Herbal Medicine | Science Based Nutrition

September 7, 2010

Royal London Homeopathic Hospital rebranded. But how different will things be at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine?

Filed under: Acupuncture, Alternative Medicine, CAM, Herbal Medicine, Homeopathy, Peter Fisher, Royal London Homeopathic, Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, UCLH, Ucl Hospitals, badscience — David Colquhoun @ 3:01 pm

On Friday 25 August 2006, Michael Baum and I went to visit the rather palatial headquarters of the UCL Hospitals Trust (that is part of the NHS, not of UCL). We went to see David Fish, who was, at that time, in charge of specialist hospitals. That included world-leading hospitals like the National Hospital Queen Square, and Great Ormond Street children’s hospital. It also includes that great national embarrassment, the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital (RLHH).

It came as something of a surprise that the man in charge did not know the barmy postulates of homeopathy and he looked appropriately embarrassed when we told him.

Michael Baum is not only a cancer surgeon. but he has also taken the lead in thinking about palliative and spiritual needs of patients who suffer from cancer. Listen to his Samuel gee lecture: it is awe-inspiring. It is available in video, Concepts of Holism in Orthodox and Alternative Medicine.

The problem for UCLH Trust is that the RLHH has royal patronage One can imagine the frantic green-ink letters that would emanate form the Quacktitioner Royal, if it were to be shut down. Instead, we suggested that the name of the RLHH should be changed. Perhaps something like Hospital for palliative and supportive care? Well, four years later it has been changed, but the outcome is not at all satisfactory. From September it is to be known as the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine.

What’s wrong with that? You have to ask what is to be "integrated" with what?. In practice it usually means integrating things that don’t work with things that do. So not much advance there. In fact the weasel word "integrated" is just the latest in a series of euphemisms for quackery. First it was ‘alternative’ medicine. But that sounds a bit ‘new age’ (it is), so then it was rebranded ‘complementary medicine’. That sounds a bit more respectable. Now it is often "integrated medicine" (in the USA, "integrative"). That makes it sound as though it is already accepted. It is intended to deceive. See, for example, Prince of Wales Foundation for magic medicine: spin on the meaning of ‘integrated’, and What ‘holistic’ really means.

Of course the amount of homeopathy practised at the RLHH has fallen considerably over the last few years. Already by 2007 there were signs of panic among homeopaths, They are beginning to realise that the game is up. Some of the gaps were filled with other sorts of unproven and disproved medicine.

What the hospital is called matters less than what they do, The current activities can be seen on the UCLH web site.

Services:

Allergy Environmental and Nutritional Medicine

Autogenics Training

Children’s Clinic

Complementary Cancer Care Programme

Education services

Musculoskeletal Medicine Clinic

Pharmacy Services

Skin Services

Stress and Mood Disorders Clinic

The Marigold Clinic – Homeopathic Podiatry and Chiropody

Womens Clinic

It would be tedious to go through all of them, but here are some samples.

The Children’s Clinic

"The mainstay of treatments offered include Homeopathy, Herbal remedies, Flower essences, Essential oils, Tissue salts and Acupuncture. We also assess nutritional status, provide dietary advice and supplementation. Psychotherapeutic techniques including Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), and Visualisation are sometimes used where indicated, to gain better understanding of the presenting problems".

So a wide range of woo there. And they claim to be able to treat some potentially serious problems

"What can be treated

A wide variety of clinical conditions are being treated including:

Recurrent infections

Skin diseases such as eczema

Allergic disorders including asthma

Food intolerances and eating disorders

Functional developmental and learning problems

Behavioural disorders including ADHD (hyperactivity) and autism."

There is, of course, no evidence worth mentioning thar any of these conditions can be treated effectively by “Homeopathy, Herbal remedies, Flower essences, Essential oils, Tissue salts and Acupuncture”.

They describe their success rate thus:

An internal audit questionnaire showed that 70% of children responded well to homeopathic treatment

So, no published data, and no control group. This is insulting to any patient with half a brain.

These claims should be referred to the Advertising Standards Authority and/or Trading standards. They are almost certainly illegal under the Consumer Protection Regulations (May 2008). The UCLH Trust should be ashamed of itself.

Education Services offers mainly courses in homeopathy, the medicines that contain no medicine,

Pharmacy Services stock thousands of bottles of pills, most of which are identical sugar pills. It’s hard to imagine a greater waste of money.

The Marigold Clinic – Homeopathic Podiatry and Chiropody

I was rather surprised to find this is still running. In 2006, I wrote about it in Conflicts of interest at the Homeopathic Hospital. It turned out that the prescription costs if the clinic were spent on Marigold paste, made by a company owned by the people who run the clinic. UCLH claimed that they were aware of this conflict of interest, but had no obligation to make it public. That is an odd ethics in itself. Even odder when I discovered that the Trust had been notified of the conflict of interest only after I’d started to ask questions.

The same people are still running the clinic. They may well be good chiropodists, If so why surround the service with woo. There are, almost needless to say, no good trials of the efficacy of marigold paste (and it isn’t homeopathic).

Conclusion

At the moment, it appears that the renaming of the RLHH is empty re-branding. No doubt UCLH Trust see homeopathy as something that brings shame on a modern medical service. But to remove the name while retaining the nonsense is simply dishonest. Let’s hope that the name change will be followed by real changes in the sort of medicine practised, Changes to real medicine, one hopes.

Other blogs on this topic

Gimpyblog was first, with Farewell to the RLHH, hello to the RLHIM

Quackometer posted An Obituary: Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, 1849-2010

Follow-up

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June 22, 2010

Hot and cold herbal nonsense from Napier University Edinburgh: another course shuts.

Western herbal medicine need not be mystical nonsense, but it usually it is,

Plants often contain chemicals that have pharmacological actions, with all the possibilities for good and for harm that implies (see Plants
as medicines). It would be quite possible to teach about the plant constituents and their actions in an entirely scientific way, but it seems that this is not what courses in herbal medicine choose to do. That is why they shouldn’t be called Bachelor of Science degrees.

We have recently revealed the ancient nonsense taught at Middlesex University in its "BSc (Hons)" degree in Traditional Chinese Medicine in Dangerous Chinese medicine taught at Middlesex University as well as similar dangerous gobbledygook from the University of Westminster: see Why degrees in Chinese medicine are a danger to patients.

Western Herbal medicine does not talk about "knotted spleen Qi", but has an equally barmy mystical vocabulary of its own. They have in common a tendency to divide herbs into hot and cold, a crude and baseless classification that dates from a time when nothing was known about physiology or the causes of disease.

A recent post described the problems of finding out what exactly is taught on these courses: Not much Freedom of Information at University of Wales, University of Kingston, Robert Gordon University or Napier University

I lodged a Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act with Napier University Edinburgh on 10th August 2009. As almost always, it was refused, as was the internal review of my request. The response to the internal review came from Gerry Webber BA (Hons) 0 PHil MBA MCMI AUA (Fellow). Despite all those impressive sounding letters, he argued with a perfectly straight face that it was perfectly all right for the university to teach this sort of stuff. He ended

“On public interest grounds, I have therefore concluded that, in respect of the commercially sensitive information requested, the public interest is better served in withholding the information you have requested than in disclosing it.”

Despite all those impressive sounding letters after Dr Webber’s name, here was a solemn letter, on the university letterhead, defending the teaching of pseudoscientific nonsense The experience is surreal, but far from unique.

Although we won a judgement that compelled disclosure from the Information Commissioner for England and Wales, the Scottish law is slightly different so I had to appeal to the Scottish Information commissioner. [Download appeal]

A similar appeal was lodged for Robert Gordon’s University Aberdeen. They have already sent some homeopathy materials, and closed down the homeopathy course, as described at: Robert Gordon University stops its homeopathy course. Quackademia is crumbling. Napier University followed the same pattern, but a bit more slowly. They sent some of what I asked for without waiting for a formal judgement, after they had been contacted by the Scottish Information Commissioner.

Napier also shut down the degree from which the slides, below, were used. It is fascinating that so many places have done this shortly before what is taught is made public. Before that time the courses are defended and advertised. no doubt by people who have never given a moment’s thought to what is taught. In 2007, after my Nature article on the topic, the Glasgow Herald said

A spokeswoman for Napier University said it stood by the integrity of its BSc degrees.

“The BSc Herbal Medicine course uses an approach to teaching and training that we believe best prepares students for practice within a modern integrated healthcare system,” she said.

The university’s brochure for the course (still, carelessly, on the web at the time of writing), waxed lyrical about the herbal medicine course. Yet as soon as it becomes known what’s actually taught, the courses close.

What was taught on Napier’s Herbal Medicine “BSc”.

Materia medica starts with hot and cold herbs

napier 1

napier 2

Yes, but one of the problems is that very little is known about the therapeutic actions of herbs from "controlled enquiry". The material just isn’t there to fulfil this aim. To paraphrase their quotation,,you can call anything medicine, but plenty of people will argue with you if you can’t produce the evidence.

napier 3

This slide strikes me as pure pre-scientific gobbledygook. All herbs and all diseases seem to fall into the ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ class. The ‘argument’ is entirely circular. Pure pseudoscience (is that what the lecturer told them in response to the last question?).

napier 4

napier 5

What do all these conditions have in common? They are all "cold". How can anyone take this sort of baloney seriously?

napier 6

napier 7

This quotation appears to have no comprehensible meaning at all. It carries overtones of the great "detox" fraud, and so perhaps is useful justification for slimming the wallets of the gullible.

Now we come to a real herb.

napier 8

napier 9

There is some real chenistry in this slide. Unfortunately it simply isn’t known whether these chemicals have any useful function. Usually it isn’t known either what dose of them you are giving in tincture of valerian. When I worked in a pharmacy in the 1950s, you could still find tincture of valerian on the shelves of a normal pharmacy, but iit soon vanished as paople realised it wasn’t much use. Disappeared from normal medicine, that is. it is still alive and well among herbalists.

Notice too, the mention of "synergy". The perpetual excuse of herbalists for giving impure mixtures of chemicals is that they might act synergistically. They are undeterred by the fact that no such synergy has ever been demonstrated properly. I asked that question ot Liz Williamson. editor of Potter’s herbal Cyclopedia, but answer came there none.

I’d be interested to know what answer was given to the last question, which isn’t as simple as it sounds. I wouldn’t mind betting it didn’t include a critical description of isobol analysis.

So what does Valerian do?

napier 10

It seems, even from the lecture, that there is no unanimity that it does anything useful at all.

napier 11

napier 12

There is no worthwhile evidence to think it is useful for "generalises anxiety disorder" Let’s take another opinion.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is the branch of the US National Institutes of Health which has spent around a billion dollars of US taxpayers’ money on research into alternative medicine, For all that effort they have failed to come up with a single useful treatment. Clearly they should be shut down. Nevertheless, as an organisation that is enthusiastic about alternative medicine, it’s interesting to see what they have to say about valerian.

What the Science Says

Research suggests that valerian may be helpful for insomnia, but there is not enough evidence from well-designed studies to confirm this.

There is not enough scientific evidence to determine whether valerian works for anxiety or for other conditions, such as depression and headaches.

Even NCCAM don’t pretend that there is any good reason to think it’s good for anything. So, you might ask, why are students being taught to treat people with it?

Simon Mills on "hot and cold herbs"

Many of the slides refer to a book by herbalist Simon Mills. You can see a video of a talk he gave in which he ‘explains’ "hot and cold herbs". It strikes me as pure gobbledygook. Make up your own mind.

Now take the test

This is a question from a Napier University exam paper

exam1
exam2

Which constituents are responsible for the actions of saw palmetto? Which actions would they be? This is what The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) says
about saw palmetto.

What the Science Says

Several small studies suggest that saw palmetto may be effective for treating BPH symptoms.

In 2006, a large study of 225 men with moderate-to-severe BPH found no improvement with 320 mg saw palmetto daily for 1 year versus placebo. NCCAM cofunded the study with the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

There is not enough scientific evidence to support the use of saw palmetto for reducing the size of an enlarged prostate or for any other conditions.

Saw palmetto does not appear to affect readings of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels. PSA is protein produced by cells in the prostate. The PSA test is used to screen for prostate cancer and to monitor patients who have had prostate cancer.

Magic Medicine

In the materials that I was sent, I see nothing to make me believe that herbalism is being taught as science. On the contrary, it all seems to confirm the definition given in the Patients’ Guide to Magic Medicine.

herbal magic

Herbal medicine BSc degrees still exist.

They are still running at the following universities.

The vice-chancellors are named because they are the people who must take responsibility for this sort of nonsense being taught in their universities.

University of East London (vice-chancellor from Feb 2010 is Patrick McGhee, who, in his previous job at University of Central Lancashire, did so much to prevent me from getting hold of their teaching materials, but then closed the courses anyway)

University of Lincoln (Vice chancellor, Professor Mary Stuart)

London Metropolitan University (vice-chancellor, (interim vice chancellor, Alfred Morris)

Middlesex University (vice-chancellor, Professor Michael Driscoll)

And, of course, the home of woo, the University of Westminster (vice-chancellor, Professor Geoffrey Petts). Their students are taught that Amethysts emit high Yin energy and that dowsing and pendulums can be used for diagnosis and treatment.

By the same token, we may congratulate Professor Dame Joan Stringer, vice-chancellor of Napier University Edinburgh for closing down the course from which these slides came. Perhaps now she should consider closing their ‘degrees’ in aromatherapy and ‘reflexology’

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April 8, 2010

Robert Gordon University stops its homeopathy course. Quackademia is crumbling

Filed under: Academia, Department Of Health, Foundation for Integrated Health, Freedom Of Information, Herbal Medicine, Homeopathy, Michael Pittilo, Pittilo, Robert Gordon's university, Universities, politics, quackademia — David Colquhoun @ 11:04 pm

Yet another university has stopped its homeopathy course. The particular interest of this course was that it was being run at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, the vice-chancellor which was Michael Pittilo, until his recent premature death. Pittilo is the person who recommended to the government that herbalists and Chinese medicine practitioners should get honours degrees and be regulated like doctors. His report, was, in my opinions, disastrously bad.

It recently emerged that this, very bad, advice would not be accepted by the Department of Health (DH), so the campaign against the Pittilo proposals, on this blog and elsewhere was successful. The alternative DH proposals look pretty silly, but we won’t really know until after the election exactly what will happen.

Robert Gordon University (RGU): is the ‘post-1992′ university in Aberdeen, as opposed the the University of Aberdeen (where my son is at the moment). Much of RGU does an excellent job, but like so many post-1992 universities they harm themselves by running courses in barmy alternative medicine. RGU ran an Introduction To Homeopathy module.

In July 2009, I asked RGU to see some samples of the teaching materials on this module, partly as part of the campaign against Pittilo’s proposals. I asked to see the powerpoints and handouts for three lectures, (1) evidence for homeopathy, (2) first aid remedies, and (3) allergies.

In September 2009, this request, made under the Freedom of Information Act (Scotland), was, as always, rejected by RGU, though they did tell me that the evidence lecture had been produced by a lecturer from The Faculty of Homeopathy and the other two had been produced by a local GP.

So, as usual, I asked for the mandatory internal review of the decision. In October, the review upheld the original decision, as they almost always do. I referred the decision to the Scottish Information Commissioner (the law is slightly different in Scotland) and they have still not responded.

But on 8 April 2010 I got a letter from RGU.

“The above course requested is no longer part of the School of Nursing and Midwifery’s provision, and it was cessated [sic] in Semester One 2009/10. This followed a formal review of all Nursing and Midwifery modules and their viability. In the light of this the university has decided to release the information.”

So yet another university has done the sensible thing. The course has been shut. Just for the record, I’ll reproduce a few of the slides from the lecture on “homeopathic remedies for allergies”.

Allergies can be dangerous, and occasionally lethal. To treat them with homeopathic pills, medicines that contain no medicine, is not just delusion, but a dangerous delusion which risks the lives of patients.

The "remedies" include nettles, sulphur, petroleum and arsenic. They’d be pretty scary but in fact the pills contain, in most cases, not a jot of nettle, sulphur, petroleum or arsenic. Homeopathic pharmacies stock thousands of bottles of identical sugar pills, each with a different label.

These dangerous delusions were being taught as fact in a UK university. The shame of it..

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February 12, 2010

More fails for the Freedom of Information, and a bit of history

Every single request for information about course materials in quack medicine that I have ever sent has been turned down by universities,

It is hardly as important as as refusal of FoI requests to see climate change documents, but it does indicate that some vice-chancellors are not very interested in openness. This secretiveness is exactly the sort of thing that leads to lack of trust in universities and in science as a whole.

The one case that I have won took over three years and an Information Tribunal decision against the University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN) before I got anything.

UCLAN spent £80,307.95.(inc VAT) in legal expenses alone (plus heaven knows how much in staff time) to prevent us from seeing what was taught on their now defunct “BSc (Hons) homeopathy”. This does not seem to me to be good use of taxpayers’ money. A small sample of what was taught has already been posted (more to come). It is very obvious why the university wanted to keep it secret, and equally obvious that it is in the public interest that it should be seen.

UCLAN had dropped not only its homeopathy "degree" before the information was revealed, They also set up an internal inquiry into all the rest of their courses in magic medicine which ended with the dumping of all of them.

Well, not quite all, There was one left. An “MSc” in homeopathy by e-learning. Why this was allowed to continue after the findings of UCLAN’s internal review, heaven only knows. It is run by the same Kate Chatfield who ran the now defunct BSc. Having started to defend the reputation against the harm done to it by offering this sort of rubbish, I thought I should finish. So I asked for the contents of this course too. It is, after all, much the same title as the course that UCLAN had just been ordered to release. But no, this request too was met with a refusal

Worse still, the refusal was claimed under section 43(2) if the Freedom of Information Act 2000. That is the public interest defence, The very defence that was dismissed in scathing terms by the Information Tribunal less than two months ago,

To add insult to injury, UCLAN said that it would make available the contents of the 86 modules in the course under its publication scheme, at a cost of £20 per module, That comes to £1,720 for the course, Some freedom of information.

Because this was a new request, it now has to go through the process of an internal reviw of the decision before it can ne referred to the Information Commissioner. That will be requested, and since internal reviews have, so far, never changed the initial judgment. the appeal to the Information Commissioner should be submitted within the month. I have been promised that the Information Commissioner will deal with it much faster this time than the two years it took last time.

And a bit more unfreedom

Middlesex University

I first asked Middlesex for materials from their homeopathy course on 1 Oct 2008. These courses are validated by Middlesex university (MU) but actually run by the Centre for Homeopathic Education. Thw MU site barely mentions homeopathy and all I got was the usual excuse that the uninsersity did not possess the teaching materials. As usual, the validation had been done without without looking at what was actually being taught. The did send me the validation document though [download it] As usual, the validation document shows no sign at all of the fact that the usbject of the "BSc" is utter nonsense. One wonderful passage says

“. . . the Panel were assured that the Team are clearly producing practitioners but wanted to explore what makes these students graduates? The Team stated that the training reflects the professional standards that govern the programme and the graduateness is achieved through developing knowledge by being able to access sources and critically analyse these sources . . . “

Given that the most prominent characteristic of homeopaths (and other advocates of magic medicine) is total lack of critical ability, this is hilarious. If they had critical ability they wouldn’t be homeopaths. Hilarious is not quite the right word, It is tragic that nonsense like this can be found in an official university document.

Middlesex, though it doesn’t advertise homeopathy, does advertise degrees in Traditional
Chinese Medicine, Herbal Medicine and Ayurveda. On 2nd February 2010 I asked for teaching materials from these courses. Guess what? The request was refused. In this case the exemptions under FOIA were not even invoked but I was told that "All these materials are presently available only in one format at the University – via a student-only accessed virtual learning environment. ". Seems that they can’t print out the bits that I asked for, The internal review has been requested, then we shall see what the Information Commissioner has to say.

Two other cases are at present being considered by the Information Commissioner (Scotland), after requests under the Scottish FoIA were refused. They are interesting cases because they bear on the decision, currently being considered by the government, about whether they should implement the recommendations of the execrable Pittilo report.

Napier University Edinburgh. The first was for teaching material form the herbal medicine course at Napier University Edinburgh. I notice that this course no longer appears in UCAS or on Napier’s own web site, so maybe the idea that its contents might be disclosed has been sufficient to make the university do the sensible thing.

Robert Gordon University Aberdeen The second request was for teaching material from the “Introduction to Homeopathy” course at the Robert Gordon University Aberdeen. The particular interest that attaches to this is that the vice-chancellor of Robert Gordon university is Michael Pittilo. The fact that he is willing to tolerate such a course in his own university seems to me to disqualify him from expressing any view on medical subjects.

Michael Pittilo, Crohn’s disease and Andrew Wakefield

Michael Pittilo has not been active in science for some time now, but Medline does show scientiifc publications for Pittilo RM, between 1979 anf 1998. Between 1989 and 1995 there are five papers published jointly with one Andrew Wakefield. These papers alleged a relationship between measles virus and Crohn’s disease. The papers were published before tha infamous 1998 paper by Wakefield in the Lancet (now retracted) that brought disgrace on Wakefield and probably caused unnecessary deaths.. The link between measles and Crohn’s disease is now equally disproved.

The subject has been reviewed by Korzenik (2005) in Past and Current Theories of Etiology of IBD. Toothpaste, Worms, and Refrigerators

“Wakefield et al proposed that Crohn’s results from a chronic infection of submucosal endothelium of the intestines with the measles virus [Crohn's disease: pathogenesis and persistent measles virus infection. Wakefield AJ, Ekbom A, Dhillon AP, Pittilo RM, Pounder RE., Gastroenterology, 1995, 108(3):911-6]“

"This led to considerable media interest and< public concern over use of live measles vaccine as well as other vaccines. A number of researchers countered these claims, with other studies finding that titers to measles were not increased in Crohn’s patients, granulomas were not associated with endothelium ^{49 , measles were not in granulomas⁵⁰ and the measles vaccine is not associated with an increased risk of Crohn’s disease^{51–55 "}}

This bit of history is not strictly relevant to the Pittilo report, but I do find quite puzzling how the government chooses people from whom it wishes to get advice about medical problems.

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February 4, 2010

Mass placebocide attempt. The 10:23 campaign

Filed under: Alliance Boots, Andy Hornby, Boots, Herbal Medicine, Homeopathy, Michael Pittilo, Vice Chancellors, badscience — Tags: Advertising Campaign, Advertising Standards Authority, Australia And New Zealand, Bad Advice, Boots Chemist, Boots The Chemist, Canada Australia, Dishonesty, Enormous Publicity, Expert Team, Gimmick, Gross Insult, Homeopathy, Important Things, Pharmacy Chain, Publicity Effort, Quackery, Shop Staff, Skeptics Society, Vitamin Pills — David Colquhoun @ 2:31 pm

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I don’t know about you, but I’m bored stiff with homeopathy. There are a lot more important things. Nevertheless, it remains a gross insult to reason, and there has been such enormous success in combating it over the last five years so, this is not the moment to stop.

Hats off to the Merseyside Skeptics Society. I admit that when I first heard about the 10:23 campaign, it seemed to be a bit of a gimmick, but in fact it turned out to be an enormous success., not just in the UK but also in Canada, Australia and New Zealand

The campaign was focussed on Boots, the UK’s biggest pharmacy chain, In particular the fact that Boots sell homeopathic pills. and regularly gives appallingly bad advice about all forms of quackery that they stock.

I’ve been criticising Boots for years now, starting with Mis-education at Boots the Chemist in May 2006. was largely about homeopathy, but Boots’ quackery is not restricted to homeopathy, In November 2007, Don’t Trust Boots described Boots’ promotion of vitamin pills that were
advertised by Boots to increase your energy, and also the appallingly bad advice given by shop staff on this product.

In March 2008, Boots did it again, with a big promotion written up as Boots reaches new level of dishonesty with CoQ10 promotion. The strategy seems clear by now. Launch an enormous publicity effort, and rely on journalists to parrot the press release. Put mendacious advertisements in every newspaper. Eventually the advertisements are found to be inaccurate by the Advertising Standards Authority. Boots are told to stop using the advertisement, but suffer no penalty at all. By that time the advertising campaign is over anyway, and they can rely now on inaccurate advice from "Boots expert team"; face to face in the store, to continue the promotion in a way that evades all regulation.

Boots is deeply involved too in the great ‘detox’ scam, as recounted, for example, in “Detox”: nonsense for the gullible, along with the Prince of Wales. And, most recently, Lactium: more rubbish from Boots the Chemists. And a more serious problem.

The nauseating hypocrisy of Boots’ Corporate Social Responsibility statement beggars belief. The same stuff is repeated on the current Alliance Boots site.

“Trust – The essence of the way we do business. We are trusted because we deliver on our promises.”

You must be joking.

Who owns Boots?

Boots started in 1849 as a single shop in Nottingham. Within my lifetime, they were rather ethical pharmacies (my recollection is that they didn’t sell homeopathic pills). They were also an ethical pharmaceutical company. They developed ibuprofen, which was launched in 1969. But since then the company was involved in a complicated series of acquisitions. Now it is a supranational conglomerate with presence in 20 countries, and almost beyond the reach of the law. Boots’ executive chairman is Stefano Pessina, who, with private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in a £11.1 billion deal last year, took the firm private in 2007. In 2008 they announced a 20% increase in profits, to £771 million In 2008 they moved their headquarters out of the UK, to Geneva, partly, it seems, so they can be closer to other giants of Big Pharma, and partly, no doubt, to put pressure on the UK government not to tax them too much, On the other hand, tax may not be a big consideration because, according to The Times, the ultimate owners of Boots are based in Gibralter

The disgraced head of HBOS, Andy Hornby, was appointed as chief executive of Alliance Boots in June 2009. Before playing his part in ruining the UK economy he used to work for grocery chain, Asda. I’d guess that he has limited interest in pharmacology.

The economics of such organisations are beyond most people. a bit like the two cow economics joke perhaps.

"VENTURE CAPITALISM – AN ICELANDIC CORPORATION

You have two cows.

You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public then buys your bull."

Clearly there is not the slightest chance of an organisation like this will have any sort of conscience about selling useless pills, The only way that they can be influenced is by public mockery of their outrageous behaviour. If the publicity harms their image enough they may decide to cut their losses, because it pays, not because it is right.

10:23 a great success

The campaign was a success because it got good coverage in the newspapers, radio and TV. Boots, rather like vice-chancellors, seems to be uninterested in reason or morals, but will certainly be sensitive about its public image, There is a partial list of coverage at the 10.23 site.

Laura Donnelly had a good account in the Telegraph, "Homeopathy: medicine that’s hard to swallow?". And Hadley Freeman in the Guardian showed that fashion journalists can spot nonsense too, in "Me and my homeopathic overdose. How I knocked back a bottle of homeopathic ‘medicine’ and lived to tell the tale"

The spoof published on the NewsArse site (despite the name, it is excellent) hit the nail on the head, because it uses exactly the naive sort of post ho ergo propter hoc argument that homoeopaths love.,

Homeopathy proven to work after overdosing protesters eventually fall asleep

Homeopathic practitioners are today claiming victory for the efficacy of their remedies, after a protest by the 10:23 group who overdosed on homeopathic sleeping pills, left each participant asleep within just 36 hours of taking the remedy.

Funniest of all though, was the bleating by homeopaths themselves. Try, for example, Homeopathy Heals. Like all the others it alleges a conspiracy by big Pharma: “it seems to be driven by those working for Pharma behind the scenes”. It seems to have escaped the attention of these conspiritorialists that the demonstration was aimed at Boots and Boots IS Big Pharma. The two are inextricably linked and both use the same tactics to increase sales.

My small contribution

Apart form contributing to Laura Donnelly’s piece in the Telegraph, "Homeopathy: medicine that’s hard to swallow?"., I had a few more calls.

Mary English, homeopath and astrologer

The most interesting was a talk show on Radio 5 live, where I was was pitted against a homeopath, Mary English [download the mp3 file, 4.4
Mb]. Having come across Mary English before, I was well-prepared to talk about her record not only in homeopathy, but also in astrology. The presenter didn’t give me time to raise these points but he did a pretty good job himself in asking her the relevant questions.

Mary English’s website is a delight. "Homeopathy and Astrology can heal you".

" If you eat a whole bottle of them it wouldn’t make any difference because it’s the dose that you have, not the quantity of the tablets"

"It’s the frequency of dose . . .because it’s vibrational medicine"

The host asked "what’s vibrational medicine?"

"it works with your bodies systems as opposed to against it"

No doubt Mary English is quite sincere, She just, like so many homeopaths, seems to be quite unaware that these words don’t mean anything at all. Just pure gobbeldygook.

Some of her claims are bizarre, even by the standards of homeopaths. She has researched the birth charts of Indigo Children, and written a book, "How to survive a Pisces" Her claim to homeopathic fame is that she has done "provings" of "remedies" including thunderstorm, and shipwreck and Stanton Drew Stone Circle, and Old Wardour Castle. Ahem, suddenly Arnica 30C sounds quite sane.

Less excusably, Mary English went on to claim that there is good evidence that homeopathy works. She just hasn’t read, or hasn’t understood the evidence. But since she earns her living as a homeopath
and astrologer, she hasn’t got much incentive to read the evidence. if she did, her income would dry up.

The presenter put directly to Mary English the recommendation of homeopathy for malaria prevention. "You wouldn’t condone that would you?". Quite disgracefully that question was avoided. She
changed the subject without answering the question. The quackometer’s classic post on The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing came to mind (see also here for links to full text)

Some herbal stuff

Herbal medicine rather than homeopathy was the topic of the other two weekend gigs. That arose from the Pittilo proposals for statutory regulation of herbalists and Chinese medicine.

The BBC TV interview, together with a herbalist, Rhona Edmonds, is now in YouTube. A Welsh member of the European parliament, Jill Evans (Plaid Cymru) , has been backing herbalists on the grounds that they are a “well-respected profession”. Oh yes? The Prince of Wales has also had support from another MEP. Mike Nattrass (UKIP). It seems that our fringe parties have even more trouble with science than the Labour and Conservative parties (and, tragically, that includes the Green party too).

There was also an early morning talk show interview on Sunday 31 January, against the same herbalist [download mp3 file] She claims "we treat all sorts of conditions",. Yes indeed, that’s the problem. "If we were recognised it would give the public even more confidence". And that is the problem too. They don’t deserve that confidence.

The analogy between alternative medicine and religion is often striking. Both involve blind faith, and both are characterised by tendency to split into sects that war with each other even more viciously than they war with unbelievers. All the discussions of herbalism ignore the fact that an enormous number of herbalists (2536 as of 4th February) have signed a petition opposing the idea of statutory regulation, even in the ineffective form that is being proposed.

The Prince of Wales declares war on . . . the Enlightenment

That was the headline of an article in The Times (February 4th, 2010). There can be no more high profile propagandist for every form of magic medicine than the Prince of Wales. Nothing seems to stretch his credulity. But even I was taken aback by his latest pronouncement. It seems he’s been called an enemy of the enlightenment (yes, by me among many others).

“I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment,” “I felt proud of that.”

“We cannot go on like this, just imagining that the principles of the Enlightenment still apply now. I don’t believe they do. But if you challenge people who hold the Enlightenment as the ultimate answer to everything, you do really upset them.”

So it seems he wants to return medicine not just to 1800, but to 1500, the dark ages. Can he really think that life in 1500 was some sort of utopia? Of course one suspects that his disapproval of the enlightenment is restricted to medical matters. He hasn’t been seen to reject other products of the enlightenment, like cars, aircraft, telephones, radio, TV and the internet.

I suspect that the Prince of Wales needs a history lesson.

Follow-up

Thanks to a colleague for pointing out an excellent sketch from the Newsjack show on BBC Radio 7, broadcast on 4th February 2009. [download mp3 file, 2.4 Mb]. I quote.

“Last weekend, people up and down rhe country engaged in a mass anti-homeopathy protest, swallowing whole bottles of remedies outside Boots.”

“It’s very easy to sneer at homeopathy but we at Newsjack believe it’s important to listen to both sides of the debate. So to put the case for homeopathy we have invited on a ridiculous charlatan who extorts money from innocent people while providing no services of any actual value.”

“Will you please welcome His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales”

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