Complementary health warning

[Rolfe]

It's a knotty question. Expecting taxpayers' money to fund research to validate (or maybe otherwise) treatments already being sold to the public by private individuals seems nuts. We don't let pharmaceutical companies lauch their newest chemotherapeutic agent on a hunch, claim a few anecdotal cures, then demand that public money be used to research the drug. No way! These guys don't get to sell a single pill until safety and efficacy have been proved to any reasonable definition of safe and effective.

Ideally, nobody gets to offer any healthcare product to the public until they themselves have produced adequate evidence to satisfy the licensing authorities. In an ideal world.

But we don't have an ideal world. If it takes some investment to demonstrate that a lot of the stuff being peddled by the quacks is at best useless and at worst harmful, and so prevent the NHS spending even more money financing this nonsense, then maybe it will be money well spent.

Rolfe.

 

[Mojo]

The professor also takes a dim view of health "experts" who claim misleading qualifications. He has revealed that a top TV and celebrity nutritionist, Doctor Gillian McKeith PhD (http://www.drgillianmckeith.com), has nothing more than a "worthless" PhD in holistic nutrition gained via a postal course at a backwater US college.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2004352496,,00.html

I'm beginning to quite like Prof Ernst...

I know this is kind of an old thread, but I've recently discovered that McKeith is suing The Sun over that article.

I'm not sure how likely it is to actually come to trial. McKeith seems to have won this preliminary stage, so The Sun might want to settle.

 

[Deetee]

I have previously pointed out the Guardian's badscience columns on "Dr" McKeith

http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,12980,1280808,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,12980,1285600,00.html

Interestingly, he points out the error that she stated her PhD was from the American College of Nutrition.

She has claimed to have a PhD from the American College of Nutrition. In fact, she does not have a PhD from there. Her PR says this was an isolated, accidental error and an intern might have got the name of the college wrong. This is not an isolated error: she also claims to have a degree from the ACN in her book, Dr Gillian McKeith's Living Food for Health. Where is her PhD actually from? The same place as her Masters degree: the Clayton College of Natural Health.

I think the Sun should stick to its guns and force a public libel suit. Maybe she'd win - she doesn't like the idea that her PhD has been labelled"worthless" (paradoxically it is monetarily not worthless, though it might be regarded as "medically" worthless, since it has enabled her to let people think she is a medical doctor and earn her loadsamoney). I doubt whether she would wish that to be widely known tho.
If the Sun settles, there will just be a lot of publicity vindicating the "doctor"

 

[Drooper]

I suggest we take a literal interpretaion of these remarks:

Some of the few that had been vigorously tested did work, but others did not, he told a briefing on Monday.

A few have been rigorously tested - three.

Some work - One, maybe two.

 

[pgwenthold]

His relations with the complementary community remain troubled. "Virtually from the word go I've had problems with the complementary camp. Sometimes it subsides. But then as soon as we publish a negative result it flares up. We are champions so long as we produce positive results, but enemies when we produce negative ones." And many of the department's findings have, it must be said, proved negative.

His critics argue that he is too inflexible in his application of orthodox research methods; that most of his comments on complementary medicine seem unduly pessimistic; and that he should be using more subtle methods of assessing its effects.

Highlights are mine.

IOW, if it comes up positive, science is great. OTOH, if it comes up negative, science is not appropriate.

I guess if you start with the assumption it works, you can always conclude that it works, regardless of whether it is shown to work or not.