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Guardian continues witch hunt against complementary medicine
I'm getting sick of this. The paper which I doggedly buy every day, and have done for as long as I have bought a daily paper, seems to have a real bee in its bonnet about nutritionists, and alternative practitioners in general. It's there between the lines in all of their health and medical coverage - doctors are good, complementary medicine is bad; suspect; a nefarious cult run by money-grabbing charlatans. To the credit of Ben Goldacre, the arrogant doctor who writes their Bad Science column, at least his hatred is explicit. Yesterday, he was given free reign across four pages of G2 to repeat his well-rehearsed arguments against that well-known war criminal and baby-murderer Gillian McKeith. According to this piece, in its terribly theatrical conclusion (he hates her for being "theatrical" by the way): "McKeith has nothing to contribute; and Channel 4, which bent over backwards to dress her up in the cloak of scientific authority, should be ashamed of itself." Cripes!
Under the heading, A Menace To Science - loudly trumpeted from the masthead on the cover of the paper, and accompanied inside by that daft photo of McKeith cavorting in the nuddy among fruit and veg (I bet she regrets that) - Goldacre does his usual riff on her suspect qualifications, which I'm not going to go into in detail, suffice to say, her crime is to have done a PhD by correspondence course at an American college (not that surprising when nutritional therapy is a relatively new subject and up until recently was not even available as a degree course in this country), and to have used the epithet "Doctor" to legitimise the health products and books whose sales have made her rich. I wish she hadn't done this, as being a doctor and wearing the lab coat - as she used to on You Are What You Eat, the most revolutionary diet programme on television, whatever you think of it - gives out entirely the wrong signal to most of us who prefer to take our health into our own hands and concentrate on preventative cures. I am personally suspicious of white coats. Anyone who has studied longer than a day in nutrition automatically knows more about it than a fully-qualified doctor, as nutrition comes very low down on the curriculum. Ben Goldacre might know an awful lot more than McKeith about conventional medicine, and which tablets to prescribe, but he sure as hell knows less than her about nutrition. Which is why he constantly tries to unpick her thinking by running it through conventional scientific testing. He has no time for anything that exists outside of the closed shop of white mice in labs and peer-reviewed essays in the British Medical Journal. It must be weird to be so sure that what you know is right and not to have any doubts whatsoever. The thinking of nutritionists and other practitioners evolves all the time. Holistic therapists take into account not just symptoms, but use detective work, and individual assessment, to get to the root cause. They also appreciate the role of the mind in the healing process. This doesn't compute in the world of conventional medicine. Not everything is explicable via conventional scientific rigour.
Goldacre goes after McKeith because she's visible. She's loud and annoying and she prods people to get their attention. She also sells books and products under her own name. These, he dismisses as ineffective simply because they are not classified as medicines. "She has pills to give you an erection," he states, on the same day this it's announced that Viagra will soon be available over the counter at Boots. And that's OK, apparently. "Her face is in every health food store in the country." Yes, because her products are popular. People don't buy them because they like her face. Her face is actually quite scary, even in the airbrushed version she puts on her bars. "And yet, to anyone who knows the slightest bit about science, this woman is a bad joke." So what? She helps people lose weight and get fit. Her TV programmes might inspire others to do the same. Her diets are not expensive. They don't involve buying her products. They're about fresh food, raw food, whole food, imaginative meals. Nothing dodgy there, surely? But the pharmaceutical industry would collapse if we all made ourselves feel better by adjusting our diet. The pharmaceutical industry, by definition, needs us to keep getting ill for as long as we live.
McKeith, Goldacre states, "appears on television every week, interpreting blood tests, and examining patients who had earlier had irrigation equipment stuck right up into their rectums." Colonic irrigation? How disgusting! Where else might this equipment be stuck in order to irrigate the colon? For a doctor, he's awfully squeamish. I'm glad she's moved away from hanging about in labs on the programme. It gave the wrong impression anyway. She does what all nutritionists do, and that's monitor a patient's diet and then modify it to suit their needs. She prepares menus and encourages exercise. A doctor will prescribe you pills without even asking about your diet. A doctor knows which pill treats which symptom but doesn't have the time, or the imagination, to ask about other factors. This is why endless scientific testing does not tell the whole story. Which is why conventional medicines, tested and approved and released onto the market to paid-for media fanfare, are still recalled after unforseen and often nasty, sometimes terminal side effects. Food supplements are natural. You can't overdose on Vitamin C. If a patient suffers side effects because of a combination of a conventional medicine and, say, a Vitamin A supplement, it's the vitamin that gets the blame. It's David and Goliath.
Goldacre mocks the validity of the references in McKeith's PhD, revealing with glee that some of them relate to "funny little magazines and books", such as Creative Living, Healthy Eating, and Spiritual Nutrition and the Rainbow Diet (oh, how he laughs at that one). This is all rather cheap, don't you think? He attacks her for relying on "anecdotal evidence" to support her work. But she's been a practising nutritionist for years. Wouldn't she have gathered up a lot of anecdotal evidence in that time? She gathers this by listening to her patients. This is how you learn.
"You don't get sober professors from the Medical Research Council's Human Nutrition Research Unit on telly talking about the evidence on food and health," he says. "You get the media nutritionists. It's like the difference between astrology and astronomy." Now I for one would switch over if some sober professor came on to tell me what to eat. A media nutritionist is simply a nutritionist who's on the telly, it seems. Does he think Robert Winston is a media fertility doctor? And does that mean he is less qualified to tell us things than a sober professor? Ben Goldacre clearly hankers after his own TV programme.
Here is a description of the Nutritional Therapy degree at Westminster University (the first of its kind in this country, I think): "Nutritional therapy seeks to involve patients in the management of their own healthcare, and is based on individual patient uniqueness. Health is viewed as a state of positive vitality related to the maintenance of a homeodynamic physiology. Tendency toward disease is related to the interplay of the patient's history, triggers and 'mediators', which can be modulated by the use of food as a therapeutic tool along with nutriceutical prescription and lifestyle advice. These concepts link nutritional therapy to its naturopathic heritage." Does that sound like the work of quacks? It certainly doesn't sound like the work of GPs. Nutritional therapy should be treated as doctors might osteopathy - as a complementary practice that might enhance what they do.
Let us guess what Ben Goldacre's background is like. Could perhaps one of his parents be a doctor? Both? Doctors often have a "family firm" mentality. Nutritionists, meanwhile, often come to the subject later in life, sometimes after an illness upon which diet had an unexpected bearing. If you look into it, you'll find that a lot of nutritionists are women. I can't say why for sure, but let's generalise and say that women are more in tune with their bodies, cycles etc. than men. They're certainly less scared of talking about ailments. I'm generalising, but there does seem to be a trend. More women go to see nutritionists than men, too. (A few years ago, I attended a day's seminar on the causes and treatment of cancer, chaired by Lynne McTaggart, whose newsletter What Doctors Don't Tell You provides a constant antidote to orthodox medical opinion and hype. Most of those attending were women. I was in the minority.)
I draw your attention to this, quoted in a book called Sugar Blues by William Dufty. It's from the fourteenth century, before the advent of the printed press, when all knowledge was passed down, when the church was all-powerful and when women were forbidden from healing. Such healers, who had prescribed herbal remedies based on a patient's symptoms, were rebranded sorceresses, and this is what the church proclaimed:
If a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 8:24 AM
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82 Comments:
Andrew, let me preface this by saying I have long been a fan of your work, and read your blog every time its updated. And I generally agree with you on most of the subjects you bring up - your taste in film, politics etc.
But on this subject I have to say that I strongly disagree with you. Gillian McKeith is not a doctor, and yet she repeatedly claims to be. The body she got her "PhD" from is so laughable that it even awarded a PhD to Ben Goldacre's dead cat.
Were she to use her "Doctor" title in any advert she would invite criminal prosecution for fraud due to misleading advertising, and yet she still manages to get away with it on the titles of her books and her website.
* * *
Look, I'm not denying that McKeith does promote fresh fruit and vegetables and scorns junk food. All very good advice, and the nation as a whole should of course be eating more fresh fruit and less junk food. Goldacre even makes this point, and applauds McKeith for
But she dresses everything she says in half understood pseudo-science.
You state "he [Ben Goldacre] sure as hell knows less than her about nutrition". I'm sorry but I really don't think this is accurate. McKeith has stated that chlorophyll can "oxygenate your blood". As Dr Goldacre rightly points out, this is a entirely wrong claim, and goes to the heart of her fundamental misunderstanding of nutrition. Chlorophyll can only oygenate anything in the presence of light, and you don't have much light in the inside of your gut. Furthermore you don't have fish gills to absorb the oxygen in your stoumach so it would not be able to be passed to your bloodstream.
* * *
Finally - I know you have been subject to abusive posts in your comment thread in the last few weeks. But I hope you will agree to show some comments that disagree with your point of view if expressed politely.
[And breathe...]Feel better now? :-)
Much as I don't especially like Gillian McKeith (she is, as you say, a little scary!) I want to cry "hallelujah!" that someone is actually talking common sense and going to the root of a problem rather than sorting it out with chemicals. Here's my thinking behind complementary medicine: OK, if you have cancer or something like that, they probably aren't going to go very far; if you have Irritable Bowel Syndrome they're probably going to help quite a lot. I've suffered from migraines for years and my doctor seemed to think the best way to sort it out was by prescribing what's basically a kick-arse version of Migraleve, which does indeed sort out the headache and stop me throwing up, but turns me into a gibbering idiot for the next 24 hours. Anything that contains that amount of (unnatural, I might add) chemicals and sends you tripping out can't be good for you, surely? Now I rarely have to take them as I have (shock horror!) controlled them through diet, that is I have stopped eating most enjoyable things, like dairy foods (hence my rants about soya milk!) and various other things, and take various vitamins etc to obost my immune system so I don't get too run-down (another trigger.) The tablets are a useful standby for when I really can't function without them (about twice a year now rather than once a month.) Maybe Goldacre and his ilk feel threatened? Maybe they realise this bizarre notion of a healthy lifestyle and not filling your body with manufactured crap will catch on? Or maybe he does just want a TV show. It's also worth pointing out that countries like China have traditionally focussed on prevention rather than cure - you pay your doctor while you are well and stop once you get ill. That seems much more positive to me than a culture that focuses on "health problems" rather than good health.
You're right also for pointing out that she listens to her patients. I for one am fed up of doctors telling me that because they are "qualified" they know my body better than I do.
By the way, have you been watching "The Truth About Food"? What do you think of it?
Px
Mike, I have no problem with people disagreeing with me, or with debate, in fact, that's half the reason I occasionally post about things that matter more than TV shows or films. That's what blogging is all about. You take the Goldacre view. I do not. He has a platform in a national newspaper for his point of view, I do not. This is my chance to have my say. And now it's over to you. I sent a long letter on the subject to the Guardian, but they haven't printed it. This is fairly predictable. I've had a lot of letters printed in the Guardian over the years, but never ones criticising the Guardian or its contributors. A coincidence, I'm sure. For the record, I have never censored a single comment on this blog because it exercises dissent. (Check out the angry responses to my entry on Little Englanders.) The only ones I have a problem with, Mike, are abusive ones. I didn't even have comment-moderation switched on until the abuse started arriving. It was a free-for-all. (I once removed a comment that was libellous, but that's it.) So you may have your say on the matter. And others may have theirs. It's a democratic idyll. I don't need to counter your arguments though, as they are simply Goldacre's repeated, which you know I disagree with.
I stand by my statement that she knows a lot more about nutrition, having practised it for years, than Dr Goldacre, who only did about half a day's specific nutrition during his medical education. He knows a lot about science, but choose to know very little about how complementary medicine works. Which is not all about testing and chemistry and cannot be squared off in the usual scientific ways.
Oh, and the body McKeith got her PhD from did not award a PhD to Goldacre's cat. He registered his cat with a body by putting her name down instead of his own, as far as I can see it, and paid the joining fee. So don't get too excited by his schoolboy prank. Whatever you think of the college she got her PhD from, and whatever you think of her PhD, she's still got one. I wish she didn't call herself a doctor, as I said. I respect her more without the "Dr". It was a mistake to try and assimilate the respect doctors are afforded by dressing as one in a lab coat. But as I also said, this is not just about her. He has it in for nutritionists in general. McKeith is just a convenient target whom we all recognise. Don't swallow his arguments whole though. See past them, is what I was trying to get across.
Andrew
Again, I want to stress that I have a lot of respect for you as a writer and broadcaster. And of course you are entitled to your point of view.
So please don't be offended when I say I really do think you are wrong on this.
I wouldn't have a problem with McKeith if she was just on television telling people to eat healthily. This would be a sensible and laudible aim.
But she isn't just doing that.
She promotes herself as a scientific authority, and peddles dubious products via her website.
She isn't a soft target, she's a multimillionaire making money scaremongering people into buying her products.
* * *
Furthermore, I don't think anyone has really addressed the point about chlorophyll. This cuts to the heart of McKeith as a public igure, because it shows that she doesn't really understand what shes talking about.
You can't disentangle nutrition and science and say shes an expert in nutrition therfore she doesn't need to understand science. She needs to understand the fundamentals to make rational observations that will result in people getting better.
If anyone can explain to me how her statement that cholorphyll will "oxygenate blood" makes any sense at all, I will eat my hat. This is typical of the way her and other nutritionists make unsubstantiated statements that can be proved wrong.
PS I take your point about the Guardian not publishing letters contrary to its point of view, and I think its to your credit that your allowing a debate on your blog.
Apologies if this has come through twice - not sure it worked the first time and, as ever, I'm determined to have my say...
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Clearly a subject that gets everyone hot under the collar, leading - dare I say it - to a loss of perspective all round.
'In other words, to attack nutritionists...is to attack women'. Pardon? That's a bit of a leap isn't it? The majority of James Blunt's audience is female. By having a go at him and his winsome tunes am I also attacking women?
And I get very nervous when 14th century quotes start being trotted out to support 21st century arguments. Are you really equating the attitude to female healers in the 1300s with the attitude of the medical profession to nutritionists today? What is the context of that quote? What does the word 'studied' refer to? I would hazard a guess that it's studied the teachings of the Church not studied the science of medicine which would tie it more neatly into your argument.
Are you saying that for the 14th century church read today's medical establishment? May be something in that but not much.
I know little of Gillian McKeith or Ben Goldacre (why is the fact that he's an Oxbridge GP relevant by the way? Does Oxbridge equal arrogance?). However, as my wife suffers from serious food allergies - diagnosed relatively recently - I'm with you all the way on the importance of nutrition in maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
I think the problem some of us have is with the more evangelical wing of the complementary medicine fraternity who have a tendency to come over all messianic - not something the British public have ever had much time for.
Is it not possible to discuss the merits of complementary medicine without slagging off 'normal' doctors? Are you not falling into the same trap as the likes of Goldacre with his sweeping dismissal of the nutritionists?
Let's not lose sight of the relative position of complementary medicine within medical science as a whole. It has a useful and important role to play. But the huge advances in medical science of the past couple of centuries have overwhelmingly been down to the application of traditional scientific methods and thinking.
I, for one, am not ready to abandon those white coats just yet.
I am not against complementary medicine at all (my mother was bringing me and my sisters to acupuncture to successfully treat asthma back in the late '70s, which was not exactly the norm in Ireland at the time!), but McKeith's psuedo-science really enrages me. It's not that she's offering alternative health ideas, it's that she apparently is just making up random ludicrous theories about the power of seeds with no basis in either folk medicine or practice and presenting them in a way which suggests that she venerates the idea of "science" far more than she does the idea of complementary medicine. She certainly isn't backed up by all nutritionists (like my best friend's mum, who hates McKeith with a firey passion). I haven't studied science since I was 15 and even I knew that the chlorophyl theory (hasn't she heard of photosynthesis?) was utter nonsense.
As are her credentials. In that prank, Goldacre's dead cat managed to get not, as you point out, a PhD but membership of the Association of Nutritionists of which McKeith proudly boasts that she is a member - that does pretty much prove that it's not a serious organisation, certainly not one which a credible nutritionist should be supporting. The college which awarded McKeith her PhD is not an accredited one. I could set up a college in my sitting room right now, give myself a PhD, and it would have just as much academic validation as McKeith's one. She's practiced as a nutritionist for years, but so what? Just because someone has been doing something for years doesn't mean that they are particularly good at it - and of course, there are plenty of medical doctors who have been doctoring away for years and are unreliable too. I don't agree with many of Goldacre's views on complementary medicine, but I believe he was totally right to (a) denounce this woman as the charlatan she is and (b) point out that no one makes much money just telling people to eat fresh fruit and veg and go for a walk every day. I thought the most important part of his piece was the point about social class making more difference to one's health than anything else.
And as woman, and a feminist, I respectfully disagree with you that there is a misogynist element to this criticism of McKeith. I don't doubt for one second that there is sexist snobbery directed at some nutritionists, but to say that this is the case here smacks of a straw man argument. Also, to compare McKeith - a middle class woman who has made a huge fortune bullying those who lack her moral (and dietary) fibre - to a disempowered 14th century wise woman is a bit much. You may not have agreed with Goldacre's piece, but it's hardly the Malleus Maleficarum.
"[Nutritionists] also appreciate the role of the mind in the healing process. This doesn't compute in the world of conventional medicine. Not everything is explicable via conventional scientific rigour."
Hits on PubMed for "placebo effect": 2639 (specifically phrased like this to exclude all the studies that just used placebos, to avoid biasing the results)
Hits on PubMed for "nocebo": 65
Hits on PubMed for "psychoendocrinology": 44
Hits on PubMed for "neuroendocrinology": 584
Hits on PubMed for "psychogenic": 4880
Hits on PubMed for "psychosomatic": 12537
These are all peer-reviewed articles which collectively take a vast amount of evidence into account, and many of them subject it to thorough statistical analysis. Which surely, to use your phrase, 'computes' much more than the opinions of a few celebrity nutritionists.
I suspect there's a feeling among complementary medicine supporters that phrases like "the role of the mind in the healing process" are somehow good but phrases like "psychosomatic" and "placebo effect" are somehow bad, when they refer to the same thing.
"Food supplements are natural."
People need to get over this weird natural nice, chemicals nasty thing. Botulin, pufferfish venom, UV radiation, Ebola, belladonna and ricin are all natural. And everything is made of chemicals, after all...
"You can't overdose on Vitamin C."
No, but it can for example increase the risk of premature birth:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=15846696&query_hl=9&itool=pubmed_docsum
I hope this response was well enough reasoned for you to allow through the moderation process. By the way, your system for posting from a Google account doesn't work, and I had to sign up for a new blog just to post this.
Cheers,
Andrew.
I'm afraid I'm another one in the 'burn Gillian McKeith' brigade. Sorry. I always get suspicious when people make claims for things and then refuse to take part in any sort of independently controlled test to see if they work. Unfortunately the common sense things that McKeith says are muddled in with all of the pseudo-science, herbal viagra and rainbow spirituality.
Andrew
I enjoy your writing about films, but I'm completely appalled by this article. To say that Ben Goldacre knows less about nutrition than Gillian McKeith just because they don't spend a lot of time learning about nutrition at medical college is little short of insane.
If you read Goldacre's column regularly, you'll know the following about him:
1. He is thorough. He reads the evidence. He analyses it. He doesn't leap to lazy conclusions about "conventional science = good, alternative medicine = bad": he reads every damn thing he can find, looks at how the research was conducted and points out the flaws or gaps. Look at his pieces on the Durham fish oils study as an example.
2. He has a razor-sharp mind. I spend a lot of my time reading health, science and technology journalism and he is way ahead of the field. He has a first class honours degree in medicine from Oxford: you might think that this is less of a qualification than McKeith's years of doing whatever she does - in which case, judge him on what he writes. He does actually understand the way in which food is used by the body, in a way that McKeith clearly doesn't.
3. You could never accuse him of being in thrall to the pharmaceutical companies, which he has attacked on more than one occasion. What he does do is point to the merits of proper, double-blind research on whether something works. The hard grind of proper scientific methodology, in other words, not just some mumbo-jumbo pulled out of the air.
4. He would obviously support the message that we should eat more fruit and veg and less sugar and fat. The point he makes is that by trying to make it any more complicated than that, all McKeith and her co-nutritionists are doing is making other people miserable while raking in bucketloads of cash for themselves.
I would add, finally, that while it would be nice to believe that all modern illnesses would just disappear if we ate healthy foods, it ain't so. Don't forget how lucky we are to live in an age when many of the major killers of the past, such as cholera and polio, have been wiped out - largely thanks to modern medicine.
One thing I missed the first time:
"Anyone who has studied longer than a day in nutrition automatically knows more about it than a fully-qualified doctor"
Ms McKeith has been widely reported as saying, for example, "each sprouting seed is packed with the nutritional energy needed to create a full grown healthy plant" (from You Are What You Eat I believe).
There are the same amount of calories in a seed as in an entire fully-grown plant?!? That measn 1 banana = a whole banana tree. These are not the words of someone who knows the first thing about nutrition.
Similar howlers have been about bad nutrition reducing the amount of DNA in your body -- when every normal cell contains precisely one copy of your genome -- and chlorophyll in green veg helping oxygenate your blood (erm, without any internal light source or the means to absorb O2 in your digestive tract).
Andrew.
What is interesting is that all evidence should be made available for science - even evidence that appears contrary to the tenants of the 'scientist'. As a 'scientist' BG knows this and you would assume that he would allow comments from all sides to appear on his site. This is not the case: any comments supporting contrarywise views or responding to his foul attacks are ruthlessly censored - thus distorting the information made available to his readers.
I would suggest that readers of his site start to wonder why there is 100% agreement with all his comments - 100% agreements are sure signs of manipulatory intent.
(I assume BG will see this (HI) and await for his denial to appear - before I give details of some of the people who can verify the above)
The point of the Bad Science column, as I understand it, is to highlight cases of babble masquerading as science to sell us stuff, and in that capacity it performs a useful service. The basic "eat your greens" message is not something that the establishment is going to argue with. It seems that that Bad Science's problem is essentially that she has chosen to adorn herself in a white coat, and a more or less mail order PhD. She's stepped onto his turf, when she would have been better off staying firmly on her own (vegetable) patch.
On balance, I'm going to side with straight science over someone making clearly bogus scientific-sounding claims to sell books and potions. But I'm also very suspicious of arrogant voices quoting the infallibility of the medical establishment, when there is so far yet for them to go on the subject of patient care.
As an aside, this argument reminds me of the book Against Method by the late philosopher/anarchist of science Paul Feyerabend. He first wrote the book to defend science from outsiders, in particular philosophers like Karl Popper who he believed were trying to tell the scientists how to do their job. But in later revisions he added material which went on to defend outsiders, society in general, from science, and the notion that all knowledge must conform to (broadly Popperian) notions of scientific "method".
Andrew like the first commenter I've been a fan of your writing for a while, so when I stumbled upon this article it was like finding out a favourite uncle likes to touch young boys bottoms. I don't really want to be a loser and pick through the whole thing so if you'll indulge me I'll pick out a few quotes that jumped out at me and made me want to stab myself in the eye with a biro.
You end your first paragraph by saying, "Not everything is explicable via conventional scientific rigour."
Which makes me think you don't understand what science is. The Scientific method is really just about finding out what works and what doesn't, which I think is a good thing, yes?
"But the pharmaceutical industry would collapse if we all made ourselves feel better by adjusting our diet"
No it wouldn't. Yes there is evidence eating yer greens, not being a fatty and having a moderate alcohol intake will improve your life expectancy, but it's not going to bring "Big Pharma" to it's knees. And if I'm seriously ill I want drugs not some well meaning quack feeding me gogi berries. No one would critisise Mckeith if she just said eat less, exercise more, but she wraps it up in pseudoscientific waffle that is just plain wrong.
You called Goldacre cheap for mocking her "phd", but come on, she is passing herself off as a nutritional expert, her credentials are fair game. That "phd" IS a joke.
"Her diets are not expensive"
This is also wrong. Have a flick through her book. It is full of overcomplicated, expensive, faddy ingredients where cheap easily available ones would suffice.
"Food supplements are natural."
Natural does not mean good.
You imply (tongue in cheek I think) that Goldacre just has a problem with women. In his column the previous week he was ripping into Partrik Holford. I think his problem is more with quacks than their genitalia.
It's difficult to respond to your blog without you taking this as an attack because your arguments are so poor and utterly lacking in understanding of the original article from Goldacre. Furthermore, I notice that this is a moderated blog, so I could waste hours pointing out the poor quality of virtually every sentence of your post only for you to throw my comments away.
But in any case, for a taster, here's just one issue taken pretty much at random from your post. You say:
These, he dismisses as ineffective simply because they are not classified as medicines. "She has pills to give you an erection," he crows, on the same day this it's announced that Viagra will soon be available over the counter at Boots. And that's OK, apparently.
The "pills" that she sells do not work. It's that simple. Viagra does work. Again, it's very, very simple.
I personally believe that it is wrong to claim that a product has a function which it does not perform. Where could the confusion be here?
BTW, if you disagree with this then you should contact me personally, I can supply you with a whole range of "miracle products", at special prices, just for you.
He knows a lot about science, but choose to know very little about how complementary medicine works. Which is not all about testing and chemistry and cannot be squared off in the usual scientific ways.
In fairness to BG, he has repeatedly acknowledged that alternative medicine treatments often do work, due to practitioners being able to spend time with patients and listen to them fully - as opposed to rushed NHS conventionally scientific doctors who have to get them out of the door after 10 minutes.
I am not in any way a fan of McKeith's. There is, though, a bit of an upleasant misogynistic quality to the attacks on her. cf: the number of uses of 'coven' and 'witches' to describe the celebrity big brother racists.
P.s.
Does he think Robert Winston is a media fertility doctor? And does that mean he is less qualified to tell us things than a sober professor?
Robert Winston does lose some of his credibility with me due to his
misleading plugging of fishy milk.
Sorry Andrew
You are completely missing it here.
Speaking as a professional scientist and teacher of science and medical students, I have to say that Ben Goldacre is right on the money, as is Mike.
Almost all the "nutritionists" who pervade our screens and newspaper pages are, in scientific terms - and in plain language - full of it.
What they say contains little or no actual science, from my view as someone who has spent a quarter of a century in scientific research and university teaching.
Ben Goldacre does NOT attack qualified people who belong to a regulated (and hence quality-controlled) heathcare profession and who give sound dietary advice based on actual proven scientific evidence of what works. These people are called dieticians.
"Nutritionists" are a different story. Basically in the UK anyone at all can call themself a "nutritional therapist" or "nutritionist" - including Ben Goldacre, his cat, me, you, Prince Charles, and Adolf Hitler if he were still around. Anyone.
Even with the British Nutrition Society, who say they are trying to regulate nutritionists as a profession, the qualification to be registered is a 3-year B.Sc. degree in nutrition and a couple of years "practical experience".
So if I do a nutrition B.Sc. degree - which alone would set me apart from a lot of self-styled nutritionists - and set up in business, I can sell all my "patients" my own branded diet supplements, even if there is not one single scintilla of evidence that they work. No-one stops me doing this. And after a couple of years of this "professional experience", the Nutrition Society will let me call myself a "registered nutritionist".
To repeat: there is no meaningful control on what these people can say, or what they can sell you. That is why it is a scam.
In contrast, suppose I do a law degree, but none of the professional training to practise as a lawyer. I then open an office with a sign "legal advice". Does that mean I know more about the law than Joe Public? It might do, or might not. Does it make me a solicitor? Answer: no. The title "solicitor" is protected to protect people from con artists. Ditto "nurse". Ditto "dietician". Ditto "medical practitioner".
Finally, you say that Ben knows less than "Dr" Gillian about nutrition. I seriously doubt it, because almost every "scientific" statement she makes about what goes on in your body and its cells is the purest nonsense. In contrast, what Ben gives is the scientific and medically accepted consensus.
The fact that this consensus doesn't offer "diet-based miracle cures" is because there aren't any. Sad but true.
I'd only really disagree with one statement there: "Not everything is explicable via conventional scientific rigour." I really don't think that's true and I certainly hope it isn't. The key to all science is knowledge (which is what the word means after all). I prefer to think that you can explain anything if you've got all the facts. The problem is that large, apparently chaotic systems (such as the human body) are hard to encapsulate in a model and are therefore hard to predict. Hence "side effects", a euphemism for: "We don't know exactly how it works", or at least: "We're not as clever as our grasp of Greek and Latin would suggest." Or as virtually every other US TV ad says, "Zintulum [or whatever] isn't for everyone."
Hopefully it's not impossible though. Meteorologists get things vaguely right (and I emphasise vaguely) barely enough to convince people that what they do is scientific. Yet there's a huge amount of science behind what they do, and I suspect Ben Goldacre wouldn't dismiss them as cranks because he did physics at school and he's seen for himself that, say, hot air rises.
It's interesting that you bring the Church in at the end of your piece. Ben Goldacre reminds me of the churchmen who ridiculed Darwin for the idea that we are descended from apes. (Actually so does Richard Dawkins, but that's a whole other can of worms.) Scientists really need to be more open to other ideas because some of them do appear to work and it might just be useful to know why. I wish Ben Goldacre would spend more time carefully picking fault with Gillian McKeith's science, rather than with the woman herself. The reason he doesn't, I suspect, is that he knows little about the subject and he's happy to dismiss it out of hand. And that's really bad science.
Andrew,
Does it not concern you that the PhD course Gillian McKeith did hasn’t equipped her with the knowledge you would expect from a GCSE biology or chemistry student?
As a consequence I think very little of the certificate printing organisation, er, sorry, 'college' that McKeith got her unaccredited PhD from as it is patently obvious from what she has written that she knows nothing about how the body works and next to nothing about nutrition.
If the origin of her PhD does not concern you then why do you wish she wouldn't call herself a doctor? Surely someone with a PhD is entitled to call themselves a doctor?
You said that "she knows a lot more about nutrition, having practised it for years, than Dr Goldacre, who only did about half a day's specific nutrition during his medical education." Please think about this Andrew. How can she if she, to use an often quoted example, thinks that 'chlorophyll oxygenates the blood'?
You also said "he knows a lot about science, but choose to know very little about how complementary medicine works. Which is not all about testing and chemistry and cannot be squared off in the usual scientific ways."
The scientific method is used to test all the evidence-based medicine that we take, the stuff that has helped to nearly double our life expectancy over the last 100 years. I'm sure you're all for the rigorous testing of non-complementary drugs. When the vast majority of sCAM treatments (so-called Complementary or Alternative Medicine) are subjected to the same double blind randomized placebo controlled trials they fail.
The scientific method works, full stop. It has allowed astronomers to look back to the very beginning of the universe, begin to understand quantum physics, put a man on the moon, develop global communication, etc etc etc. The idea that the effects of Bach flower remedies, homeopathy, reiki etc etc can't be tested to see if they work, or are in some way too mysterious to be understood, is just a canard.
In any event, it is easy to demonstrate, using the scientific method, that oxygen doesn’t oxygenate the blood.
Having glanced at McKeith's 'PhD' thesis, I'm surprised that she did more than half a days nutrition study. Dr Ben Goldacre (a 'serious f***-off academic ninja') would have long intense years learning about how the body works. This is quite important because the body does not work in one way for evidence based medicine and another for sCAM 'medicine'. I should be working so haven't got the time to spell out the whole argument so I recommend that you read 'Snake Oil' by John Diamond who expressed it a lot better than I, or indeed most of us, can.
And it's a shame that you need to fall back on the 'platform in a national newspaper' argument. Ben Goldacre's column is a small oasis in a sea of uncritical and positive sCAM coverage in the media, with every national newspaper having a 'lifestyle' section devoted to it.
As the product of a similar 70s diet to yourself (I had a serious Space Dust habit) I can understand your wish to eat healthily and live a healthy life. I do too. But my health is too important to make choices based on nonsense. I'm surprised that you put your critical faculties on hold when it comes to this sort of thing (given that you are a critic) and accept sCAM and McKeith so readily.
McKeith does not deserve the public platform she gets, nor of our respect or attention, and especially not money. She has repeatedly misrepresented herself (at best) as a medical doctor, while deriding the science on which evidence-based medicine is founded. She clearly doesn’t understand the basics of physiognomy or nutrition as the absolute howlers she has made in print and on television are testament to this.
As an experiment look at the following examples plucked and précised from Dr Ben Goldacre’s article:
• If you do not have enough RNA/DNA you may ultimately age prematurely
• Stress can deplete your DNA, but algae will increase it
• DNA is only present in growing cells.
• Each sprouting seed is packed with the nutritional energy needed to create a full-grown, healthy plant
Are any of these statements correct? Would you defend a GP who had as little comprehension of their chosen field as she does? Of course not. So why accept shoddy qualifications and a patent lack of understanding from anybody else?
Surely instead of championing McKeith you should be bemoaning her obvious uselessness and the fact that she is an embarrassment to the nascent profession of clinical nutrition and championing someone who actually knows what they are talking about.
Andrew it's worth remembering that it's not only doctors that despise this woman but also most in the nutrition industry itself. I am not talking only the State Registered Dietitians but also Registered Nutritionists as well as Nutritional Therapists.
whist some may envy her success most are unhappy about the fact that she has long been used as a stick to beat the profession with. This development has been welcomed by many both with 'alternative' practitioners as well as those within the NHS.
Also on the subject of the PhD, "whatever you think of her PhD, she's still got one." is actually totally incorrect. A PhD that is not accredited is not a PhD, or indeed any other type of qualification.
Andrew it's worth remembering that it's not only doctors that despise this woman but also most in the nutrition industry itself. I am not talking only the State Registered Dietitians but also Registered Nutritionists as well as Nutritional Therapists.
whist some may envy her success most are unhappy about the fact that she has long been used as a stick to beat the profession with. This development has been welcomed by many both with 'alternative' practitioners as well as those within the NHS.
Also on the subject of the PhD, "whatever you think of her PhD, she's still got one." is actually totally incorrect. A PhD that is not accredited is not a PhD, or indeed any other type of qualification.
Sorry, I meant to say that "In any event, it is easy to demonstrate, using the scientific method, that chlorophyll doesn’t oxygenate the blood."
Clearly oxygen does oxygenate the blood.
I knew this would get a heated debate going when I wrote it - so, good. There are far too many points here for me to go through them individually. I don't want to be a champion of Gillian McKeith. I'm more concerned, as you'll know, having read my entry, with Ben Goldacre's rage against nutritionists and the Guardian's similarly antipathy, which manifests itself more subtly in their coverage of health matters, which buys the idea, say, of Herceptin as a "wonder drug" and yet seems to delight in a story about the Food Standards Agency claiming that organic food is no better than non-organic. As I say, it's subtle.
Some of you seem to share Goldacre's rage. I feel that Goldacre's lengthy and colourful attack in a large-circulation newspaper merits at the very least a counterattack, which, after all, is on a blog read by a small number of people. He represents the orthodox medical establishment just as McKeith represents an alternative. Perhaps we're all getting too wrapped up a battle of the giants, concentrating too much on personalities. Some of us worship the concept of science without question, some of us don't.
I don't suppose I'm ever going to see eye to eye with the person logged in as "PhD scientist". Although I appreciate the length you've gone to in your comment, PhD, your standpoint sounds pretty immoveable so I won't attempt to convert you! I respect the amount of work and study you've put in, but it's a little superior after the benefit of all that experience to then put inverted commas around "nutritionists" and say they are "full of it." Dieticians, as I understand the distinction, government-approved as they may be, give advice based on one-size-fits-all philosophy (this is good for you, that isn't), whereas nutritionists treat the individual on an individual basis. This, regardless of one's position on Ben Goldacre, strikes me as a more effective and helpful one. You pour scorn on the "3-year BSc degree in nutrition and a couple of years practical experience" as if this doesn't count for anything. Most nutritional therapists don't sell their own branded products. They merely "sell" their services. Some people distrust doctors, and it's right that there should be other places to go for health advice. And nobody seems interested in my point that conventional medicine treats symptoms, while other therapies look for the cause. Have a bad back; see a doctor; get a painkiller; take away pain of bad back.
I'm asthmatic. When I was first diagnosed, the trigger was deduced to be cats, and I was prescribed Salbutamol, in a blue inhaler. This clearly works, as it expands the tubes and aids breathing. However, after a couple of months of this, I went back to my doctor and was advised to move up to the brown inhaler, containing Beclomethasone (forgive spelling if it's wrong). This is not a "reliever" but a "preventer", taken twice a day. It is a steroid, and should be inhaled using a large plastic trumpet, so that the spray doesn't hit the throat, which is your first clue that it's not such a great thing to be firing down yourself. Compliant, I took to using this brown inhaler for a good long time, until I started reading more and more about natural health. I gradually phased out the brown inhaler. It made no difference anyway. I cut dairy out of my diet, which produces mucus and is therefore antagonistic to asthmatics. My asthma, pretty mild anyway, improved. I now use my blue inhaler very rarely. Months go by without me taking it out. Why didn't my doctor suggest cutting out dairy in the first place? And why did she move me up to the brown inhaler? My asthma hadn't worsened. It was as if being on the blue for a certain amount of time meant I was ready for the brown. No other profound reason. It's just what happens to asthma patients. This is hardly a life-threatening example, but it makes you think.
Let us bear in mind that nutritionists were promoting the use of folic acid for pregnant women to help prevent birth defects such a cleft palate, spina binfida etc. ten years before the medical establishment took it onboard, sanctioned it and made it official. They're now putting it in bread in America.
My melodramatic use of the 14th century "witches" quote was just to underline the suspicion of a mostly male establishment about the natural healing work of women. Evidence of patriarchal society repressing the work of women goes back centuries. I did say that Ben Goldacre doesn't hate women, but I raise it as a possible subconscious undercurrent to all this.
Once again, I leapt to the defence of McKeith not because she needs me to, with her expensive legal team and her large house, but because she is an easy target and I maintain that Goldacre's incandescent rage seems to be at more than just a small woman with a correspondence-course qualification who's on the telly a lot.
Apolgies for not answering all points. Too many. I like the debate, and to reiterate for Andrew Clegg, who wrote "I hope this response was well enough reasoned for you to allow through the moderation process", I only introduced this process because of personal and juvenile abuse aimed at me (and at those who post on the blog). I only use it to weed out abuse, not counter-argument, and certainly not comments as considered and passionate as these. I prefer this to be inclusive.
Phew.
Back to reviewing television programmes soon. I hope you will still respect me in the morning.
Oh, and one other thing and then I'll stop taking up your cyberspace (and 'props', as I believe the youngsters say, for allowing the opposite point of view to be aired).
You stated that "food supplements are natural. You can't overdose on Vitamin C."
A logical extrapolation of this statement is that you would consider all vitamins to be food supplements which could be taken with impunity.
Vitamins, and indeed all food supplements, are chemicals. You can get side effects from taking too much Vit C and you can overdose on other vitamins.
From this perspective I think the word 'natural' is misleading.
Deadly nightshade is 'natural' but I'm not going to eat any. Willow bark is a 'natural' and effective remedy but call me old fashioned, rather than chew on a bit of bark I'd sooner somebody extracted the active ingredient (acetylsalicylic acid), put it into consistent doses, warned me of any possible side effects and let me choose whether to take it or not.
This all boils down to the fact that there is no 'conventional' or 'alternative' medicine. Just medicine that works or medicine that does not.
The scientific method is the best way of finding out what does or doesn't work. It found out how to put planes in the air and keep them there and no amount of post-modernism will change the fact that there is no 'alternative' physics. Would you be happy to get on a plane manufactured by a company that did not subscribe to Newtonian physics but an equally valid alternative system? Me neither, but them I'm also trying to reduce my carbon footprint.
In just the same way, there is no 'alternative' biology or chemistry or astronomy or anatomy or, yes, even nutrition.
This fundamental issue is completely separate to any problems you have with your GP or the NHS or drug companies. I despise drug companies for being capitalist behemoths and corporate psychopaths (this is not a left and right issue as you seem to think). But the methods they use to research, test and manufacture drugs are the best we have and are for the most part very successful. As are the treatments. More successful than crystal therapy or homeopathy anyway.
I know you have a problem with Ben Goldacre but to suggest that he 'raves' and 'crows' in his article and to do that sneaky 'I'm sure he doesn't have problems with women' while suggesting that he does, is pure tabloidese. But hey, it's your blog.
BTW, Dr Ben (real PhD and therefore entitled to wear white lab coat whilst observing white mice in maze) does not dismiss McKeith's moneyspinning line of powders and potions as ineffective "simply because they are not classified as medicines." I seem to remember an article of his that looked at the claims she made for them and the actual ingredients . He then concluded that they were unlikely to be effective. Still, if the only evidence we have as to their efficacy is the testimony of the millionnaire McKeith, would I be happy to shell out to ingest some expensive chemical compound of her own correspondence course devising? Or would I rather it had been submitted to clinical trials to see whether it worked first?
You said that Dr B had 'crowed' (I'm using lots of inverted commas here, shame I can't format the text and liven things up with the occasional bit of italics) that "She has pills to give you an erection,"...on the same day... it's announced that Viagra will soon be available over the counter at Boots. And that's OK, apparently."
Yes it is ok, apparently. The difference is that Viagra works and has been proven to do so. It is not without risk but is, for the most part, safe. It is a drug that has been tested and re-tested for its efficacy. Large scale trials have been undertaken to demonstrate this fact and its possible side effects have been documented and analysed. It has helped a lot of people immeasurably. (Well perhaps measurably!) It is a fact that it makes mens willies go big when they take it.
Does McKeith's nutritional supplement do the same? (It makes no difference if it is called a supplement or a medicine, it is essentially just a mixture of chemicals). Well, she could test it in the same way as Viagra. It would either work or it wouldn't as there is no such thing as an 'alternative' erection.
A trial would be easy to set up and run and the sCAM industry and McKeith are awash with cash. Surely if she believed in the testimony of her patients and her own clinical research then she should have nothing to fear?
I apologise for not making a comment here relating to the original topic but I really don't know enough about it to make an informed comment. What I object to here is Someguy's comment "it was like finding out a favourite uncle likes to touch young boys bottoms". Whatever you may think of Andrew or his views, Someguy I find your comment above both inappropriate in the context of an intellectual discussion and somewhat offensive. Moreover, resorting to this level of comment lessens the impact of your argument no matter how good it may be.
Actually, Gwen, you're right. I missed that particular comment due to the sheer weight of response I've had to plough through. I too object to the implication. I know it's only a simile, but it does seem rather strong. I like being a favourite uncle, but does having a strong opinion with which you agree make that uncle a paedophile? What strong feelings this debate engenders.
the touching young boys bottoms was a reference to an old John Peel quote. I thought Mr Collins might get it.
Sorry, no offence was meant.
That 'uncle' comment was a bit rough.
Anyway, now all this has all blown over, who fancies going for a burger?
Andrew,
I'm impressed that you let so much criticism through, and I generally like your stuff, but I'm still having second thoughts. Misunderstanding the whole point of Goldacre's article is one thing, but your insistence that Goldacres work has a possible subconscious undercurrent against women is really freaky. It shows you in a very bad light in my honest opinion, as if you are scrambling for something, anything, to pin on him just because you couldn't understand his point. There's lot's of insidious sexist stuff out there, and this is nothing whatsoever like it.
Ayupmeduck - maybe I'm being oversensitive, but my observations about the female bias within nutrition and the complementary therapy community remains sound. And the comparison with the way women who practised natural healing before the church clamped down on them I found interesting. I certainly don't feel as if I am scrambling to pin anything on him. It's a very general feeling that I have, and I was very careful not to actually accuse anyone of direct misogyny. I accept that you disagree with this, but I don't see why it's "freaky". It's a gut feeling, based on a certain overriding arrogance that seems to come through in certain male-dominated worlds. It goes back to the old truism: men start wars; women don't. I like your pseudonym.
Wow! This one really does generate some heat, doesn't it? To add my ten bob's worth, I used to read Ben Goldacre's column with real interest but find his delivery has got so arrogant that it obscures much of his message. In that respect he's following an unfortunately prevalent medical tradition. Change has been slow and many GPs still display rigidity and the 'god complex'. I work in the NHS (mental health) and see way too much over-prescribing and lack of a holistic, collaborative approach. I do however want to put in a word for the significant minority of GPS who work intelligently and sensitively with their patients - they do exist.
But I digress. I have been worried by some of the pseudo-science pedalled by Ms McKeith ( I'll call her 'Dr' when I afford the same respect to Ian Paisley!). Even with my non-medic background, I've read some of her stuff and thought 'hang on, there's no WAY that be right'. She's a businesswoman and a determined, clever self-promoter (maybe the similarities between she and Ben Goldacre are as significant as the differences). Being a businesswoman doesn't make her wrong, but it also doens't make her that different from the CEO of Glaxo Smith-Kline. Both are pedalling products.
I believe that complementary therapies have a valid and helpful place, and of course there's no counter-argument to the prospect of good balanced diet. But among many of the vulnerable, unhappy people I work with, I've seen 'snake oil' remedies which have promised miracle cures and usually done nothing more than help separate the client from their hard-earned money. There really are some dangerous, unregulated, egomaniacs out there. To mis-quote a phrase I recently heard, "in a godless age, the danger is not that people will not believe anything - it is that they will believe everything."
I'm an atheist, by the way, but the sentiment is an interesting one.
Anyway, I'm meandering - hope this makes some kind of point! Excellent debate!
Well, I was also taken aback by the comment that Ben Goldacre's attitude to McKeith was indicative of a 'deeper, less savoury antipathy' towards women. As a feminist, I tend to be pretty alert to media hostility towards women ( there's enough of it about) but I couldn't say I'd spotted it here.
By the way, I have plenty of sympathy with your bad experience with your GP. I think lousy GPs are a dime a dozen. But I don't think this invalidates Ben Goldacre's argument about McKeith. It's not as if she's some wise woman, humbly dispensing her herbs to poor and needy, is it? On the contrary, she's a charlatan who passes off her entirely non-existent qualifications and skills as a way of relieving people of their money. Think less ancient healer, more 19th century snake oil merchant.
Incidentally, I'm fairly sure that BG is not a GP but a hospital doctor. Probably when he's not publishing his arrogant rants in The Guardian, he's arrogantly going about saving people's lives. How dare he.
Blimey, talk about lighting the blue touch paper !
There's too many points in the blog entry and responses and my brain is addled.
To talk about 'complementary' or 'alternative' medicine is way too generic. Covers too much ground.
The only experience I've had is with homeopathy, which is utter bollocks and deserves to be witch-hunted.
Any one seen 'Heroes' yet? (I'm trying to change the subject)
Suggesting someone cut down on dairy is different from insisting they spend £20 on a little bottle of 'Living Food Powder' or (topical for today) the 'Living Food Love Bar'.
Coincidentally, given my last post about Viagra, I saw a car this evening with the number plate V12 GRA. This just about summed up everything I thought about the private plate brigade.
Sorry to harp on about this but I thought this Wikipedia entry might be interesting reading as it sums up the misinformation and misrepresentation that lies at the heart of the McKeith conundrum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_McKeith
I must admit that I had never heard of Lynne McTaggart but she makes McKeith look like a shrinking violet:
http://www.wddty.co.uk/cms/content.asp?pageID=vitamincandcancer
This is the kind of media hype that I find extremely distateful, giving false hope to seriously ill people and pretending that 3 pieces of hearsay constitute a cure for cancer. The journal referenced could not be more different from the hysterical tone of the article:
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/reprint/174/7/956.pdf
Honetly Andrew, this is poor poor stuff. And dangerous.
How seriously do you take someone who, on top of curing cancer has managed to find a unifying theory of the universe, with a little help from some fringe scientists? Luckily for us it 'is much like the force in Star Wars' and involves, surprise surprise, 'vibrations':
http://www.beyondtheordinary.net/lynnemctaggart.shtml
Hmmm, has she published the experimental data to prove this theory yet? Or is she still waiting her turn on the CERN Large Hadron Collider? If you came across this type of nonsense in any field you had any sort of knowledge of you'd find it alternately depressing or hilarious. This is the 'time machine in the shed' syndrome with a PR budget and a cynical outlook.
And I'm not having a go at her because I'm subconsciously a misogynist, I'm having a go at her because I'm consciously a rationalist.
Well...
I entirely agree with Ishouldbeworking's post re: the 'god complex' thing. I work in the health field and spent two and a half years in the NHS. What I saw there prompted me to leave the system and challenge it from the outside.
Andrew's comments about the quashing of female healers in the middle ages are entirely relevent. I'm sure there's nothing overtly sexist in the medical profession as a whole... but the fact that centuries of knowledge on natural healing was effectively wiped out when 'wise women' were not permitted within the exclusive world of medical 'discovery' has been to the detriment of society.
My personal and professional interest is in childbirth. Since the 70s feminist movement there has been a backlash against birth being a 'medical' event. Statistically, homebirth is just as safe, if not safer than hospital birth for women with straightforward pregnancies... But you will still find ignorance and opposition from the medical profession who largely believe it should be 'controlled'. This belief has it's roots in the complete knowledge vacuum left by the religion-fuelled marginalisation and demonisation of 'wise women' (or so-called 'witches') in the middle ages; the interferance of male doctors in the birth process, the mismanagement of care (e.g. The only reason giving birth on your back is seen as 'normal' is because it is the best position for the doctor, it is the worst possible position for the woman & the baby) leading to poor health outcomes served to perpetuate the myth that childbirth is incredibly risky. Taking women out of their natural birth environments into hospitals led to fear-based birthing; higher adrenaline= more pain & more complications. The treatment of birth as a risky event disrupts the body's natural process and indeed - gives rise to complications. This fulfilling prophecy has been demonstrated and enforced for hundreds of years now, to the detriment of society as a whole. A non-physiological birth (i.e. medicated, instrumental or C/S) leads to a disruption in natural hormones & bonding at an incredibly important time of life for a baby and a Mum, and many people have found a link with the grown up individual's lessened capacity for different sorts of attachment, love & altruistic behaviours. Over the past few hundred years or so, the cultures with the most interventionist birth rituals also have had the most aggressive foreign policies and lack of regard for others. This, I find quite frankly terrifying. It's an acute example of how a non balanced attitude of patriarchy is actually contributing to the state of society and the world.
Only now with writers such as obstetrician Michel Odent, we are rediscovering the amazing cocktail of hormones & the associated calm, quiet, dark, unobserved environment needed for a safe natural birth, and it is increasingly evident that the medical model frequently does everything to ensure that these needs aren't met - albeit with the best intentions, but with a severe and pervasive level of ignorance about the power of women's bodies to give birth unaided.
But anyway... this is just an example of how patriarchy has taken over in the medical profession and is sustained & ingrained in our culture. It is incredibly hard (despite the quantitative research) to get people to believe that hospital is always the safest place to give birth (for some it IS though, don't get me wrong!) It is slowly changing, but more by word of mouth and the attitudes of some very revolutionary midwifery groups, if anything.
But I don't like Gillian McKeith's approach either! I feel she does little to attract people to holistic living, other than those who are impressed by being told what to do by somebody seemingly in an influential position.
People need to be encouraged to think for themselves, research the information and be responsible for making their own choices in healthy living.
I don't know too much about all of this, however, I do know that if something makes you feel better and there isn't anything to suggest that it is bad for you, then what's the problem? Each to their own. I know from reading Andrew's blog since the start that he hasn't based all his information on what Gillian McKeith has said (despite what someone suggested in a previous comment).
I do have one comment to make that disagrees with Andrew. I know there are some GPs out there who do not appear to have enough time to spend with you and they think that all you want is a prescription. But I think that since it has become general practice for medical professionals to have to explain properly what they are doing and the reasons for it, GPs like this are becoming less and less.
I don't think it is fair to suggest that all GPs are like this.
In my local practice, there are at least 2 GPs that are excellent and are not reaching for their prescription pads the minute you walk through the door. They are willing to spend time with you and to go over all your symptoms and to explain the possible causes.
I have a question about your blue/brown inhaler story. Did you ask why you were given the brown inhaler? Did the GP not explain why they were putting you on a brown inhaler? You are assuming the reasons and I know from plenty of experience that it is not good to assume!! (I'm taking the mickey out of me there, not you!!)
My nephew has asthma which seems to affect him when the weather changes. Does cutting out dairy products really help? Do you have any other tips, I know you have mentioned before about orange juice?
Thanks
Clare
"People need to be encouraged to think for themselves, research the information and be responsible for making their own choices in healthy living. "
----------------------------
I'm one of those who reads AC's blog and usually loves it but felt this particular entry was way off the mark. But the sort of thinking that the quoted text tends to lead to is people assuming that all information found is equally valid.
I saw a documentary about "health choices" on the OU a while ago. A woman was trying to discover whether to allow her son to have the MRR. She consulted doctors and scientists who all overwhelmingly stated the facts that there is no real risk. She then went to a quack....errr homeopath who used the classic scientific argument "It's such a little body and to put 3 diseases in must cause trouble mustn't it." And "We all had measles didn't we? It didn't kill us." Maybe not but it did kill quite a few a year and severely disable quite a few others.
This is why nonsense paraded as medical fact needs to be attacked with vigour and rational argument.
The debate about the paternalism of medicine over the years seems a distraction to me. Who cares as long as they can show they have their facts right (and say when they don't know something)? The point is that the homeopaths and this McKeith woman have no basis to demonstrate that they're right at all.
Why listen to someone who knows nothing instead of someone who knows something?
Kim -- yes, Goldacre works in a hospital not general practice.
Seany -- no, sorry, he doesn't have a PhD, he's an MD.
As far as I know.
Andrew.
First of all, thank you Alice for at least considering my claim that a male-dominated medical establishment is not entirely healthy. You make some valid points about childbirth.
Second, Clare H, I'm in no position to advise on individual health matters. Dairy can be a trigger for asthma, so can all sorts of other things. There's no blanket answer, which is why I prefer the approach of nutritionists to doctors. There's a home test available through Yorke Tests that will find food allergies and intolerances and classical allergies also. I have no financial interests in this or any other company, but these tests are out there. If not, you can try eliminating suspected food triggers from the diet and see if this has any effect. This is free.
I know not all GPs are as bad as others, and there are those who listen, and don't just reach for the prescription pad. But the doctor-patient relationship seems to be predicated on one dispensing wisdom to the other. My GP never explained why I was being given the brown inhaler, and I was dim and submissive enough at that stage not to enquire. I have learned my lesson.
Thirdly, Rob, you're of course entitled not to believe in homeopathy, but why then should it be "witch-hunted"? It works for some people. Freedom of choice. Why dismiss homeopathy when vaccination works on much the same principle? Which is introducing a small amount of a disease into the body to elicit an immune response. In homeopathy the quantities are much greater dilutions, and this is where the problem for the medical community lies. They don't believe it can work. But the body is very clever. It knows what's going into it.
Fourthly, Seany, you condemn Lynne McTaggart's work because you are a "rationalist." Being a rationalist doesn't mean believing there is only one way. You are in fact, with all due respect, an absolutist. Why is offering hope to people with cancer any more "dangerous" than pumping their bodies full of drugs - itself built on hope? Hope cannot be "rationalised". It cannot be tested. Again, we seem to be separating the body from the mind. The body cannot be separated from the mind. McTaggart looks for alternatives. The cancer conference I went to changed my entire perception of cancer - that it is not a "Lottery", but a largely preventable disease. Never mind the intricacies of the other things I heard from speakers that day, this was a paradigm shift for me.
Also, Seany, you mock McTaggart for having a unifying theory about the universe based on "vibrations". A well-known experiment was done on heart cells. One was isolated in a Petri dish and it was seen to beat, because that's what heart cells do. Another heart cell was put in the dish and the two cells started to beat in time with one another. This showed that cells communicate in a way that we don't fully understand. There is clearly some vibrational element involved that doesn't include direct physical contact. Just because you don't understand it yet, doesn't meant it's not there, and doesn't exist. In last week's New Scientist there was a piece about how the laws of gravity may not be how they have always seemed to be. This was the cover story of the conventional scientific magazine New Scientist. We don't know everything yet. James Lovelock's Gaia Theory is that the whole world is one organism. Go and Google him. It took decades to be accepted, this theory, but it has now been accepted by all but the most hardened absolutists.
Alice wrote:
"People need to be encouraged to think for themselves, research the information and be responsible for making their own choices in healthy living."
And Physio CPD Blog disagrees with this statement - one which I would have said was pretty all-encompassing and neutral. But no. You bring up MMR and say that measles kills people. Yes, mainly in countries where they have Vitamin A deficiency. We're talking about a very small minority in any case, and do you know anybody who has caught measles, German measles and mumps at the same time? The subject is not as black and white as you're making it out to be. We should be entitled to make our own decisions.
Which is where I came in.
Andrew Collins said:
"Why dismiss homeopathy when vaccination works on much the same principle? Which is introducing a small amount of a disease into the body to elicit an immune response. In homeopathy the quantities are much greater dilutions, and this is where the problem for the medical community lies."
No Andrew, that's where you're wrong. Homeopathic remedies do not contain "much greater dilutions". They contain NO active ingredients. Nothing. Nada. Nil. It simply DOES NOT WORK above placebo.
Now, on another note regarding the difference between doctors and quac... err, CAM practitioners. An interesting question to look at is why some people feel homeopathy et al works for them and why confidence in proper medicine is declining. Let’s look at what actually happens when you go to see a private CAM practitioner and a doctor.
With the CAM practitioner you will have a nice long consultation where they will listen to your problems, possibly over a nice cup of tea in a nice relaxing setting. They’ll be friendly and sympathetic to you. They will then tell you EXACTLY what is wrong (your chakras are misaligned etc etc), and tell you EXACTLY what to take to make you feel better. At the end of the session you will pay them money, which in itself has an effect (after all, why will people pay 5 times as much for branded paracetamol than for chemically identical own brand?).
Now let’s look at what happens when you see your doctor. First you will have waited a long time in a waiting room surrounded by other sick people. Your doctor will call you in (half an hour after your appointment was due) and will have less than 10 minutes to see what’s wrong with you. Although they care about you they also have 20 other patients waiting to come in. Finally, they will tell you what they THINK is wrong with you (but they can never be sure), and prescribe something that they THINK will make you feel better. Finally, they will tell you what side effects you might expect from the medicine and ask you for your opinion. It’s called informed consent.
Essentially, this means that whilst your doctor cannot lie to you and has to be upfront about their uncertainties the CAM practitioner can satisfy your desire for definite answers and cures. They’re not bound by the same ethical principles as doctors. They can prescribe you placebo that will work for you whilst any potential placebo affect in conventional medicine that could have backed up the biological action is completely destroyed.
So, where do we go from here? It’s clear that placebo can have an effect, and I think a lot more work needs to be done in this area. I suggest the NHS removes funding from all CAM treatment that can’t be shown to work above placebo and ploughs this funding into researching the placebo effect itself. The increased understanding of the psychological aspect of the placebo effect can be used reinstate confidence in proper medicine.
And if people want a particular alternative therapy on the NHS? Well, let it be subjected to the same tests and trials as any other medicine is, and if it can be shown to work it ceases to be alternative and just becomes medicine. If it can’t be shown to work, don’t fund it!
Tristan, I admire your absolute certainty of belief. You say that homeopathy DOES NOT WORK IN CAPTIAL LETTERS. But horses are regularly given homeopathic remedies where other treatments may have previously failed, and good results are often achieved. How does that work?
You say, "Let's look at what actually happens when you go to see a private CAM practitioner and a doctor," and then cannot resist gently taking the piss out of the former. You must be a doctor. Have you ever been to a CAM practitioner? Yes, it's more relaxing and friendly and sympathetic, but they don't tell you EXACTLY what's wrong or tell you EXACTLY what to take. This is simply untrue. Yes, you pay for private consultations, but we all pay for the National Health Service - the fact that we're not paying at the point of delivery doesn't mean we're not paying for it. We're all paying for all the Tamiflu that the government has stockpiled for no good reason. It's a done deal. By your withering mention of "misaligned chakras" you are taking a cheap shot at something you don't happen to agree with. It undermines your rational comparison.
Apparently doctors, by contrast, tell you what they THINK is wrong with you and prescribe something that they THINK will make you feel better. I've always experienced the opposite. I don't recall being asked for my opinion either. It's all about symptoms. Find the symptoms, and treat the symptoms. Doctors are not bad people, and I understand that they are overworked and underfunded. But you suggest that a CAM practitioner might lie to you. Why? What would be the point of that? The implication resurfaces that all CAM practitioners are out to fleece ordinary people. If a treatment works for you, it works, end of story. Surely?
Andrew, I see where you are coming from with the McTaggart thing, I really do. But isn't it obvious that the webpage I referenced is a shrill and nonsensical extrapolation of the actual real research?
Isn't the heading "Vitamin C: It can cure cancer after all" misleading? The research she quotes says nothing of the sort.
This is on a completely different level to the Guardian (which is also 'my' paper) not reporting sCAM uncritically. Do you not think so? Have you read her page and cross referenced what she says with the research?
Apart from lying about what the research says, her webpage is dangerous and harmful on another level. She is subtly promoting the idea of refusing chemotherapy and radiotherapy in favour of taking Vit C.
Chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy work. Several members of my family and a number of friends are testament to this. The combination of treatments are not pretty, are not 100% effective but are the best we have. Drastically improved survival rates are a testament to this.
If a time comes when I have to choose between a proven and effective treatment or intravenous Vit C on the say so of a misleading webpage that misrepresents actual research, I won't be naive, misguided or gullible to fall for the latter. But many people are and their odds of dying before they have to will increase immeasurably. This makes me sad and angry.
Hope is an abstract concept. A positive outlook helps when treating disease (I agree that mind and body are linked) but medicine is not an abstract concept, it either works or it doesn't. There is no proof that Vit C cures cancer.
Your statement "Why is offering hope to people with cancer any more "dangerous" than pumping their bodies full of drugs - itself built on hope?" seems to sum up your position on this. Drugs (chemicals, manmade, unnatural) are bad and any alternative is better. This position seems to me to be absolutist. As a rationalist I am open minded and actively want to see new and more effective treatments for illness. But let's test them first! The 'alternative' forms of treatment / remedy have all been tested and have failed. On the basis of our knowledge so far, any new leaps in medicine are unlikely to involve chakra balancing, megadoses of vitamins, coffee ground enemas, homeopathy (which doesn't work on the same principle as vaccination at all, there is no room for argument here, it just doesn't) or reiki. However, herbal remedies are of interest and medical researchers are starting to look for interesting chemicals and active ingredients in these. This is exciting, interesting and new work.
Also Andrew I did read the 'Free fall' article in the NS and, despite having a fairly strong physics background it was a tough read. What it wasn't about was changing the 'laws' of gravity. The ones we have are laws for a reason, whether they work on a Newtonian or quantum level. It was about trying to find out something new by postulating a theory, testing the theory through experiment and writing up the results for peer review. Science is about discovery and is based on the statement "just because you don't understand it yet, doesn't mean it's not there".
And I've never found NS to be 'conventional', as its reason for existing is to report radical new research.
If you could reference the heart experiment I would be interested to read it (although heart 'cells' don't beat, hearts do).
However, Lynne McTaggart needs to do more than postulate her ideas. She needs to prove them. Her theories may be right but I doubt it. Einstein came up with the general and special theories of relativity but struggled with the unifying theory (to be fair I think he got a bit distracted by Marilyn Monroe) and, please don't misconstrue this as misogyny, he knew how to read a scientific paper and understood that coming up with 'an ocean of subatomic vibrations in the space between things' wouldn't fool anybody. What space? Space between atoms? Space in a vacuum? Space between the ears? If we can weigh a proton surely we can measure these vibrations. Do the research Lynne! Share your findings with (cough) other scientists so they can verify it. Let the Nobel panel hear about it.
Before I go, please please please read the John Diamond book Snake Oil. Also, I was bought the Derren Brown book for Valentine's Day (my girlfriend's so romantic) and I mamnaged good portion last night (oo-er). It has a really interesting section oo critical thinking which, after pages of how easy psychological deception is, comes as a relief.
Peer reviewed study after study. Metastudy after metastudy. All these show that homeopathy doesn't work above placebo. The best the homeopaths can come up with was what essentially amounted to a customer satisfaction survey at the Bristol homeopathic hospital, a survey that was full of holes.
If a homeopath tells you it works, they are either telling lies, or dangerously misguided.
You say "If a treatment works for you, it works, end of story. Surely?"
I disagree. Whilst placebo might be ok for your headache, or to help you feel better about a cold, it certainly won't protect you against malaria. Yet a recent investigation showed that of ten homeopaths consulted (the first ten found on an internet search) all of them would prescribe homeopathic pills to someone travelling to Africa instead of recommended seeing a doctor for a proper vaccination against malaria. This is dangerous. Very dangerous. But it can only happen if people think "there really is something in this whole homeopathy stuff".
"But horses are regularly given homeopathic remedies where other treatments may have previously failed, and good results are often achieved. How does that work?"
It doesn't. Or, if you prefer, it hasn't been proved to have worked.
Your example of using it on horses is interesting because of the inference that using a horse would give objective results, i.e. the conscious or unconscious bias or the subject is removed. But what about the conscious or unconscious bias of the tester? Wouldn't removing any chance of this bias give even more objective results? Of course.
So when you use a test that has no bias whatsoever, i,e, a double blind randomized placebo controlled trial, homeopathy always fails. Always.
Homeopathy is an extraordinary claim in that it defies simple mathematics (Avagadro's law) and is not based on any known chemical or physical principle.It demands extraordinary proof. Not anecodtal evidence based on small scale studies of homeopathic vets.
Homoepaths could change whole branches of science if their claims are true. Why are they not donning the lab coats and putting the Nobel panel on alert? Because it doesn't work.
"If a treatment works for you, it works, end of story. Surely?"
Only if the treatment actually works, or it doesnlt really matter if it does or not ( i.e. you are one of the 'worried well'). It is far from end of story if you are convinced, or have been convinced, that a treatment works for you but it turns out that the ache in the small of your back that your reiki healer was trying to treat and had reassured you about turned out to be caused by a tumour and he /she were unable to tell what it was.
Or if you thought that a homeopathic malaria concontion worked for you until you got back from holiday and 6 weeks later got ill.
The problem is that the media gives this stuff an easy ride, it is a massive industry that is not regulated or accountable, and the promotion of snake oil causes pain, suffering and death.
Last thing, I promise. Lynne McTaggart and Ramtha:
http://www.beyondtheordinary.net/ramtha.shtml
I thought the idea of an ancient spirit teacher being channelled through JZ Knight was ridiculous but then I saw the celebrity testimonials and realised I was just being cynical.
Andrew, I'm really having a hard time grasping why a critical, (amusingly) cynical and curious person like you would not see through this nonsense. If you saw this on Louis Theroux you would you take it seriously?
Seany, I am indeed a curious person. I am open to all sorts of new ideas. I personally think there's something in homeopathy because of anecdotal evidence and experience. Clearly, we're never going to agree on these areas. It's not important that you agree with me. I can go to a homeopath or an acupunturist or a nutritionist and if the time comes I can choose whether or not to have chemotherapy. I can also go to my doctor. I've already said that I prefer the term "complementary medicine" to "alternative". You can go to the doctor about a pain. I just find myself dissatisfied by the choices conventional medicine offers and seek other avenues, by reading, and thinking, and making up my own mind. I'm not religious, but I do believe in the power of the mind over the body. It's not spirituality as such, but it's more than just empirical evidence and facts and figures. I actually like that grey area. Why must you all try so hard to convince me I'm wrong? Are my interests and beliefs and viewpoints so threatening? This all started because I believe that Ben Goldacre has a problem with nutritionists that reflects a historical problem the male-dominated world has with women. I don't think McKeith is flawless, or that she was very clever to don the white coat, but I can't write her off, or Lynne McTaggart, or Patrick Holford, as I don't know for certain that any of them are wrong and I am personally persuaded by many of their arguments. Not all.
"The promotion of snake oil causes pain, suffering and death." As indeed does the promotion of conventional medicine. Is it a perfect world? No. And as for this truly "objective" test you demand for homeopathy. Perhaps there isn't one. If I get well, I don't need to see the paperwork. We must all follow our own individual paths through life.
Sorry if that sounds a bit wishy-washy for all your absolutist/rationalists.
Andrew, perhaps everyone who has commented on this blog entry are trying to convince you that you are wrong because sometimes you can come across as doing the same thing in other areas you have discussed (whether that is your intention or not), or perhaps it could be as simple as some people just feeling so strongly about it and are so confident that they are right?
I don't know. I don't have a view on this one way or the other, but I do get the same feeling as you that they are trying too hard to convince you. I can understand them commenting, but to keep on and on - as seany has - repeating the same things that everyone else has said to try to keep emphasising their point, does wear a bit thin after a while.
Everyone - Andrew isn't trying to force any of you to change your views, so give the man a break!
"Why must you all try so hard to convince me I'm wrong?"
I don't think I could convince you you are wrong and that is the difference between us( I'm 100% with you on Snow Patrol though). I am willing to be convinced .
But I'd like to see good evidence. Sure, there is a chance that Lynne McTaggart is right, but doesn't common sense and experience tell you this is extremely unlikely? Isn't it more likely that she is a a nutter? Do you not weigh up evidence and make judgements like this about people and situations all the time?
Of course you can write off what Lynne McTaggart says. If you are not religious you have written off theism and superstition and the leaders who tell you to take it all on 'faith'. As I said, I'm willing to be convinced that, for instance, homeopathy works. Show me the evidence. If you are not willing to be convinced in the face of evidence that homeopathy is no more than a placebo then you are taking a 'faith' position.
"If I get well, I don't need to see the paperwork."
Nor do I but I would prefer it if my physician had read and understood it.
You do sound wishy-washy but, as you say, each to their own. Do read the John Diamond book though.
Andrew, why is this so hard to understand. You may think there is something in homeopathy, but the objective studies show there is nothing in it. Sorry to break it to you, but in other words, "you are wrong".
In studies, as many people who took a placebo pill got better to the same extent as those who took a homeopathic pill. That means that your anecdotal evidence is essentially meaningless, since if you'd taken lactose pills thinking they were homeopathic remedies then it is likely that you would have got better as quickly as you did with homeopathy. It's all in the mind.
I'm happy to concede that taking a homeopathic remedy can make you better, BUT it has nothing to do with the remedy and EVERYTHING to do with your mind.
You seem like an intelligent chap. Surely you must understand this.
Now, unfortunately not everyone is a bright as you Andrew, and some people will think that homeopathy can protect them from and cure them of quite serious conditions. Particularly since some homeopaths seem to tell them this is the case.
If such people get ill and die from not seeking proper medical attention what are we to do? Start dishing out Darwin awards to them, or try to stop it happening in the first place?
Sorry for 'keeping on and on', I thought debate was good? Surely if you are going to express controversial opinions you should expect to have them challenged?
I'll leave the topic now but I'll continue to browse the site as I usualy do. I won't expect any changes of opinion on this subject though.
Andrew, I would like to have heard your opinion on McTaggart's webpage though, given you feel so strongly about the media coverage of 'wonder drugs'.
Paula J said
"Andrew isn't trying to force any of you to change your views, so give the man a break!"
Normally I wouldn't have bothered replying to a blog but I think Seany summed it up best when he said:
"I'm really having a hard time grasping why a critical, (amusingly) cynical and curious person like you would not see through this nonsense."
Thats exactly how I felt and is what motivated me to reply. It really just surprised me to see Andrew write something full of logical fallacies.
I don't think anyone is on some sort of fundamenalist cause to "convert" him. I'm guessing most of the science bods are atheists so I hope we don't sound like religous zealots. It's just hard not to feel strongly about this sort of guff especially when someone you respect is saying it.
First of all, can I state again that I do really rate Andrew as a writer, broadcaster, and blogger. This blog is one of the first things I turn to every day.
But I just want to say on the issue of homeopathy, I really do think he is wrong. And as Richard Dawkins has said, in refernce to the Creationism vs Evolution debate: just because there are two passionately expressed and different views to an issue doesn't mean that the truth is somewhere in between. It is possible for one side to be wrong.
I'll bring up the comparison of believing in homepathy vs not as being akin to believing in a flat earth vs not. I'm sure some people will take that as showing that scientists are arrogant and dismiss other points of view. But I must stress, that even though you may believe something with all your heart, that doesn't make it true.
Thats the reason why people keep commenting on the blog, not because they want to personally attack Gillian McKeith or Andrew for supporting her. Not because they want to insult anyone. Not because they feel threatened. But because some things such as homepathy can be empirically proven not to have any more effect than a placebo.
If you take a thousand people in a control group and give them a placebo and a thousand people in another control group and give them homepathic "medicine" there will be no difference between the groups. The placebo effect is a real and measurable effect - for example give someone a glass of water while dressed as a doctor and tell them it will make them feel better, and a proportion of people will feel better.
But there is no difference between the effects of homepathic "medicine" and the placebo effect.
* * *
It is frustrating talking about this, because obviously in some fields like most arts subjects there are many different answers to a problem. Each may have its own supporters and detratctors.
But in the field of science you can often show empirically that something is or is not correct. This isn't being arrogant or forceful, its just stating a fact. and it is a fact that there is no difference between the effects of homepathic "medicine" and the placebo effect.
* * *
Anyway, seperately I really liked the blog about the Brit awards, and I think fair play to Andrew for allowing lots of people to challenge him publicly.
Andrew, must comment on your assertion that "Dieticians, as I understand the distinction, government-approved as they may be, give advice based on one-size-fits-all philosophy (this is good for you, that isn't), whereas nutritionists treat the individual on an individual basis."
You understand wrong. To call yourself a dietitan you have to be registered by the Health Professionals Council, a governing body that maintains professional standards. You, me or Ben Goldacre's dead cat can call themselves a Nutritionist, as it is not a protected title.
And what on earth is the meaning by "one size fits all?" A dietitian will assess their patient's needs on an individual basis and prescribe an appropriate course of action based on evidence, peer review and years of hard study. Not really the work of a "philosophy".
I echo the previous bloggers comments, if you want to challenge your own thinking read John Diamond's Snake Oil or Derren Brown's latest book. Or feel free to continue to believe it is all a consipracy of western medicine if you like. Makes no difference to me - when I'm ill I shall be down the doctors not at the acupunturist (isn't strange how the average life expectancy in China has risen from 30 to over 70 since the adpoted "Western" medicine - must be just a coincidence.....)
"I believe that Ben Goldacre has a problem with nutritionists that reflects a historical problem the male-dominated world has with women"
I sympathise with what you're trying to say, but I think you should be more careful with these sorts of accusations. To me, the fact that you claim an aggressive, notoriously litigious multi-millionare is a "soft target" for criticism just because she's a woman seems equally liable to an interpretation of misogyny. I'm sure that's not your thought or intention just as I'm sure it's not Bens. I think you are being unfair to him here.
andrew collins said: "I personally think there's something in homeopathy..."
Heh; anyone who's looked into the science behind homeopathy would find that ironic and amusing.
Check out the maths Andrew: Hahnemann's recommended dilution 30C results in only one molecule of active ingredient in 10^60 molecules of water. That's more water than we have on the planet; with one molecule of active ingredient. Your homeopathic sugar pill quite literally has nothing in it.
Now your angry homeopath would make claims about 'water memory' and 'succussion' but none of this is based upon scientific evidence; just the 200 year old ramblings of a man who found out that doing nothing often leads to a better recovery rate than bloodletting or applying leeches.
I think Paula has hit the nail on the head in her first sentence.
Andrew, in one of your earlier responses you said (with reference to Goldacre) - "He has a platform in a national newspaper for his point of view, I do not. This is my chance to have my say."
For 'Goldacre' read 'Collins' and for 'national newspaper' read 'popular blog'.
Perhaps some of us who have no platform to express our views (other than the local) have a tendency to get over-excited when presented with a sitting target to vent spleen at.
And - with this subject at least - you have rather set the tone with a pretty full-on attack on Ben Goldacre's original piece.
Personally I think you've held up pretty well under some heavy fire. But I do wish you'd drop this
- "I believe that Ben Goldacre has a problem with nutritionists that reflects a historical problem the male-dominated world has with women." -
nonsense because it undermines the serious points you are making.
To say that 'to attack nutritionists...is to attack women' is piffle. I don't think that immediately qualifying that remark by saying you're sure Goldacre doesn't have a problem with women in any way lessens the impact of your original assertion.
He doesn't have a problem with women but he does still attack them (in print at least)? If I were Ben Goldacre I'm not sure I'd be terribly comforted by that.
I have no evidence beyond the anecdotal to back this up but I think that the modern medical world is one of the few sectors in which women have genuinely equal opportunities. Far from being looked upon with suspicion I would have thought that there are far more women in senior roles (be it as doctors, nurses or specialists) than is the case in other professions which remain very male-dominated.
Think my spleen has had a sufficient vent now. And I feel much better for it. Perhaps I should market it as a cure-all?
Well, I think Goldacre is reflecting the problem that the scientific world has with people who spout rubbish. Whether some of what she says is true or not is actually irrelevent, she is claiming the credits (in terms of respectability) of a scientific/medical background (calling herself Dr McKeith PhD) but not following the requirements of a scientific background in that she is saying things that have been clearly proven incorrect - spouting nonsense about chlorophyll and seeds having the energy of the whole tree.
Goldacre doesn't have a problem with, say Jamie Oliver just because he's a bloke, he doesn't have a problem with Oliver because he's not spouting mumbo-jumbo while claiming to be a doctor.
In short, if someone doesn't like absolutist/rationalists, they should not go around pretending to be one.
Important note: I have gone back to the original entry and changed the following. I no longer refer to Goldacre as an "Oxbridge GP" as he isn't a GP, it transpires, but a hospital doctor, and my factual use of the term "Oxbridge" (he actually studied at Oxford) was, I think, taken as a snooty bit of class warfare. I regret that implication, so it's gone. Also, for reasons of fairness, I have replaced "crows" with "states". My interpretation of his words was that he was "crowing" but perhaps this leads the witness, and "states" seems more prosaic. Also, because it seems it has drawn more heat that expected, I no longer even suggest that Goldacre subconsciously is having a go at women, even though nutritionists do tend to be female, as do a large majority of their clients (something I have picked up - eek! - anecdotally). I did say that I wasn't accusing him of accidental mysogyny, but if that's the inference, it's better excised.
I haven't altered anything else, and indeed, reading it back, it's not half as hysterical as the comments it has drawn might have you believe. I don't wish my original point to be lost in a discussion about a man I have never met's attitude to gender. It's not what the entry was about. It was about my concern that his rage at Gillian McKeith might hide a broader problem with nutritionists and their complentary ilk. Which I stand by. And a more general point about men and women.
We seem to be having a debate now about whether homeopathy works or not. It didn't start out that way. Scientific studies say it does not work. A number of patients would disagree. I remain open minded.
My own personal belief is that Lynne McTaggart is not a nutter. Her What Doctors Don't Tell You newsletter is a sensible, provocative read and gives an alternative view to many matters in the health field. Never mind her theories about quantum physics, which are a bit out of my frame of reference. It's her health writing that I like. That's the extent of it. I like it. She makes me think.
Tristan - how can you so boldly insist that I am wrong about homeopathy? I would only be wrong if I said I had pages of research that proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it works, and I don't. I still believe that there's something in it, and other non-conventional remedies. Yes, that's a belief, but it's arrogant to say that I am wrong. If I believed in God, would you say that I was wrong to do so, if you happened not to? I know for a fact that some who work in the field of medicine and science also believe in God. So it is possible for someone working from a clinical and empirical standpoint to also have a leap of faith. I've been to see doctors and complementary practitioners. I am entitled to make my own mind up from that experience. I am putting nobody at "risk" but myself.
Also, you write, "Unfortunately not everyone is a bright as you Andrew, and some people will think that homeopathy can protect them from and cure them of quite serious conditions . . . If such people get ill and die from not seeking proper medical attention what are we to do? Start dishing out Darwin awards to them, or try to stop it happening in the first place?" But who are "we"? We, the medical establishment? We, the clever people, here to protect the stupid people? We, the rationalists? We, the state? You must allow people to believe anything they wish to believe. It's a free society. People also get ill and die after seeking proper medical attention sometimes. Chemotherapy works for some people, and kills others. There are no absolutes in medicine.
"Some guy": I expected to be challenged, but I didn't realise my views were that controversial! Now I know what it's like to feel in the minority - very different to claiming a love for The Wire. It's an odd feeling. All I did was challenge the writing of another person. Now I am being challenged on his behalf. Goldacre is clearly in a large majority. That much I have learned. It's been a bracing debate, and I have published every single response. However, we're not getting anywhere, which suggests we should stop now. Thanks for contributing.
Liz wrotes, "the fact that you claim an aggressive, notoriously litigious multi-millionare is a 'soft target' for criticism just because she's a woman seems equally liable to an interpretation of misogyny." It might if I meant she was "soft" because she's a woman, Liz. I meant she was "soft" because she's famous and on the telly and instantly recognisable. There are other nutritionists on the telly, but attacking them wouldn't make a G2 cover story - that was my point. I don't think women are soft, and I regret giving you that erroneous inference. I hope you see what I mean now.
If I say that's the end of the matter, I expect about five further responses within the next half hour but I am spent. I've tried to respond to so many different points from so many different people. There's only one of me.
May I make one sensible recommendation, since we're all at it. Try this book by Patrick Holford - he's a better writer than McKeith, who explains herself badly, and he never claimed to be a doctor! - Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs. He bases his research on scientific trials and case histories. It's a good read, and does not read like the ramblings of a nutter.
Andrew, 'props' again for giving us the space to debate. Can somebody not come up with a young person - older person dictionary? Have I got the right phrase or do I look like my dad at a family wedding having 'a boogie'. (Cue Homer Simpson style shudder). And you are spot on re. The Wire - it is the reason the scientific method (and crack cocaine) was invented!
I hear what you say, I've got to some work to do too but this is important. Please allow me one more shake of the 'freedom of AC's blog' stick. I've got to call you on this and, to use a phrase I'm too old to fully understand, I think I pwn (sic) you on. I've made a lot of specific points about a lot of specific issues and you haven't really answered any of them, but you can answer yes or no to each of these:
"Vitamin C: It can cure cancer after all".
This is wrong, isn't it? Y / N
The evidence she cites to 'prove' what she is saying doesn't prove what she is saying Y / N
This is very poor reporting Y / N
It is misleading Y / N
It is a good example of media hype Y / N
It si the kind of one-sided and biased media reporting that deserves censure Y / N
It could lead people to make poor health choices Y / N
She doesn't know what she is talking about Y / N
She probably has some kind of agenda (sorry, I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories ) Y / N
It is unlikely that she has come up with a cure for cancer and a unified theory of the universe Y / N
Is the the standard of media debate you wish to see on health? Y / N
"Food Is Better Medicine Than Drugs".
No it isn't. Or if it is, for which diseases?
Cholera?
Malaria?
TB?
Yellow fever?
Rubella?
Chicken pox?
AIDS/HIV?
Yellow fever?
Chlamydia?
Leprosy?
Hepatitis?
Dengue fever?
Dysentry?
We could really help out the 3rd world with a few plane loads of mung beans couldn't we?
Or perhaps some some scientifically tested vaccines / antibiotics / anti-retrovirals would be better. What do you think?
This is not about western neuroses and ideas about 'choices' of different types of healthcare. It is about life or death. Which side are you on?
I hope that this has crystallised your thinking.
Andrew,
the idea that Ben's comments are the rantings of a subversive woman hater are ridiculous. The reason there are mostly women in this profession is down to money pure and simple. The wage is nothing more than a second income, it could not possibly support a family and therefore becomes a profession for women with children who want a flexible work schedule (I know this for a fact as I did the exact same degree course to gain my nutrition degree apart from the hospital placement work in the holidays and for the final year).
I also speak form experience when I say that sadly I got to the end of my BSc and realised that it counted for diddly in the real world and that I needed an MSc in public health nutrition and/ or work experience to get anywhere in the nutrition world that wasn't tied into the boring world of being a state registered dietician (my opinion and sorry to those that take offence!).
One more point. Ben's argument was thought out and well presented, yours appears to be a personal beef with him.
Sorry, pointless addition here but the year before last (I think), there was a fascinating tv series in which an open-minded scientist investigated various alternative remedies (I think) and was amazed by the power of placeboes, and to learn that some GPs in Germany (I think) actually prescribed them for various things. Sorry, bit hazy on the details. Anyway, it could well be that what you believe really makes a difference.
Andrew, I don't want to stop you working and I don't care whether this is published but for what it's worth:
My only beef with the medical profession is the image of self-confidence and certainty it likes to foster. Medical trials, when they don't kill people, are all about statistics. They're about what's safe statistically and what works statistically. There's nothing wrong with that at all, of course. The problem is that a lot of people perceive the drugs they're taking as being precision-tooled tablets that go directly to where the problem is and fix it. But the chemicals might be doing lots of different things in different parts of your body. That's my problem with the term "side-effect": there's no such thing; they're all direct effects. On balance, statistically, the trials find a drug to be safe and beneficial. But do any medical trials really prove there are no long-term effects that are far more serious than the problem the drug is being prescribed for? Is another thalidomide impossible now? I doubt it. I'm not saying that medical science is intrinsically a bad thing, I just wish that my doctor didn't behave like he knows everything. He's full of it, to coin a phrase.
Seany states that Viagra works.
Viagra may "work" but its effect is famously an unexpected side-effect. (And am I right in saying this only came to light in medical trials?) Now its intended effects are considered to be side-effects. And is it necessarily a good idea to "cure" erectile dysfunction on such a wide scale? Is erectile dysfunction really a dysfunction or is it one of the vital factors that has kept the human race going this long? Just a thought.
Mike said:
But in the field of science you can often show empirically that something is or is not correct. This isn't being arrogant or forceful, its just stating a fact. and it is a fact that there is no difference between the effects of homepathic "medicine" and the placebo effect.
Neither are facts. Empirically you can only show that something appears to be correct or incorrect. Science is about accumulating knowledge that appears to be consistent and correct. There are no certainties. (If you like, you can't prove that the Earth is never flat.) Which is why your second sentence should contain the word "statistically", or "statistical". In individual cases homeopathic remedies might work, and in a different way to the placebo effect. You might believe that's nonsense (and I'd probably agree with you), but unless you can prove it absolutely (and while you're at it get Dawkins to prove there are no gods), you really shouldn't state it as a fact. Otherwise you will look arrogant. And arrogance is an enemy of good science.
It is also highly dubious for rat10nal15t to imply that Western medicine alone is responsible for the increase in life expectancy in China. Science in general (especially hygiene) probably has more to do with it. Prevention is better than cure any day.
Andrew, the difference between believing in god (like you, I do not) and believing in homeopathy is great. That homeopathy works is a testable scientific hypothesis. The tests have been done, and show that it does not work. The numbers say it all!
To say that god exists might not be a testable hypothesis in the same way (though I'm only half way through the new Dawkins book which suggests it might be. I'm undecided). Therefore, whilst I believe there is no god, it is a different type of belief than believing homeopathy doesn't work. All the evidence shows that there is very little room for debate on this one. It simply doesn't work and better than placebo. To say there's something in homeopathy is just the same as saying there's something in placebo. We all know there is, but it's nothing to do with the pills!
Regarding Patrick Holford. He is a man, so I suppose he's more believable than McKeith...... just kidding! Actually, Holford is only a little better than McKeith, but not much. This is the man quotes proper research, but only to then go an misinterpret it. For example, he claims that Vitamin C is a better treatment than AZT for AIDS, based on a paper that says nothing of the sort. The same man who claims that half the population has a hidden food allergy. The same man who's only qualifications are an undergrad degree in psychology and a "Diploma in Nutritional Therapy" awarded to him by his own organisation. The man who uses a PR agency to edit his own wikipedia entry to remove anything critical yet factually accurate.
I'm afraid you'll have to do better than Holford.
i think it is good that this debate continues. I think all the medical professions can learn from each other, mainstream medicine can learn a lot from alternative medicine in treating patients as human. It's clear that one of the reasons people pay to see a homeopath is to feel they have been listened to. On the alternative side they can learn from mainstream in the use of precision in language. it's the amazing that people who will arguing to the death about whether a certain band are "goths" or emo" will blythly refer to "chemicals in food". Also the reluctance of alternative medcine to be regulated seems strange as if what they do has value why not protected it from the true charlatans and snake oil salesmen. Oh and one last thing you can have too much of a good thing too much Vit C can give you the runs!
Chris
Andrew (hello, we used to know each other years and years ago :) ),
One of my blog readers pointed me over here. There is way too much here to properly digest, but I do have several thing to say about what I've read so far.
Now, I, too, had a medical problem, like your asthma story, which doctors just wanted to treat with medicine. It would work for a while and then I'd get ill again. I ended up being referred to a specialist because my doctor thought that I must have some kind of organ failure for their medicine not to work. This went on and on for 18 months. Not only was I ill with my 'problem', but my immune system was shot, I caught every little bug going around and I had this horrible fainting problem where I'd pass out and have a fit at the most inopportune moments.
Then I read in a 'self-help' book that I should just drink a bit more water. I did. Problem solved. Honestly, it was as easy as drinking a LOT of water. (and using sea salt)
Years after that I was getting fed up with my hayfever. I would spend my summer months constantly on antihistamines. I tried 'drinking more water' one year and hardly needed any medicine... (Google the Water Cure)...
Fine. Sometimes 'unconventional' treatments work. Great.
That's not what the whole 'Gillian McKeith' thing is about. It's about her *lying* about her qualifications and WORSE THAN THAT Channel 4 adding some weight to her lies by putting her on telly (and she lied about her previous media experience in the States, too).
Like one of your previous commenters, I wouldn't have as much of a problem with McKeith if she was just 'some woman with a certificate in nutrition' who went on TV and told people to take care of themselves. It's that she calls herself a Doctor. Having a PhD *means* something more than just putting those three letters after your name.
Apparently, she got her fake PhD from the Clayton College of Natural Health... an online only distance learning 'college'. I've just now looked into their "accreditation". Her PhD is accredited by: The American Association of Drugless Practitioners and The American Naturopathic Medical Accreditation Board.
Neither of which turned up in the US Department of Education's Institutional Accreditation list.
Would you be happy putting your child's life in the hands of a doctor who got their PhD from an unaccredited distance learning college? If your child was seriously ill would you be happy to eschew all traditional medical treatment and just feed them more seeds, sprouts and water? Oh, go on. It works!!
Andrew: "A well-known experiment was done on heart cells. One was isolated in a Petri dish and it was seen to beat, because that's what heart cells do. Another heart cell was put in the dish and the two cells started to beat in time with one another. This showed that cells communicate in a way that we don't fully understand. There is clearly some vibrational element involved that doesn't include direct physical contact."
Do you have a reference for this? Otherwise it's just a bloke-down-the-pub anecdote. If the cells are in the same dish but not touching, I'm immediately thinking chemical signalling through whatever medium they're sitting in. Not, err, a "vibrational element" (booiinnnnnggggg).
"James Lovelock's Gaia Theory is that the whole world is one organism. Go and Google him. It took decades to be accepted, this theory, but it has now been accepted by all but the most hardened absolutists."
By 'all' what? All people? All scientists? All geoscientists? All environmentalists? I think you'd probably be wrong on all those counts, but my opinion is no better than yours unless either of us have figures to back it up.
I've read some Lovelock and while he's quite inspiring, and probably a force for good in the fight against climate change, him and his followers can be a little guilty of confusing a metaphor with objective fact.
You'll have noticed I said 'probably' a force for good. This is because there's a subtle undercurrent in some of his writing that it doesn't matter what us insignificant parasitic organisms do -- Gaia's immune system will repair the damage. I can see this being the sort of thing climate-change denialists might latch on to in a dangerous way. A little like the way Leakey & Lewin's book The Sixth Extinction, which is ostensibly pro-conservation and anti-exploitation, also contains the message that mass extinctions are natural and unavoidable and happen fairly regularly on the geological timescale, regardless of mere human effects. Critical reading is important, although I'm sure you know that already.
By the way, rationalism is a completely different thing from absolutism. Rationalism, for example, is saying "it doesn't matter whether I think this herbal remedy has cured my cold, or whether my friend thinks that; I'm willing to accept that we're both potentially liable to self-delusion, so I won't waste my money on it unless it's been shown to work in a way that factors out such possibilities."
Whereas a more absolutist viewpoint might be "I know this remedy works, because it definitely seemed to cure my cold quicker, without any objective frame of reference to compare it to; therefore I'll certainly buy it next time, regardless of any doubts on its efficacy that might come out of a broader and more objective test." See?
Andrew.
Folks - I think AC really meant it when he said he was 'spent' and had nothing more to add to this thread! Let's not bludgeon him over the head, eh?
Gia
"we used to know each other years and years ago :) ),"
Do you happen to appear in any of Andrew's books :)
Not being nosey - just interested.
Gia
Thanks a lot for your reply on my blog. Much appreciated.
Cheers
Gwen
Andrew,
Now look what you've gone and done by mentioning Holford! Just in the last 24hrs Holford's gone and:
1) Written an insane letter to The Guardian where in some wierd attempt to defend himself he basically admits that his qualifications are dodgy
2) Then goes on to proudly associate himself with a bunch of dangerous nutters (Dr Rath's people)
3) Finally he starts wildly editing his own wikipedia entry (take a look while it's still there).
McKeith, Holford, Jeffery Archer and the King of Scotland (Idi Amin). I'd just keep away from anybody that starts fabricating titles for themselves.
Anyway, I hope the next blog is not so stressful for either you or us ;-)
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Holford's research is far from flawless no matter how respectable he implies it is: he has been known to mention the existence of many studies as support for his claims, even when the papers contradict his claims.
There is HTTP://BREATHSPAKIDS.BLOGSPOT.COM/2007/02/WHY-IGG-TESTING-FOR-FOOD-INTOLERANCE-IS.HTML HREF="little scientific evidence to support the usefulness of Yorktests in diagnosing or confirming food intolerance. Encouraging people to use such tests and 'take power into their own hands' can have adverse consequences: it would be appropriate if Holford and others of his ilk were to acknowledge this.
You know, scientists are the reason why I didn't pursue physics after uni.
Seany:
If you gave the third world a clean and plentiful water supply, good drains, and - yes - food, it might not need quite so many expensive medicines. That's not to say your point is entirely invalid.
Tristan:
Dawkins will never prove God doesn't exist or come up with a test to prove it. That's not simply because you can't prove a negative; it's because he doesn't know what a god is. He has no terms of reference. I'm an atheist too but I'm happy to accept that that's as much a leap of faith as believing in gods. Science will never get you any further than agnosticism. (I'm not sure any of this really disagrees with what you said but I'm saying it anyway because I think Dawkins is a twonk. Him and Johnny Borrell.)
You say that tests have been done, and they show that homeopathy does not work. But they only show that statistically it's no better than the placebo effect. That isn't the same thing at all. (You do acknowledge this further down but you've already stated your conclusion by then.)
Statistics don't prove anything. By definition they're an indicator of probability; and they're only as good as your sample. It is simply dangerous for scientists to forget that. Nuts were 100% safe until someone with a nut allergy ate one. Thalidomide was safe for pregnant women to take until it wasn't. Metal fatigue in airliners (even ones designed on Newtonian principles) simply wasn't a factor until it had killed a few hundred people. Incredibly, burning millions of year's worth of coal and oil in a couple of hundred years seemed like a great idea until we realised it wasn't.
If homeopathy cures some people on a placebo effect alone, at least those patients aren't going to suffer early dementia or death or whatever because of some as yet unknown long term effect of the medicine they and thousands of other people have been prescribed. That's the only argument I'm prepared to make in favour of homeopathy, by the way.
It is perfectly reasonable to dismiss homeopathy because statistically it isn't effective. Just don't suggest that science has proved it doesn't work. It hasn't and (like Dawkins) it never will. (Although I can't prove that.)
Andrew....thank you for having such a fab website...I've really enjoyed it! Stupidly I got involved with the Guardian blog on Gillian McKeith, and oh boy do I regret it. What a painful waste of time. Will peruse more here and maybe add some thoughts of my own if you care to publish them. Frankly, I feel like a kicked puppy at the moment, and am shocked at how difficult it is to discuss anything remotely complementary with the science bods at the Guardian. I suspect my arguement wasn't very good, and I'm NOT looking for sympathy, but I naively thought well educated people, as I'm sure they all are would be more willng to listen to another's point of view. Absolutely not. They wanted to convert me. To show me the light, I guess. How ironic. Hope this is a warning to anyone who thinks that debate is a good way to progress our understanding of what surrounds us...it's a fabulous idea. Just not at the Guardian.
'Free rein', not 'free reign'.
Andrew...I have listened to your radio shows and read your blogs, which on the whole I have enjoyed, however, this article has left me puzzled.
Your opinions seem to be of a rational nature, however, this article displays some extremely irrational thinking. You talk about orthodox medical opinion as being hype. Surely something which is regarded as factual by qualified individuals cannot be called hype.
You also talk extensively about Ben Goldacre's opinion of Nutritionists. As I am aware, I could call myself a nutritionist without any sort of qualification. Calling nutritional therapy a new phenomenon is no excuse for individuals such as Gillian Mckeith exploiting the public's lack of scientific knowledge to make money. It seems clear to me that Mckeith is just advertising a balanced diet coupled with exercise. While this is clearly sound advice, it does not take a questionable "qualification" to make the public aware of this.
Perhaps her motives are moral and sound, however by making money out of public ignorance (for want of a better word), she is exploiting those who do not have, or care to find out, an understanding of even the most basic science. This may sound condescending, however, I believe it is imperative that people understand science so as to not allow for false claims to be mad in the news media.
As much as I admire much of your work, I believe this article is contributing to the mountins of false information that is being printed in much of our news media.
I hope you do not take this as an insult, as it was certainly not meant as one. Rather, I hope you take this in and see it as a differing opinion with a base of fact.
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