[BPSDB]I cannot be the only person infuriated by the decision of Mike Adams, the self-styled ‘Health Ranger’, to exploit the tragic killing of an eight year old boy to push his agenda. I hope you don’t mind me adding to the criticism but I need to, well, let off steam about it. He begins:- I’ve always said that Big Pharma executives were guilty of crimes against humanity. Now one of their wealthiest and most successful executives has been caught trying to pull off a murder-suicide in an upscale NY hotel. Gigi Jordan, who ran pharmaceutical companies selling pills to ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB]You can always rely on the self-appointed ‘Health Ranger’ for an understated opinion on conventional medicine. In his latest newsletter he says:- Looking for a way to fry your brain and cause memory problems and impaired cognitive function? Just submit to radiation therapy (and kiss your brain good-bye…) Kind of implies that all radiation therapy will destroy your brain does it not? Reality turns out to be a bit different. He links to this article by NaturalNews staff writer David Guttierrez. The first thing that struck me on reading it was that it does not quite ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] Sceptics stage homeopathy ‘overdose’: ‘The society [of Homeopaths]' chief executive, Paula Ross, said: “This is an ill advised publicity stunt in very poor taste, which does nothing to advance the scientific debate about how homeopathy actually works.”’ It. Doesn't. Work. There's no ‘scientific debate’ to be had about how something works if it doesn't work and it the quality of your science is represented by nonsense like this.
Read more [SHPalman's Blog] 

[BPSDB]Mike Adams, the self-appointed ‘Health Ranger’ seems to be getting a tad defensive about his anti-sceptic diatribe For example, he now says:- Getting back to the skeptics themselves, some of them took my article way too personally, attributing every single statement to themselves. Well of course every single belief in that article isn’t followed by every single “skeptic” person. It is hardly surprising that sceptics “attribute every single statement to themselves” since every statement began either “skeptics believe” or ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

Just a note to say that I've got a bit on The Pod Delusion this week (see above or download from here) blethering about homeopathic labelling and registration. (I know, pretty raunchy, huh?)Please don't leave any comments about my voice making me sound like a dick - that is already an established fact.The last two words on my bit were in response to Skeptic's With A K podcast - episode in question here. Please add SWAK podcast to your list of weekly podcast downloads here.BPSDB
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

[BPSDB]Mike Adams, the self-styled ‘Health Ranger’, has decided to debunk scepticism here. He claims that the views he describes have been pulled from sceptic websites but he gives no links. He claims that this is because he does not wish to boost sceptics’ google rankings but there is a way round this; he could replace the t’s in http with x’s. Readers could then copy and paste the url into their address bar and change the x’s back to t’s. This would allow them to look at his evidence without links boosting the rankings. The fact that he does not ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] BIS and Science: So What? So Everything promote bad research in the name of science communication: insisting that this bad research is "rigorous and credible".
Read more [Holford Watch] 

You may have already come across the 10:23 campaign, a project that aims to raise awareness about the reality of homeopathy coordinated by the Merseyside Skeptics Society.At 10:23am on January 30th 2010, more than three hundred homeopathy skeptics nationwide will be taking part in a mass homeopathic 'overdose' in protest at Boots' continued endorsement and sale of homeopathic remedies, and to raise public awareness about the fact that homeopathic remedies have nothing in them. The campaign has been picked up by a number of media outlets - The Independent here and here, The Telegraph, The ...
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

[BPSDB] BBC Radio Oxford broadcast an infomercial for Patrick Holford's books and his commercial diet programme. They did not invite any experts to discuss his diet or claims, question whether the 'free diet trial' involved purchasing supplements or blood tests, nor ask for detail of the 'science' that he claims supports his advice.
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB]I have received a reply to my Freedom of Information request to the University of Westminster for “research papers or other documents” that support claims made by their School of Life Sciences for the qigong tuina course they offer. You can read the reply here. As I have mentioned previously I was somewhat surprised that a university biology department was making claims about the usefulness of qi in the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions so I made the following request: I would like to see copies of the research papers or other documents that support the ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] Having completed a second full year of blogging, I thought I’d do as I did in 2008 and post an overview of the year. It’s a bit late as I’ve just returned from South Africa and most of the time was a fair distance from an internet connection. Enough excuses. Talking of Africa leads neatly to the beginning of the year when I (along with many other bloggers, particularly Gimpy) covered the activities of Jeremy Sherr in Tanzania. Sherr not only claimed that homeopathy can cure AIDS but also talked of conducting human trials in Tanzania. This would be in breach of the ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] Uncritical and rather tedious Times article on Holford, superfoods, etc.
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] Apparently the company ‘An Oasis of Healing‘ has written to the excellent My Malignant Melanoma blog – asking that a blog about Thomas Lodi is removed and saying they will be “forced to take legal action” if the post is not removed. It therefore seems like a good time to look at some of [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] It has been nice to see a lot ofgood coverage of the recent Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upholding of my complaint against Dore. One more forum to add to the list is Paul Flynn MP’s excellent blog: Flynn discusses how Dore “has been resurrected” and reminds readers of last year’s Early Day Motion about Dore. [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] In the holiday season, people often worry about weight gain. I’m not sure that things quite add up with Holford’s blog’s contribution to the discussion, though. A contributor has blogged that Research has shown that women in particular tend to put on 7 pounds a year. This steady weight gain is often linked to [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] After Wednesday’s ASA ruling, it’s great to see Dore starting to get some critical publicity. The Sun’s Jane Symons reports that Professor Maggie Snowling, a literacy expert based at York University, has analysed the trial most often used by promoters of the programme. She said: “There were no significant improvements on the key tasks of [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] I was delighted to see that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld a complaint of mine about Dore’s advertising. I complained about an advert referring to “help with Dyslexia, ADHD, Dyspraxia or Asperger’s”. The ASA has reviewed the evidence Dore submitted to support their claims, and found that: the evidence was inadequate to [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

You can help beat Trafigura’s gag on the BBC by embedding this Youtube video on your website……and linking to this pdf! See here (full blogpost) as to why.(H/T to Carmen Gets Around and Don't Get Fooled Again.)BPSDB
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

Whilst browsing Wikipedia, I came across a poignant early example of publication bias, the failure to make public scientific results that don't support a given hypothesis.The Judenzählung was a census of the German military carried out in 1916, at the height of the First World War. It was designed to measure the number of Jewish soldiers in the army.The background to this was the feeling, very powerful in Germany at that time, that the Jewish German minority were "unpatriotic" or "traitorous", and were dodging military service or avoiding front line combat.The survey was completed, but the ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

Breaking news from the BBC -Testosterone link to aggression 'all in the mind' Work in Nature magazine suggests the mind can win over hormones... Testosterone induces anti-social behaviour in humans, but only because of our own prejudices about its effect rather than its biological activity, suggest the authors. The researchers, led by Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, said the results suggested a case of "mind over matter" with the brain overriding body chemistry. "Whereas other animals may be predominantly under the influence of biological factors such as ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

Sinking and Swimming is a paper just out from the Young Foundation, a British think-tank. It "explores how psychological and material needs are being met and unmet in Britain." I'm not sure how useful their broad concept of "unmet needs" is, but there's some rather interesting data in this report.On page 238, and prominently in the executive summary, we find the following terrifying graph, which comes with warnings like "anxiety and depression looks set to double during the course of a single generation..." The % of the population self-reporting suffering from depression or anxiety seems ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

In yesterday's Guardian, Nick Davies, author of seemingly every British blogger's favourite book, Flat Earth News, delivered a pair of remarkable articles that confirmed him as one of the country's most important journalists.In the first, Davies reported that a recent nationwide police initiative, Operation Pentameter, did not convict anyone of the crime of forcing women into prostitution after illegally trafficking them into the country.This is rather surprising because, as he explains in a companion comment piece, forced sex trafficking has been widely reported as rife in Britain. The ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

[BPSDB] Relying on bad science to justify educational choices is a truly sorry situation. Providing state funding to support this is even worse.
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] My requests for the scientific basis for the claims made for the University of Westminster’s qigong tuina course have so far remained unanswered. What a surprise. Not. On 23rd November I emailed the course leader as described here. A week later, I had received no reply, not even an acknowledgement so I emailed the Dean of the School of Life Sciences, Professor Jane Lewis, with the same request. I hoped that a proper scientist as opposed to a CAM therapist would understand the nature of evidence and the need for the scrutiny of scientific claims. In this I have so far been ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] In many comments on the CRU hack I’ve seen it alleged that Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit denied his data to another researcher with the words, “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” Whenever [...]
Read more [Evening Person] 

[BPSDB] Years ago, when I was a researcher, I used a technique called ‘infrared spectroscopy’ a lot.  It involves passing infrared radiation through a sample of a substance, then splitting the infrared radiation up into its various frequencies (a spectrum) and measuring which frequencies are absorbed by the substance. Most substances (though not all) absorb [...]
Read more [Evening Person] 

[BPSDB] 32,500,000 hits for ‘climategate’ on Google today, and I’m beginning to feel as if I’ve seen most of them. Lots of repetition there, but what I have yet to see is any actual evidence of climate data being suppressed or distorted to falsify conclusions. Only tendentious interpretations of selected quotes from emails that were [...]
Read more [Evening Person] 

10:23pm on a Friday night - this is my rock and roll life. Due to moving house, I've had a month off blogging. Luckily nothing in the areas that I tend to blog about has happened in the last month. Oh, apart from the UK Parliament having an evidence check session on homeopathy which is brilliantly on YouTube, so you can watch some governmental weaselling and squirming at your convenience. Lots of good blogs have been covering this such as Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, Lay Science and The Quackometer. All this, and I missed it.....The upshot of the session was a glut of anti-homeopathy ...
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

It's every man's dream - a pill to make women want more sex. According to Boehringer Pharmaceuticals, that dream could be a reality in a few years, in the form of the strangely-named flibanserin. But is it the latest wonder-drug or just a glorified sleeping pill? Read on.Flibanserin was originally developed as an antidepressant, but in clinical trials against depression it reportedly failed to perform better than placebo. The standard for getting approved as an antidepressant is low, so this is quite an achievement.The BBC today described flibanserin as the "Female Viagra", which is rather ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

[BPSDB] Concerns about Science So What website: poor accessibility, some poor quality content, and poor use of social media.
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] BANT have not even acknowledged my complaint e-mail
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB]It would appear that the University of Westminster have learned nothing from the intellectual mauling they received from Professor David Colquhoun over their homeopathy degree. I happenned to be looking at their website today when I noticed that they are offering an undergraduate diploma in qigong tuina. I had never heard of this so clicked the link to have a closer look. Oh dear. Lots of stuff about qi energy, including claims that the understanding of this nebulous concept will improve diagnosis and treatment. However, a contact email address for Rosey Grandage, the diploma ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

[BPSDB] ‘Alternative’ nutritionism marketed by British media nutritionists would not be a helpful import to South Africa
Read more [Holford Watch] 

We all know about movies that are so bad, they're good. But could the same thing apply to doctors?As I described last week, Desiree Jennings is a young woman from Virginia who developed horrible symptoms, including muscle spasms and convulsions, after getting a flu vaccine. It looked a bit like a form of brain damage called dystonia.Numerous neurologists concluded that her illness was mostly or entirely psychogenic. A certain Dr Rashid Buttar, however, said that she was suffering from neurological damage caused by toxins in the flu vaccine.Buttar gave her chelation therapy to flush the ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

You may already have heard about Desiree Jennings.If not, here's a summary, although for the full story you should consult Steven Novella or Orac, whose expert analyses of the case are second to none. Desiree Jennings is a 25 year old woman from Ashburn, Virginia who developed horrible symptoms following a seasonal flu vaccination in August. As she puts it:In a matter of a few short weeks I lost the ability to walk, talk normally, and focus on more than one stimuli at a time. Whenever I eat I know, without fail, that my body will soon go into uncontrollable convulsions coupled with periods ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

Coffee contains caffeine, and as everyone knows, caffeine is a stimulant. We all know how a good cup of coffee wakes you up, makes you more alert, and helps you concentrate - thanks to caffeine.Or does it? Are the benefits of coffee really due to the caffeine, or are there placebo effects at work? Numerous experiments have tried to answer this question, but a paper published today goes into more detail than most. (It caught my eye just as I was taking my first sip this morning, so I had to blog about it.)The authors took 60 coffee-loving volunteers and gave them either placebo ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

[BPSDB] Inadequate BBC response to complaint about Quinnell plugging Dore for dyslexia on Radio 5 Live
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB] Trustees of Life's 4 Living "came to a decision to cease all fund-raising activities and close the charity".
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB]Waterloo Road, the eponymous school in BBC 1’s drama/soap opera, with its disaster-prone staff and unruly students, seems to have managed until now without a science department. This changed with the Wednesday 11 November episode, which featured helpings of bad science and bad education. Plot summary. A student nicks some laboratory alcohol and uses it to spike bottles of soft drinks, then sells the resultant cocktail to his fellow students. One drinks rather a lot of it and is hospitalised. This is not the bad science as it is pretty much what you’d expect. The bad ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

It's always nice when a local boy makes good in the big wide world. Many British neuroscientists and psychiatrists have been feeling rather proud this week following the enormous amount of attention given to Professor David Nutt, formerly the British government's chief adviser on illegal drugs.Formerly being the key word. Nutt was sacked (...write your own "nutsack" pun if you must) last Friday, prompting a remarkable amount of condemnation. Critics included the rest of his former organisation, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), and the Government's Science Minister. The ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

[BPSDB] BBC Radio 5 Live had Scott Quinnell on the 6/11/09 breakfast show*, for Dyslexia Awareness Week. Unfortunately, his conversation on the breakfast show gave him an opportunity to plug Dore unchallenged. We have a number of concerns about this radio segment: Quinnell is allowed to state that by “stimulating…three senses” Dore “allows the neural [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB]Much to my surprise, Mike Adams the so-called ‘Health Ranger’ has almost managed to say something sensible when he condemns a dodgy nutritional claim by Kelloggs. The claim made is that Cocoa Krispies (TM) “enhance immunity” because they have been fortified with vitamins. Now I would be the first to agree that adding vitamins to the average sugary breakfast cereal is the nutritional equivilent of polishing a turd but I would also point out that no evidence is offered that vitamin supplementation enhances the immune system and indeed that an over-enhanced ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

In the UK there has been a drive to add medical herbalists to the growing list of health practitioners subject to statutory regulation (SR).  In fact this is government legislation we’re talking about, so the drive has been going on for over ten years. The stated motivation is, as usual, to ensure public safety. However, many herbalists are fuming over the recent proposals. They claim that this regulation will take herbal medicine away from ordinary people whilst doing nothing to improve safety. They’ve even organised a rally in London and an online petition. I’m in two ...
Read more [Bridging Schisms] 

[BPSDB]This programme was a rerun of Jane Elliot’s famous experiment that demonstrated that “superiority” and “inferiority” of different groups is a social construct. In brief: forty years ago, Elliot divided her class of (entirely white) schoolchildren into two groups based on eyecolour and then told them that blue-eyed children were inferior in every way to brown-eyed children. The children went along with this: the brown-eyed began looking down on the blue-eyed and, more significantly, the blue-eyed began doing less well in their schoolwork. Elliot did not ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

Last month Wired, announced that Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.The article's a good read, and the basic story is true, at least in the case of psychiatric drugs. In clinical trials, people taking placebos do seem to get better more often now than in the past (paper). This is a big problem for Big Pharma, because it means that experimental new drugs often fail to perform better than placebo, i.e. they don't work. Wired have just noticed this, but it's been being discussed in the academic literature for several years.Why is this? No-one knows. ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

I have recently returned from an excellent holiday in sunny Spain.  Predictably, my first Monday back at work was a bit of a trial.  It was a training day to support the implementation of a new performance management system.  Not the most enjoyable part of my working life, but fair enough. However, after an excellent introduction from our CEO, the trial began in earnest when the following two words were projected onto a screen at the front of the auditorium: “BRAIN GYM” Before moving into the course proper, our brains apparently needed some fine-tuning from a well-known piece of quackery* ...
Read more [A canna’ change the laws of physics] 

Back in July, Boots had been promoting Nelson's Sulphur 30c homeopathic remedies, alongside a pdf to download to help you choose which homeopathic product you thought you needed, complete with therapeutic indications. (I hate it when I forget to cache a website that's being complained about. Never mind...)After a complaint from this site, the MHRA contacted Boots and instructed them to change their website, using only the phrase Nelsons Sulphur 30c Pillules is a homeopathic medicinal product without approved therapeutic indications according to the current legislation. Boots have since ...
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

[BPSDB] So it seems that Lionel R. Milgrom's legal knowledge rivals his physics for ignorance, delusion, and disregard of reality: Lionel R. Milgrom Lionel R. Milgrom All the while, speaking with a voice of (worthless) authority.
Read more [SHPalman's Blog] 

[BPSDB] Advice is offered without full patient histories, and some advice around current symptoms and product use is worrying
Read more [Holford Watch] 

[BPSDB]  I get the sneaking suspicion that this may be it for the much laughed-at Destination Truth series.  We were thinking that the show was done last season, especially after the long break between seasons, but when it mysteriously appeared out of the blue, it soon became painfully obvious that all is not well in the Destination Truth labs. For one, barely an episode goes by without a guest shot by the Ghost Hunters guys.  It really seems like they’re trying to bolster their ratings by dragging in guys from a popular show.  Also, it’s become more commonplace for the ...
Read more [BitchSpot] 

[BPSDB]I previously wrote here on the Times OnLine’s slightly inaccurate description of the effect of ‘Health & Safety’ on school science practicals and illustrated my point with examples of supposedly banned experiments still performed at my school. One commenter pointed out that this was really just anecdotal evidence and countered with an anecdote of her own to the effect that practical work had decreased at the school attended by her daughters. This is a very fair point. While it is a fact that a short discussion with a CLEAPSS or Health and Safety Executive ...
Read more [Letting Off Steam] 

This is the new Traditional Herbal Registration certification mark. Well, it is apart from the 'Warning', which is what I think it is lacking.According to the MHRA, this indicates that the herbal medicine has been registered with the MHRA under the Traditional Herbal Registration (THR) scheme and meets the required standards relating to its quality, safety, evidence of traditional use and other criteria as set out under the Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directive (THMPD) 2004/24/EC. There have been 92 applications since the scheme began in March 06.The most important line is this ...
Read more [Thinking is Dangerous] 

Freudian psychoanalysis is the key to treating depression, especially the post-natal kind (depression after childbirth). That's according to a Guardian article by popular British psychologist and author Oliver James. He says that recent research has proven Freud right about the mind, and that psychoanalysis works better than other treatments, like cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT).Neuroskeptic readers have encountered James before. He's the person who thinks that Britain is the most mentally-ill country in Europe. I disagree, but that's at least a debatable point. This time around, ...
Read more [Neuroskeptic] 

[BPSDB] Here at Holford Watch, we would like to congratulate Patrick Holford in being selected as one of only two Health experts in the prestigious Guest Getters directory. We were interested to note that Guest Getters have a standard charge of £79.99 for ‘experts’ to register*. We are sure, nonetheless, that Guest Getters impose [...]
Read more [Holford Watch] 

I’d like to make something clear. I don’t think that religious believers or superstitious people are stupid. Far from it. In fact, contrary to what believers may feel, most atheists don’t think that religious people are stupid. They just think that they’re wrong about one particular thing. Part of the reason this blog exists is my curiosity with the fact that intelligent people sometimes believe weird things. Intelligence doesn’t seem to be any guarantee that a person will be free of irrational beliefs. I’ve debated with people who believe a variety of ...
Read more [Bridging Schisms] 

[BPSDB] Food for the Brain "MSc Research Project into a Nutritional Approach for the Treatment of Schizophrenia" is close to beginning. I have concerns.
Read more [Holford Watch] 

In the third part of my series examining an attempted refutation of the critics of homeopathy (Milgrom, 2009) I look at the claim that homeopathy has a serious scientific foundation. Dilute Science This part of the essay starts by outlining a common criticism levelled at the most common form of homeopathy practised in the US and UK.  This calls homeopathy unscientific because: “[…] in many homeopathic remedies, the original substance has been diluted out of molecular existence, detractors claim belief in homeopathy has no basis in science as ‘nothing cannot do ...
Read more [A canna’ change the laws of physics] 

[BPSDB]There’s only one word that describes July 17th feedback article from Ham’s idiot site– FAIL! The most dumbest explanation to why humans and dinosaurs are never found together in the fossil record is a total failure right from the start and Bodie Hodge knows it. He knows that what he believes about dinosaurs and humans living together thousands of years ago is completely false. But that’s not stopping him from making a fool of himself, explaining away why are there no humans and dinosaurs found together in the fossil record. To start the idiocy off, Hodge begins his explanation by ...
Read more [Stupid Dinosaur Lies] 

PTET finds a video riff on the theme of Expelled (2008), made with images from Tom Weller’s classic Science Made Stupid (1985). Let this be your BPSDB for today.
Read more [Science After Sunclipse] 

A fellow named Terry Witt has been advertising his self-published book, Our Undiscovered Universe, in places like Discover magazine and Scientific American. Unfortunately, the ad pages aren’t exactly peer-reviewed, or even cross-checked with a nearby grad student; being businesses, magazines naturally care about revenue. Upon examination, Our Undiscovered Universe turns out to be brimming over with crank physics and general nonsense. Ben Monreal, who was one of the intimidatingly smart people in the lab where I did my undergrad thesis, has weighed Witt’s “Null ...
Read more [Science After Sunclipse] 

Time for a little BPSDB! The redoubtable Ben Goldacre has the dirt on Bill Nelson’s “QXCI machine,” a device for “bioenergetic health auditing,” a medical procedure well-known among specialists as an essential step in the surgical removal of cash from wallets. Best of all, though, is what QXCI stands for: Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface. Now, quantum physics has jack to do with consciousness, but more importantly, “quantum xrroid” just sounds. . . painful. Like a blood boil growing inside your X, if you know what I mean. Maybe a ...
Read more [Science After Sunclipse] 

Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers had a lengthy, informal chat during the 2008 American Atheists conference in Minneapolis, and a recording of their conversation is now available on DVD and in the video tubes. They discuss the fight against pseudoscience as well as several interesting topics in good science. I did my best to summarize the kin-vs.-group business in this book review. Among the “glimmerings” which suggest there’s a better way to think about some evolutionary processes (name for that better way still to be defined) are, I think, the epidemiological simulations ...
Read more [Science After Sunclipse]