Briffa on Statins and CoenzymeQ10
Old news, I know – but it is one of Briffa’s hobby horses (not to mention Cybertiger, for those JABS aficionados reading this) and I happened upon an internet forum discussion that was linking to Briffa’s blog. His blog post contained this gem: Read the rest of this entry »
On Anonymous Bloggers
I think the title of this blog post puts it best: Marianne Mikko is wrong. The Estonian MEP is campaigning for bloggers to be identified – “We do not need to know the exact identity of bloggers. We need some credentials, a quality mark, a certain disclosure of who is writing and why. We need this to be able to trust and rely on the source”.
I first read about this in the Guardian, where Marcel Berlin wrote about the problems of “abuse, very personal remarks and hysterical ranting” in the comments threads that accompany his online articles. He also referred to libellous remarks. Let’s take Marcel’s comments first. If someone wrote something abusive about me in the comments section on my blog, I’d laugh. Read the rest of this entry »
Vitamins and Minerals: The Truth About Deficiency and RDAs
I’ve previously written a comment on the Holford Watch blog relating to the setting of RDAs in relation to the Orthomolecular Medicine claim that it is a myth that no-one is deficient in essential nutrients. Obviously, the OrthoMed rebuttal is of a straw man argument that “no-one” is deficient – which is not an argument I have ever heard used by any authority on nutrition – but I’m not here to talk about the use of logical fallacies by nutrition industry apologists. Read the rest of this entry »
PolyMVA Website – Encouraging Patients to Ignore their Oncologist
The PolyMVA survivors website is advising cancer patients to ignore their oncologist, to refuse chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy and to choose an alternative cancer treatment instead. Read the rest of this entry »
BANT – no opinion on Rath [updated]
I’ve received a response from the British Association of Nutritional Therapists to the email I sent regarding the actions of Matthias Rath in South Africa. Read the rest of this entry »
Critical Self-Appraisal In Alternative Medicine
Leaving this post completely blank would probably have been my funniest punchline yet.
I reckon all these branches of Alternative Medicine would probably benefit from a bit of critical self-appraisal: Homeopathy, Nutritionism, Reflexology, Reiki, Herbalism, Acupuncture, Chiropractic… but I have decided to focus quite narrowly on Read the rest of this entry »
Good News: Matthias Rath Drops Legal Case Against Goldacre and Guardian
Perhaps I should have maverickly titled this post “To the tune of one million dollars”. Perhaps not. [But, ah... the memories] Anyhoo, the story I’m writing about boils down to this: vitamin pill entrepeneur Matthias Rath had threatened to sue Ben Goldacre and the Guardian newspaper for $1,000,000 and, happily, has now pulled out of this case. Rath ‘failed the AIDS test’ – and in South Africa, a country with major problems not just with AIDS but with AIDS denialism – by promoting vitamin pills instead of antiretroviral drugs for sufferers. Before you finish (or instead of) reading my post, go to badscience.net and read Ben’s account. Read the rest of this entry »
An Idea Relating To Dr John Briffa’s Current Favourite Homeopathy Study (Arnica “Effective”)
I recently wrote about Dr John Briffa, making reference to his approving comments about a study into arnica as a post-operative aid. I had an idea that homeopathic treatments like arnica relied on the placebo effect and was surprised to see that Briffa’s post described arnica as “effective”. Read the rest of this entry »
