance an integrated approach to health and care;
7.6 raise public, professional and political awareness and cultivate a sentiment in favour of an integrated approach to health and care by publishing and distributing books, pamphlets, reports, leaflets, journals, films, tapes and instructional matter on any media;
and so on, for 36 paragraphs. Already in paragraph 4 to 6 we see their interest is to promote “integrated health” and “complementary modalities. These of course are just what most of the rest of the world calls quackery. The objects don’t differ greatly from the Prince’s Foundation from which this outfit sprang.
What will be taught at the College?
Some information about the preliminary plans can be gleaned from a letter that describes the new College (download the letter). The letter says
“The College is developing two groups of courses. The first is aimed at registered professionals such as doctors, nurses and physiotherapists. It will familiarise them with different aspects of CAM and develop skills they can use in their day to day practice – not least techniques they can pass on to patients to help them manage their own conditions.”
In other words, the only course for doctors will be to teach them about quackery. Final judgement on that must await information about who will teach it.
“The second group of courses is aimed at non-registered practitioners and will focus on developing their understanding of conventional medicine, including ‘red flag’ symptoms, familiarisation with conventional therapeutics and increased awareness of critical appraisal.”
The other course, it seems, will be for quacks, to try to teach them enough real medicine to prevent them from killing too many people. The bit about teaching them about “critical appraisal” is hard to believe. If that were really done the clients would mostly be out of business.
If you were in any doubt at all about the aims of the College, it is necessary only to look at the four directors of the Company
Directors of the College of Medicine.
- Dr Michael Dixon, general practitioner. Michael Dixon was Medical Director of the Prince’s Foundation until it closed down.
- Professor George Lewith, is Professor of Health Research in the Complementary Medicine Research Unit, University of Southampton. He was a Foundation Fellow of the Prince’s Foundation until it closed down.
- Professor David Peters. is Professor of Integrated Healthcare and Clinical Director at the University of Westminster’s School of Integrated Health.
He was a Foundation Fellow of the Prince’s Foundation until it closed down. - Mrs Christine Glover is a pharmacist who sells homeopathic pills. She was a Foundation Fellow of the Prince’s Foundation until it closed down.
The company secretary is named as Linda Leung, who was Operations Director of the Prince’s Foundation until it closed.
A request to Michael Dixon for information was deflected to Mrs Pat Goodall She is yet another connection with PFIH. Mrs Goodall acted as a spokesperson for the Prince’s Foundation until it closed down. Now she is scheduled to become Director of Policy and Communications for the "College of Medicine". Mrs Goodall declined to say where the money came from. But she did say that the College was not the "equivalent of a further education college,. . . or higher education college", That being the case, it seems very odd to use the name "College of Medicine". It is a downright misleading name.
These people are all well know advocates of alternative medicine, It is very obvious that the "College of Medicine", despite its misleadingly innocuous name, is simply a reincarnation of the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health.
The term "integrated" is, of course, simply a euphemism for alternative medicine. That means those forms of medicine for which there is little or no evidence that they work. When evidence that something works is found, it is called simply medicine.
It may be useful to give a bit more information about the Directors.
Dr Michael Dixon OBE
Michael Dixon is devoted to just about every form of alternative medicine. As well as being medical director of the Prince’s Foundation he also runs the NHS Alliance. Despite its name, the NHS Alliance is nothing to do with the NHS and acts, among other things, as an advocate of alternative medicine on the NHS, about which it has published a lot.
Dr Dixon is also a GP at College Surgery, Cullompton, Devon, where his “integrated practice” includes dozens of alternative practitioners. They include not only disproven things like homeopathy and acupuncture, but also even more bizarre practitioners in ‘Thought Field Therapy‘ and ‘Frequencies of Brilliance‘.
To take only one of these, ‘Frequencies of Brilliance’ is bizarre beyond belief. One need only quote its founder and chief salesperson.
“Frequencies of Brilliance is a unique energy healing technique that involves the activation of energetic doorways on both the front and back of the body.”
“These doorways are opened through a series of light touches. This activation introduces high-level Frequencies into the emotional and physical bodies. It works within all the cells and with the entire nervous system which activates new areas of the brain.”
“Frequencies of Brilliance is a 4th /5th dimensional work. The process is that of activating doorways by lightly touching the body or working just above the body.”
“Each doorway holds the highest aspect of the human being and is complete in itself. This means that there is a perfect potential to be accessed and activated throughout the doorways in the body.”
Best of all, it can all be done at a distance (that must help sales a lot). One is reminded of the Skills for Health “competence” in distant healing (inserted on a government web site at the behest (you guessed it) of the Prince’s Foundation, as related here)
“The intent of a long distance Frequencies of Brilliance (FOB) session is to enable a practitioner to facilitate a session in one geographical location while the client is in another.
A practitioner of FOB that has successfully completed a Stage 5 Frequency workshop has the ability to create and hold a stable energetic space in order to work with a person that is not physically present in the same room.
The space that is consciously created in the Frequencies of Brilliance work is known as the “Gap”. It is a space of nonlinear time. It contains ”no time and no space” or respectively “all time and all space”. Within this “Gap” a clear transfer of the energies takes place and is transmitted to an individual at a time and location consciously intended. Since this dimensional space is in non-linear time the work can be performed and sent backward or forward in time as well as to any location.
The Frequencies of Brilliance work cuts through the limitations of our physical existence and allows us to experience ourselves in other dimensional spaces. Therefore people living in other geographic locations than a practitioner have an opportunity to receive and experience the work.
The awareness of this dimensional space is spoken about in many indigenous traditions, meditation practices, and in the world of quantum physics. It is referred to by other names such as the void, or vacuum space, etc.”
This is, of course, preposterous gobbledygook. It, and other things in Dr Dixon’s treatment guide, seem to be very curious things to impose on patients in the 21st century.
You can read more about Michael Dixon at Dr Aust’s blog (Dr Michael Dixon is annoyed), and, from the USA, Steven Novella’s analysis in Dr. Michael Dixon – “A Pyromaniac In a Field of (Integrative) Straw Men”
Professor George Lewith,
George Lewith has appeared quite often in this blog. He first came to my attention when I discovered in 2006 that his private clinic was offering a well-known form of fraudulent allergy diagnosis, the Vega test, despite the fact that Lewith himself had written a paper that said it didn’t work.
Lewith is particularly keen on acupuncture and that most discredited form of quackery, homeopathy. On More 4 News, he actually claimed that there was no good sham form of acupuncture. That is simply not true: great ingenuity has gone into devising controls for acupuncture trials and ‘real’ acupuncture always comes out the same as sham.
Professor David Peters
David Peters comes from the University of Westminster, which is famous for offering more degrees than any other in anti-scientific nonsense.
Westminster is home of the quite remarkable teaching that "Amethysts emit high Yin energy". dowsing, aura photography and other such fairground frauds.
Westminster offers also a "BSc degree" in that quite remarkable branch of make-believe known as naturopathy, This teaches students about a totally insane form of psycho-babble called Emo-trance and they are taught (no. seriously) about diagnosis with dowsing and pendulums
Westminster also teaches about kinesiology. Sounds sort of sciencey, but Applied Kinesiology is actually a fraudulent and totally ineffective diagnostic method invented by (you guessed) a chiropractor. It has been widely used by alternative medicine to misdiagnose food allergies. It does not work (Garrow, 1988: download reprint).
Westminster offers “BSc degrees” in Chinese Medicine that are a menace to public health. Their unfortunate students are told "Legally, you cannot claim to cure cancer. This is not a problem because we treat people not diseases". It is hard to imagine anything more irresponsible,
David Peters, as Clinical Director at Westminster must bear responsibility for this load of irresponsible make-believe, I have no doubt that he is well-intentioned but some of the stuff on these courses is a serious danger to public health.
Mrs Christine Glover
Mrs Glover is an Edinburgh pharmacist. She claims
She believes symptoms rarely occur in isolation but are usually linked to a persons circumstancs [sic].
Illness occurs when there are imbalances in any of the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of their life.
Well, yes and no, Would you really go to her if you had cancer, or tuberculosis, or even atrial flutter? Judging by her website, what you’d get is a bottle of her Liquid Iron & Vitamin Formula (for £16.25 !). Or any one of a range of homeopathic pills.
There is no branch of alternative medicine that is more totally discredited than homeopathy. Yet now it i being proposed to form a College of Medicine with four directors who are all part of the dwindling band that insists you can do magic with pills that contain no medicine.
Who else supports the College?
There are some pretty surprising people who are listed in the letter as supporting the College of Medicine, though it remains to be seen how many are left once the true nature of the College is known.
Some of the supporters were already Foundation Fellows of the Prince’s Foundation, despite having no obvious sympathy with quackery. These include Professor Sir Cyril Chantler, Professor Adrian Eddleston and Professor Simon Gibbons. They also include the notorious Karol Sikora, and the geochemist Professor Jane Plant.
Professor Jane Plant is, apparently, a distinguished geochemist, but she developed an obsession with dairy-free diets, after her own experiences with breast cancer. She has written a lot of books and, no doubt, made a lot of money from the desperate. An extracr from one of her books is titled “Why I believe that giving up milk is the key to beating breast cancer”. If you want to see the ‘evidence’ for some of her wild claims, her web site invites to join -at a cost of £30. To get a bit closer to the truth it is only necessary to quote the World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) Report on diet and cancer, ‘Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity, and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective‘. The WCRF is inclined, in my view, to exaggerate the strength of the evidence for a causal link between diet and cancer (see Diet and health. What can you believe: or does bacon kill you?) but nevertheless their assessment of dairy products is very different from Plant’s.
"The strongest evidence, corresponding to judgements of ‘convincing’ and ‘probable’, shows that milk probably protects against colorectal cancer, and that diets high in calcium are a probable cause of prostate cancer."
It seems that Jane Plant’s claims are thoroughly irresponsible.
I’m told that two people who were also Foundation Fellows, and who were originally listed as supporters of the College seem to have already jumped ship, namely Professor Stephen Holgate and Baroness Finlay.
Professor Sir Graeme Catto is to be president, and I’m told, Professor Sir Ian Kennedy has agreed to be vice president.
It is incomprehensible to me why people like this should be willing to lend their names to the Prince’s Foundation in the first place, or to its replacement now..
Other people listed as supporters include Sir Donald Irvine, Professor John Cox, and, on the "scientific advisory committee, Professor Mustafa Djamgoz and Professor Ajit Lalvani.
None of these people has an obvious belief in quackery. sp what are they doing mixed up with a venture like this?
Graeme Catto tells me he “knows very little about CAM”, and Cyril Chantler says the College should deal with evidence-based integrated medicine “but not alternative medicine or homeopathy”. Since, during his time as a Foundation Fellow of the Prince’s Foundation, Cyril Chantler failed totally to shake the advocacy of homeopathy by them, it seems unlikely yhat he’ll be any more successful with the College.
The only member of the "scientific advisory committee" who has answered by invitation to comment on a draft of this post is Professor Mustafa Djamgoz. It seems that he is more gullible that meets the eye He said, for example,
“There are many ‘eastern’ remedies (such as acupuncture that we witnessed dismissed 25 year ago) that work.”
“We ourselves have already shown that natural substances like omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, reseveratrol [sic] etc can produce anti-cancer effects by blocking ion channels.”
Clearly Professor Djamgoz has not been keeping up with research in these areas. Has he never read Barker Bausell’s book on acupuncture, Snake Oil Science.? Apparently not. And there is, of course, not the slightest reason to think that omega-3 or resveratrol help cancer in humans.
It is often said that the reason that eminent people support quackery is that they live in hopes of a peerage. That is, perhaps, a bit uncharitable. I think it more likely that they don’t bother to investigate closely what it is they are signing up to, and that they are fooled by the weasel words of “integrated medicine”.
People like Catto and Chantler seem to think they are supporting caring, human centred, medicine. I fear they have been fooled, They are supporting sheer quackery.
Patient centred medicine
One of the most infuriating characteristics of quacks is their attempt to hi-jack the ‘human side of medicine’. I suppose they have little else to offer, so it’s understandable. But there is nothing human about deceiving desperate patients and the human side of medicine is something that is emphasised in the education of every real doctor.
If you want to know more about it, there is no better exposition than Michael Baum’s Samuel Gee lecture. Baum has been at the forefront of thinking about supportive or spiritual care of cancer patients. His 2009 Samuel Gee lecture is available in video, Concepts of Holism in Orthodox and Alternative Medicine. It is a masterpiece. He ends the lecture thus.
“Alternative versions of “holistic medicine” that offer claims of miracle cures for cancer by impossible dietary regimens, homeopathy or metaphysical manipulation of non-existent energy fields, are cruel and fraudulent acts that deserve to be criminalized.”
A similar distinction has been made with beautiful clarity by Dr James May
“The use of the term ‘integrative medicine’ in your editorial seems to confuse more than clarify the problem of ‘holism’ in medicine. Complementary therapists for example often use the term ‘holistic’ to blur the boundaries between the therapies used and the practitioner’s interpersonal skills. It would be better, however, to keep these distinctions clear. Caring is different from curing.”
“‘Holism’ is not a multifaceted approach to curing, it is a multifaceted approach to caring”
“Effective medicine is best measured with RCTs. Caring is not. ‘Integrative medicine’ therefore risks both damaging how we measure effective medicines (RCTs), as well as reducing caring to measurables. A better term for this might be ‘disintegrative medicine’.Effective medicine is best measured with RCTs. Caring is not. ‘Integrative medicine’ therefore risks both damaging how we measure effective medicines (RCTs), as well as reducing caring to measurables. A better term for this might be ‘disintegrative medicine’.”
I hope that the various eminent people who have lent their name to this mis-named ‘College of Medicine’ will look very carefully at what it actually does. And that will probably mean withdrawing their support.
Follow-up
The Guardian, 2nd August 2010, carried this story, written by their science correspondent, Ian Sample: College of Medicine born from ashes of Prince Charles’s holistic health charity. He quotes Tracey Brown of the Sense about Science charity as saying that the college’s emphasis on merging conventional medicine with unproven complementary therapies “would take society back a century”.
“Despite its mission to promote the integration of alternatives to medicine, this new body has chosen to call itself very grandly the College of Medicine. Perhaps someone thinks this will sound good with Royal in front of it? This wouldn’t be a surprise given the institution’s origins in the Prince of Wales’s efforts to integrate his favoured traditional remedies into medicine.”
Quotation from DC
I’m baffled. Why is it that beautiful, high quality blogs like Orac’s Respectful Insolence, wanted to be on a commercially-run site in the first place?
Scienceblogs is such a site and it recently caused a crisis when it accepted a paid PR piece by Pepsico (without warning its bloggers first). This was not to be with the obvious advertisements in the side bars, but published like any other blog, Scienceblogs is a commercial organisation, owned and operated by the Seed Media group. The response to the crisis by Adam Bly was leaked and can be read here. It is, in my view, not anything like good enough. One of the great beauties of the internet is that it is really quite hard to keep things secret.
ScienceBlogs was offensive enough even before Pepsigeddon. I go there to read Orac, not to be bombarded with adverts for phone companies and the very sort of quackery that Orac so eloquently exposes. Perhaps Americans are more inured to constant mendacious advertising through their TV and radio. Thank heavens for the BBC which makes (some) good programmes and never has advertisements.
Should people be paid to blog?
I have no objection to people being paid for work that they do. I have had occasional payments from newspapers (and the BMJ) for articles that they have commissioned. This makes a nice change. Scientists usually work for nothing but their salary, and that is how it should be. We write up our results in papers, and then, quite often, we pay the journal to publish our work, and then pay again to buy the journal in which it appears. [That, together with the crisis in peer review, is what persuades me that the current publishing system is broken, but that is a different story.].
We travel the world to give talks for nothing (well just occasionally a small honorarium). Not infrequently we don’t even get paid the full cost of travel.
And those of us who blog, mostly do that for free too. This site costs nothing but a few pounds a year for the domain name, and that comes from my own pocket [and a lot more of my time than I could have afforded when I was doing full time science).
I’m not grumbling about any of this. On the contrary, I enjoy the science and I enjoy the blogging. I am (or was) adequately paid. What more can one ask? The great virtue of not being paid is that you are behoven to nobody. The whole point of science, and the whole point of blogging, is to provide an independent opinion, your own opinion, on matters of science.
I’m only grateful that so many people seem to feel that some of the things I say are worth reading. I do it because it is interesting, it is fun, and it might even do a bit of public good.
Any hint that you may be selling a story on behalf of someone else is the kiss of death, both in real science and in blogging. It doesn’t have to be real, just the perception is enough to ruin your credibility.
To expect independent scientific views from Pepsi is whistling in the wind. Everyone knows about the hugely powerful lobbying by the food industry. The ruthlessness of the industry is, one might argue, counter-productive, because even if they were to produce a totally honest assessment of the evidence, nobody would believe it.
Anyone who has been involved in the battle against junk medicine knows that one is always accused of being a shill for Big Pharma. Of course the purveyors of junk medicine are not very good at checking their facts. If they were, they’d be in a more honest job.
Bhopal report blocked by Seed Magazine
The interesting thing about this sort of kerfuffle is that it brings new facts out of the woodwork. In today’s Guardian, Gala Vince wrote ‘This isn’t the first time Seed has sacrificed editorial independence‘ A piece she wrote about one of the major shameful disasters of the 20th century, the Bhopal catastrophe, was not published by Seed, because it might have endangered advertising income from the Dow Chemical Company (they are the nice folk who made Agent Orange and Napalm). There is no doubt about this, because Vince quotes an email from Seed that told her.
“As for Bhopal, it’s a cautionary call on our part as we’re in the midst of advertising negotiations with Dow”
This sort of behaviour is much scarier than taking paid blogs from Pepsico, if only because it was secret at the time. The wonderful thing about blogs is that it isn’t secret now. It shows that, notwithstanding their fine words, Seed is not serious about scientific independence if it endangers their income.
Science and commerce don’t mix
Seed pay their contributors per page view, though I haven’t yet been able to discover how much (will anyone tell me?)
Most of the people who write for Scienceblogs do not rely on what they get paid by Seed for their bread and butter. Many of those I like best are practising physicians and surgeons. No doubt they are far richer than I have ever been. In my view they should leave Scienceblogs right now, before they lose any more credibility. Several already have.
If anyone doubts the corrupting effects of commercial interests in medicine, listen to this year’s Sense about Science lecture by Fiona Godlee (editor of the BMJ). The podcast has appeared on The Guardian’s web site. And if you are interested in the corrupting effects of commercial pressures in the alternative medicine industry there are plenty of sources in the links at the bottom of the right hand sidebar.
Or just read the admirable Orac, lately (I hope) of Scienceblogs.
Follow-up
Interesting. I got a direct message from one blogger on Twitter, in answer to my question about how much Seed pays bloggers.
“Seed pays peanuts: I usually get $100 – $200/ month, depending on # of page views. It goes up in increments of $25 per 10,000 extra visitors”
That’s a bit more than I’d guessed, but hardly a significant contribution to the pay of most people who write for them.
Western herbal medicine need not be mystical nonsense, but it usually it is,
Plants often contain chemicals that have pharmacological actions, with all the possibilities for good and for harm that implies (see Plants
as medicines). It would be quite possible to teach about the plant constituents and their actions in an entirely scientific way, but it seems that this is not what courses in herbal medicine choose to do. That is why they shouldn’t be called Bachelor of Science degrees.
We have recently revealed the ancient nonsense taught at Middlesex University in its "BSc (Hons)" degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine in Dangerous Chinese medicine taught at Middlesex University as well as similar dangerous gobbledygook from the University of Westminster: see Why degrees in Chinese medicine are a danger to patients.
Western Herbal medicine does not talk about "knotted spleen Qi", but has an equally barmy mystical vocabulary of its own. They have in common a tendency to divide herbs into hot and cold, a crude and baseless classification that dates from a time when nothing was known about physiology or the causes of disease.
A recent post described the problems of finding out what exactly is taught on these courses: Not much Freedom of Information at University of Wales, University of Kingston, Robert Gordon University or Napier University
I lodged a Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act with Napier University Edinburgh on 10th August 2009. As almost always, it was refused, as was the internal review of my request. The response to the internal review came from Gerry Webber BA (Hons) 0 PHil MBA MCMI AUA (Fellow). Despite all those impressive sounding letters, he argued with a perfectly straight face that it was perfectly all right for the university to teach this sort of stuff. He ended
“On public interest grounds, I have therefore concluded that, in respect of the commercially sensitive information requested, the public interest is better served in withholding the information you have requested than in disclosing it.”
Despite all those impressive sounding letters after Dr Webber’s name, here was a solemn letter, on the university letterhead, defending the teaching of pseudoscientific nonsense The experience is surreal, but far from unique.
Although we won a judgement that compelled disclosure from the Information Commissioner for England and Wales, the Scottish law is slightly different so I had to appeal to the Scottish Information commissioner. [Download appeal]
A similar appeal was lodged for Robert Gordon’s University Aberdeen. They have already sent some homeopathy materials, and closed down the homeopathy course, as described at: Robert Gordon University stops its homeopathy course. Quackademia is crumbling. Napier University followed the same pattern, but a bit more slowly. They sent some of what I asked for without waiting for a formal judgement, after they had been contacted by the Scottish Information Commissioner.
Napier also shut down the degree from which the slides, below, were used. It is fascinating that so many places have done this shortly before what is taught is made public. Before that time the courses are defended and advertised. no doubt by people who have never given a moment’s thought to what is taught. In 2007, after my Nature article on the topic, the Glasgow Herald said
A spokeswoman for Napier University said it stood by the integrity of its BSc degrees.
“The BSc Herbal Medicine course uses an approach to teaching and training that we believe best prepares students for practice within a modern integrated healthcare system,” she said.
The university’s brochure for the course (still, carelessly, on the web at the time of writing), waxed lyrical about the herbal medicine course. Yet as soon as it becomes known what’s actually taught, the courses close.
What was taught on Napier’s Herbal Medicine “BSc”.
Materia medica starts with hot and cold herbs
Yes, but one of the problems is that very little is known about the therapeutic actions of herbs from "controlled enquiry". The material just isn’t there to fulfil this aim. To paraphrase their quotation,,you can call anything medicine, but plenty of people will argue with you if you can’t produce the evidence.
This slide strikes me as pure pre-scientific gobbledygook. All herbs and all diseases seem to fall into the ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ class. The ‘argument’ is entirely circular. Pure pseudoscience (is that what the lecturer told them in response to the last question?).
What do all these conditions have in common? They are all "cold". How can anyone take this sort of baloney seriously?
This quotation appears to have no comprehensible meaning at all. It carries overtones of the great "detox" fraud, and so perhaps is useful justification for slimming the wallets of the gullible.
Now we come to a real herb.
There is some real chenistry in this slide. Unfortunately it simply isn’t known whether these chemicals have any useful function. Usually it isn’t known either what dose of them you are giving in tincture of valerian. When I worked in a pharmacy in the 1950s, you could still find tincture of valerian on the shelves of a normal pharmacy, but iit soon vanished as paople realised it wasn’t much use. Disappeared from normal medicine, that is. it is still alive and well among herbalists.
Notice too, the mention of "synergy". The perpetual excuse of herbalists for giving impure mixtures of chemicals is that they might act synergistically. They are undeterred by the fact that no such synergy has ever been demonstrated properly. I asked that question ot Liz Williamson. editor of Potter’s herbal Cyclopedia, but answer came there none.
I’d be interested to know what answer was given to the last question, which isn’t as simple as it sounds. I wouldn’t mind betting it didn’t include a critical description of isobol analysis.
So what does Valerian do?
It seems, even from the lecture, that there is no unanimity that it does anything useful at all.
There is no worthwhile evidence to think it is useful for "generalises anxiety disorder" Let’s take another opinion.
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is the branch of the US National Institutes of Health which has spent around a billion dollars of US taxpayers’ money on research into alternative medicine, For all that effort they have failed to come up with a single useful treatment. Clearly they should be shut down. Nevertheless, as an organisation that is enthusiastic about alternative medicine, it’s interesting to see what they have to say about valerian.
What the Science Says
- Research suggests that valerian may be helpful for insomnia, but there is not enough evidence from well-designed studies to confirm this.
- There is not enough scientific evidence to determine whether valerian works for anxiety or for other conditions, such as depression and headaches.
Even NCCAM don’t pretend that there is any good reason to think it’s good for anything. So, you might ask, why are students being taught to treat people with it?
Simon Mills on "hot and cold herbs"
Many of the slides refer to a book by herbalist Simon Mills. You can see a video of a talk he gave in which he ‘explains’ "hot and cold herbs". It strikes me as pure gobbledygook. Make up your own mind.
Now take the test
This is a question from a Napier University exam paper
Which constituents are responsible for the actions of saw palmetto? Which actions would they be? This is what The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) says
about saw palmetto.
What the Science Says
- Several small studies suggest that saw palmetto may be effective for treating BPH symptoms.
- In 2006, a large study of 225 men with moderate-to-severe BPH found no improvement with 320 mg saw palmetto daily for 1 year versus placebo. NCCAM cofunded the study with the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
- There is not enough scientific evidence to support the use of saw palmetto for reducing the size of an enlarged prostate or for any other conditions.
- Saw palmetto does not appear to affect readings of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels. PSA is protein produced by cells in the prostate. The PSA test is used to screen for prostate cancer and to monitor patients who have had prostate cancer.
Magic Medicine
In the materials that I was sent, I see nothing to make me believe that herbalism is being taught as science. On the contrary, it all seems to confirm the definition given in the Patients’ Guide to Magic Medicine.
Herbal medicine BSc degrees still exist.
They are still running at the following universities.
The vice-chancellors are named because they are the people who must take responsibility for this sort of nonsense being taught in their universities.
University of East London (vice-chancellor from Feb 2010 is Patrick McGhee, who, in his previous job at University of Central Lancashire, did so much to prevent me from getting hold of their teaching materials, but then closed the courses anyway)
University of Lincoln (Vice chancellor, Professor Mary Stuart)
London Metropolitan University (vice-chancellor, (interim vice chancellor, Alfred Morris)
Middlesex University (vice-chancellor, Professor Michael Driscoll)
And, of course, the home of woo, the University of Westminster (vice-chancellor, Professor Geoffrey Petts). Their students are taught that Amethysts emit high Yin energy and that dowsing and pendulums can be used for diagnosis and treatment.
By the same token, we may congratulate Professor Dame Joan Stringer, vice-chancellor of Napier University Edinburgh for closing down the course from which these slides came. Perhaps now she should consider closing their ‘degrees’ in aromatherapy and ‘reflexology’
Follow-up
Once again some members of the Israeli defence force have shown behaviour worthy of an Auschwitz guard. Once again the old conflicts in my own mind are stirred up. It is a bit like the second great march against the Iraq war. Time has proved how right the marchers were, but we found ourselves walking alongside Islamic fundamentalists with whom we felt very little in common. All it proves is the undesirable behaviour that results from religion – any religion. Whether it is islam, judaism or christianity, the outcome is mayhem and murder. There is no human so irrational and dangerous as those who believe they have god on their side.
It also shows, in my view, tha major mistake that was made after the second world war when the west tried to purge its collective remorse for the holocaust, but chose to do so at the expense of Palestinians. It was downright stupid to think that it was possible to put the clock back so far.
|
Two good sources for today’s news. And the eyewitness account by Swedish crime writer Henning Mankel who was on one of the original flotilla boats: ‘I You can follow the progress of MV Rachel Corrie as she approaches Gaza at the WitnessGaza site |
 |
The name of Rachel Corrie is imprinted on my mind. It was the news that this 23-year old American college student had been callously crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer (made in the USA). That was the incentive to start my politics blog. I stopped maintaining that when Blair left office, but may occasionally get political here.
Read about Corrie on her family’s memorial web site. It is excruciatingly sad.
In her memory, here is a reproduction of my first political post, from 2003.
A Great American.
|
On Sunday, 16th March 2003, a 23-year-old American peace activist, Rachel Corrie, was crushed to death by a bulldozer as she tried to prevent the Israeli army destroying homes in the Gaza Strip You can read here some of the emails that she sent home before she died. And a reaction from Naomi Klein in the Globe and Mail (Toronto). ” Katharine Viner has edited her writings for a new play, on an ordinary woman with an extraordinary passion”. [Guardian] |
 |
John Sutherland documents some of the terrifyingly violent reactions of ‘patriotic’ Americans. [Guardian]
One ‘patriot’ wrote
“Anyone who would burn an American flag deserves to be bulldozed to death!!! Hopefully the US government will aim some bulldozers at the next group of war protesters, those anti-American motherfuckers.”
And now another: Tom Hurndall
A British peace activist shot in the head while observing the Israeli army in Gaza, in April 2003, has died in hospital.
Tom Hurndall, 22, was overcome by pneumonia at the Royal Hospital for Neurodisability, in south-west London.
Click here for the sad details.
The Thomas Hurndall Fund has the latest news.
Watch videos of the murder and of an interview with his mother.
A conviction at last!
Latest: after an indefatigable campaign by his parents to discover the truth, on 27 June 2005, a former Israeli soldier has been found guilty of the manslaughter of Tom Hurndall.
Ex-sergeant Taysir Hayb was convicted at a military court in Ashkelon for the shooting of Mr Hurndall in April 2003. Hayb will be sentenced at a later date.
In addition to the manslaughter verdict, Hayb was found guilty of obstruction of justice, incitement to false testimony, false testimony and improper conduct.
[Hurndall’s father said] “We’re concerned that there is a policy which seems to be prevalent in Gaza, amongst the Israeli soldiers and army, that they feel able to shoot civilians really without any accountability whatsoever.”
Civil liberties group Human Rights Watch last week accused Israel of investigating less than 5% of hundreds of cases of Palestinians killed since 2000.
On 11 August 2005 the BBC reported that Hayb was convicted to 8 years in jail, 7 years for manslaughter and 1 year for the other charges. Amnesty International’s Kate Allen said that while the person responsible for Mr Hurndall’s death had been brought to justice, it was
“striking that this was almost entirely due to tireless campaigning by his family”.
“The strong suspicion is that if Mr Hurndall’s family had not shown utter determination to uncover the truth of their son’s death, then no-one would ever have faced justice for what happened to Tom,”
I was asked recently to write a reply to an article about "research managers" for the magazine Research Fortnight. This is a magazine that carries news of research and has a very useful list of potential research funding agencies.
The article to which I was asked to respond originally had the title “Researchers and Research Managers, a match made in heaven?“, before the subeditors got hold of it. It was written by Simon Kerridge, who is secretary of the Association for Research Managers and Administrators The printed version of his article can be downloaded here, and the printed version of my response here. My response, as submitted, is below with live links.
This invitation came at a strangely appropriate time, just at the moment that every university is having serious budget cuts, Well, here is a chance to make a good start on cutting out non-jobs..
Researchers and Research Managers: an imminent divorce?
David Colquhoun, UCL.
|
The web site of the Association of Research Managers and Administrators says it has 1600 individual members [1], but every scientist I have met is baffled about why they have suddenly sprung into existence. The web site says “Our mission is to facilitate excellence in research by identifying and establishing best practice in research management and administration”. I had to read that several times in an attempt to extract a meaning from the mangled bureaucratic prose. “Our mission is to promote excellence in research”. How can non-scientists with no experience of research possibly “promote excellence in research”? They can’t, and that’s pretty obvious when you read the second half of the sentence. They propose to improve science by promoting research management, i.e. themselves. |
|
Kerridge’s article didn’t help much either. He seems to think that research managers are there to make that scientists fulfil “overall strategic aims of the University”. In other words they are there to make sure that scientists obey the orders of non-scientists (or elderly ex-scientists) who claim to know what the future holds. I can think of no better way to ruin the scientific reputation of a university and to stifle creativity.
We all appreciate good support. We used to have a very helpful person in the department (not a ‘manager’) who could advise on some of the financial intricacies, but now it is run by a ‘manager’ it has been centralised, depersonalised and it is far less efficient.
The fact of the matter seems to be that “research managers” are just one more layer of hangers-on that have been inflicted on the academic enterprise during the time new labour was in power. They are certainly not alone. We have now have “research facilitators” and offshoots of HR running nonsense courses in things like Brain Gym [2]. All of these people claim they are there to support research. They do no such thing. They merely generate more paper work and more distraction from the job in hand. Take a simple example. At a time when there was a redundancy committee in existence to decide which academics should be fired in my own faculty, the HR department advertised two jobs (on near professorial salaries) for people trained in neurolinguistic programming (that is a well-known sort of pseudo-scientific psychobabble, but it’s big business [3]).
A quick look at what research managers actually do (in two research-intensive universities) shows that mostly they send emails that list funding agencies, and to forward emails you already had from someone else. Almost all of it can be found more conveniently by a couple of minutes with Google. Although they claim to reduce administrative work for scientists, it is usually quicker to do it yourself than to try to explain things to people who don’t understand the science. They don’t save work, they make it.
One might well ask how it is that so much money has come to be spent on pseudo-jobs like “research managers”. I can only guess that it is part of the ever-expanding tide of administrative junk that encumbers the work of people who are trying to do good creative science. It also arises from the misapprehension, widespread among vice-chancellors, that you can get creative science by top down management of research by people who know little about it.
I’m reminded of the words of the “unrepentant capitalist”, Luke Johnson [4] (he was talking about HR but the words apply equally here).
“HR is like many parts of modern businesses: a simple expense, and a burden on the backs of the productive workers”,
“They don’t sell or produce: they consume. They are the amorphous support services”.
“I have radically downsized HR in several companies I have run, and business has gone all the better for it.”
The dangers are illustrated by the report [5] of a paper by the professor of higher education management at Royal Holloway (yes, we already have a chair in this non-subject). It seems that “Research "can no longer be left to the whims and fortunes of individual academics" “. It must be left to people who don’t do research or understand it. It’s hard to imagine any greater corruption of the academic enterprise.
Oddly enough, the dire financial situation brought about by incompetent and greedy bankers provides an opportunity for universities to shed the myriad hangers-on that have accreted round the business of research. Savings will have to be made, and it’s obvious that they shouldn’t start with the people who do the teaching and research on which the reputation of the university depends. With luck, it may not be too late to choke off the this new phenomenon before it chokes us. If you want research, spend money on people who do it, not those who talk about it.
[1] Association of Research Managers and Administrators http://www.arma.ac.uk/about/
[2] When HR gets hold of academe, quackery and gobbledegook run riot. Times Higher Education 10 April 2008, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=401385 and expanded version at https://www.dcscience.net/?p=226
[3] What universities can do without. http://ucllifesciences.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/what-universities-can-do-without/
[4] Luke Johnson The Truth About the HR Department, Financial Times, Jnauary 30 2008 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9e10714c-ced7-11dc-877a-000077b07658.html and https://www.dcscience.net/?p=226
[5] Managers must be qualified to herd the academic cats. Times Higher Education 20 May 2010 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=411643