(This post is mostly quotes, for which I make no apology because the easiest way to mock this kind of nut-job is simply to hand him sufficient rope.)

The ‘Kadir-Buxton Method’ is a treatment for mental-health problems which he invented “decades ago”:

The procedure stuns and resets the brain of the patient, so that the patient returns to a normal condition. The Kadir-Buxton Method is done by making a fist of both hands, and striking both ears of the patient atexactly the same time–

Do not do this. It is very dangerous.

–and pressure with the soft part of the inner hand which is where the thumb joins the hand. The arrow in Figure 1 shows this point for your ease of use.

…

At this point I would like to explain the difference between a stun and a punch. With the Kadir-Buxton Method, a patient standing on one leg whilst holding a rose would still be standing on one leg and holding a rose when they were cured. With a punch, the patient would be lying prone on the floor, and could well have dropped the rose. And just to add insult to injury, they would still be mentally ill. Try it for yourselves if you do not believe me.

Oh, yes, this guy’s proper crazy. Because you see, he doesn’t just cure mental health issues…

My method of unblocking fallopian tubes should be taken up by the NHS. It would increase the success rate of fertility treatment drastically, and also cut down on more expensive treatments.

He’s keen on NHS adoption. He’s even petitioning the Prime Minister to ear-box mental patients.

Many years ago I came up with the idea of feeding breast milk to old people who had suffered from immune system collapse. I got the idea when I found an obscure reference to Ayurvedic practitioners… My method was successful, the most famous person who was treated for it was the Queen Mother, then in her seventies, who went on to live for another twenty years or so.

Having cured mental illness, infertility and old age, all these people will need clean electricity:

Thus a 50% cut in Carbon emissions is achievable with the use of Buxton Geothermal Turbine Generators.

That’s not totally crazy, but this is:

The Kadir-Buxton Jump Start (formerly Buxton Jump Start) … is so called because when it is used on a [dead] patient the [now living] patient immediately sits up with a start.

After that it starts to get really strange:

Primary Menstrual Cramps can be a debilitating problem for some 10% of women. … Orgasm from masturbation has been found to relieve the painful symptoms of menstrual cramps. … In order to do this one simply has to clench and then relax the vagina repeatedly for five minutes. With this method no one need know of the discomfort being suffered, and the pain soon goes. … Do not try this whilst driving or operating heavy machinery.

No shit?

I had been instructing women in the Hands Free method of controlling Primary Menstrual Cramps since I was a school boy.

…Is that allowed?

The Buxton Handclap Method of delivering babies that minimises birth trauma to both mother and baby is used in various Third World countries, and according to one statistic quoted in ‘New Scientist’ would lead to an improvement in IQ of 15 points over natural child birth, and thus minimise intellectual impairment caused by difficult child birth.

Of course, if you don’t want to have children at all, he can help with that, too:

In the 1980s I fended off an unprovoked attack. … I gave the [now unconscious] person a bruising slap round the buttocks. When the attacker came to it was said that the experience was even better than sex. I knew at once I was on to another invention. Whilst paralysed… the sensation of pain is replaced by super enhanced pleasure. As Governments around the world have been looking for a safe alternative to sex this appears to be it.

Specifically, David Blunkett is looking for that. Although he does say “it is not an alternative to contraception as the sexual act is also far more fun”. I’m inclined to agree.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that he reads the Daily Express, on whose website he makes up yet more stuff he’s never defined:

The best way to redistribute wealth is to end mental illness. This would free up £100 billion a year in the UK alone. The Kadir-Buxton Method cures the mentally ill in just thirty seconds and a local practice nurse can do it. 

We then use the five Buxton Coefficients of Unemployment at a local level to create jobs for them, and suddenly we have ridden out the economic crisis and can look forward to another four years of Gordon Brown. Go for it Gordon.

I’m sure that you, like me, want to know how one man can achieve such pre-eminence in so many diverse fields. Well, Andy Kadir-Buxton is willing to share his amazing secret:

IQ can be increased slightly by the educational system. It is only slight because most education revolves around memorising facts, which increases eidetic memory rather than leaning logic which increases IQ. … An IQ of over 150 brings with it the bonus of being able to invent which can be economially useful.

I always tell people that the best way of learning logic is to study and analyse the character Mr Spock in ‘Star Trek.’

So now you know. All those hours of watching Star Trek were increasing your IQ all along. Who knew?

[BPSDB]

Today’s g2 contains a dull and ill-thought-out article about whether or not animals feel grief, by Justine Hankins, who used to be the Guardian’s “pets editor”. It’s perhaps to be expected, then, that she is eager to think animals have human feelings. It’s nice to see her questioning the rest of the media for taking this too far, but personally, I’m not sure she’s quite got the hang of it yet…

Photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla in Munster Zoo, holding the lifeless body of her three-month-old infant… have prompted headlines such as “Heartbreaking” and “A Mother’s Grief”. … Are we too quick to project human feelings onto animals, particularly our closest ape relatives?

…René Descartes believed that… animals are no more capable of higher emotion than a clock. But, as anyone who has been watching Richard Dawkins’ Channel 4 series The Genius of Darwin will recall, evolution favours any species with strong enough parental instincts to see their young through infancy. Animals invest time, energy and genetic material into their young, just as we do, and they naturally want them to survive.—

Let’s be careful with the word “want”. Once you say “want” you’re kind of begging the question: anything that “wants” has emotions. I think you’re being too quick to project human feelings onto our closest ape relatives again. If you start bandying words like “want” about then before you know it you’re going to say something like

Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that they would also feel loss when their young die?

Yes.

Evolution probably doesn’t care too much what happens to mothers of dead infants. Evolving to stop caring for dead children is probably low down the genetic priority list, several items beneath keeping the children alive in the first place. There’s no reason to imagine that the gorilla’s behaviour is the result of grief. It could just as easily be well-meaning genes misfiring. Grief is totally unnecessary to explain any part of gorilla behaviour that I’m aware of.

Of course, they might. I don’t know. Hankins’ argument has utterly failed to convince me, but I really have no idea how gorillas work. I’ve not, say, been observing wild baboons in Namibia for years, but that’s probably why there’s a quote from a man who has, and he’s “reluctant to describe this as grief in the human sense”. That’s that settled, then, presumably…

Gana has a history of neglecting her young, and the infant’s death may have been a result of her poor parenting. So perhaps it’s not so much grief as guilt she’s exhibiting. Or maybe that’s an anthropomorphic step too far.

Yes it damn well is! Why must you persist in this? You’ve started by trying to explore quite a complex question in a 300-word column, and ended up saying nothing except “maybe”, and posing another, almost identical question. What possible use is that?

The article frustrated me mostly because it was 300 words of nothing, beyond raising a question that could have been just as easily posed in fifteen. The opening paragraph made it sound interesting, but there was no worthwhile discussion around the theme at all — a fact made even more annoying since she’d clearly interviewed someone who could have provided some. Hankins started out by observing that journalists liked to ascribe human feelings to animals and spent the whole column indulging in exactly the same wooly thinking.

Might as well have let Gana write the column for all the content we’d have missed out on.

I would love to look indepth at the media’s odd relationship with animals - but you get 300 words and a couple of hours and that’s it. I know it’s not perfect but it’s how the media works. I personally was quite shocked at how some of the media had protrayed this incident as if it was exactly the same as the feelings a human mother would have. I have a deep respect and affection for animals, but in general, this sort of sentimentality is not good for our understanding of animals and doesn’t apparently make us treat them any better.

With which I agree — she’s quite right to highlight the absurdity. My problem was that she also seemed to be indulging in it in the same column.

By ending the piece with the gorilla’s bad parenting record - I was trying to deflate the ‘heartbroken mother’ angle - sorry if it didn’t come off. If I ever get the chance, I’ll finish off the opening in a more challenging way!

After reading all of the above, I feel a bit bad and think that maybe the bit about evolution was misjudged, and came across (to me, anyway) as a genuine argument thrown in for balance, and that made the last paragraph read more like squirming than parody, a narrative trying to reach a conclusion that its own evidence won’t support.

At this point there’s not much I can do but sit here criticising the composition of the thing, which is well outside my comfort zone (besides which I’ve probably now written more words about this column than it contained, which is verging on tragic), so I think I shan’t bother. Anyone who’s used the internet for more than about an hour knows that it can be very difficult to detect irony in text — it says a lot for writers that most of the time readers understand them properly. In this case, whether my fault or hers, I didn’t read it as it was intended to read; let’s leave it at that.

Here are my solutions. I may have got some of the level names wrong.

• The Grabber (Back and Forth) — similar to this solution, really.
• Flailey Tank (Up The Stairs) — as you can see, by now I was getting pretty into building little carts to move stuff about.
• Spatula Tank (Big Ball) — tanks made this level easy. Other players went for speed. Some went for Sling It And Hope. I went for Power!
• Serious Tank (Awash) — Serious Tank will take all comers.
• Kamikaze Tank (Mission to Mars) — I had done this in the Normal Boring Way, but that didn’t involve nearly enough tanks for me to get really excited by it.
• Short Work Tank (The Wall) — Short Work Tank rolls over the wall with such consummate ease that the Chinese government will probably block this link.
• Train Tank (Full Up) — I’m sure I was supposed to do this by knocking the big ball into the hole, but instead I built another tank.
• Oil Thing (Higher) — I did this using a tank as well, but this is so much better.
• Junktank (Junkyard) — About half of Junktank is pointless, but why on Earth would I remove it?
• Hill Tank Light (Up the Hump) — I did remove about half of Hill Tank. The big square block was Man enough for this.
• Scorpion (Down Under) — There are hardly any tanks at all in this one. But there are more than there are in this player’s solution. This one is also good (no tanks, though).
• Uptank (Tube) — Which isn’t really a tank at all, but if I call it “tank” it may become one. (Tanks are only called tanks because they were originally disguised as tanks of water.)
• Freight Tank (Handling) — This calls for flexibility and precision. The obvious solution is therefore another tank.
• Tank on a Chain (Unpossible) — Nothing is unpossible if you have a large enough tank.
• Slavedriver (Four Balls) — This is the only level I didn’t manage to complete using at least one tank. But don’t think that means I’m going easy on it. I’m getting Ancient Egyptian on its ass, Ancient Egypt apparently being the theme for this evening. I did consider this approach, but couldn’t get it to work.

These include a paper¹ whose principal conclusion “is that the regional distribution of the incidence of violent injury is related to the regional distribution of the price of beer”, one about restoring torn up documents², a mildly terrifying study in which scientists managed to work out what someone was looking at by reading the information from their brain with electrodes³, and a fantastic paper in which someone built a device that can rotate objects without touching them using angular momentum carried by sound waves⁴ — and somehow managed to resist the geek temptation and so rather boringly called it an “acoustic spanner” (and people say that the science in Doctor Who is unrealistic).

But my current favourite is one entitled “Housing in Pyramid Counteracts Neuroendocrine and Oxidative Stress Caused by Chronic Restraint in Rats”⁵. The gist is: take 52 rats, and split them into 4 equal groups (or suits). One group is left well alone, the other three are put in “restrainers” in smaller groups of 3 or 4. This is designed to piss them off. Then, you put one group’s restrainers inside a Pyramid. The pyramid is a wooden affair two and a half feet tall, with a window and a hole for ventilation.

The four triangular sides of the pyramid angled upwards at nearly 51° to the base and met at the apex of the pyramid.

My word, the triangular sides met at the apex? So it was a pyramid, then. They even have a picture, in case you’re somehow still unsure what a ‘pyramid’ might be:

Figure 1: Ratiphar had very feeew cares…

Another group’s restrainer is left in normal conditions (in a presumably-non-pyramidal laboratory), and the last is left in a square box about the same size as the pyramid, because this is a strangely well-conducted seeming study considering how completely fucking mental you have to be to imagine that a pyramid shaped box can reduce stress in rats simply by being pyramid-shaped. They even made sure to align the square box due north, as if that made any difference. The rats (in their restraining cages) were even put on little stools in the boxes, because

Maximum effect of the pyramid is believed to be exerted at one-third the height of the pyramid from its base.

I would have thought maximum effect would be at the apex, since that’s where you’re in the most pyramids. But what do I know of Pyramid Power?

The whole thing looks like ‘cargo-cult science’ to me, right down to the extensive list of references — of which there are fifty-four, although quite a lot of them come from the same couple of books, and at least one is a Geocities page which apparently no longer exists (presumably due to being stored in an insufficiently-pyramidal server room). This latter is cited to support the sentence “Pyramid exposure is believed to put the mind into an alpha state”. This comes hot on the tails of the even better sentence “Research has shown that the energy field within the pyramid can act as antistressor and thus protect the hippocampal neurons from stress-induced atrophy (10)”, in which the promising-sounding Reference 10 is a PhD thesis (not apparently available online) from the same university that ran this study. Probably one of the authors’ luckless students. Another few references discuss “bioresonance”, apparently as something reasonable, to ground the pyramid theory in something people will accept, which would work if bioresonance wasn’t also a load of made-up shit.

The strange thing is, though, that despite all the made-up woo in the discussion section, and despite the rather preposterous premise being tested, it looks like a basically okay experiment. I’d have liked to see it run as a crossover, so we could make sure it was the pyramid rather than the rats being tested, and the square box was three times the volume of the pyramid because they matched base area and height, so there’s a chance the pyramid rats got less air than the controls, but it’s not at all a bad design. Ooh, a control group not aligned to the compass would have been good, too.

And yet, apparently, it worked. The rats in the pyramid were about as stressed as the rats in ordinary cages, whereas all the other rats that had been put in restrainers were pretty pissed off about it. Apparently this is reproducible because reference 11 is an almost identical study to this (right down to the main author) without restrainers.

Of course, I’m not about to convert to pseudoscience and declare that therefore pyramid power is real, partly because the odds of even a hundred p<0.05 results coming up on the trot are still far, far higher than the odds that the shape of a pyramid works “at a hormone level”, and also a bit because the most reproducible result in science is one you just make up.

But this is still interesting — because if this is genuine research, then on some unconscious level these researchers have conspired to rig this experiment very subtly, and I for one would very much like to find out how they did that. The endless lies and deceptions that the human brain pulls on its hapless owners is infinitely more fascinating than the crystals and dowsing and pyramids that result.

1. Matthews et al, Violence-related injury and the price of beer in England and Wales Applied Economics 38, 661–670 (2008)
2. De Smet, Reconstruction of ripped-up documents using fragment stack analysis procedures, Forensic Science International 176, 124–136 (2008)
3. Kay et al, Identifying natural images from human brain activity, Nature 452, 352-355 (2008)
4. Skeldon et al, An acoustic spanner and its associated rotational Doppler shift, New J. Phys.10 013018 (9pp) (2008)
5. Bhat et al, Housing in Pyramid Counteracts Neuroendocrine and Oxidative Stress Caused by Chronic Restraint in Rats, eCAM 4, 35–42 (2007)

For the rights to republish information or theories from this website, please contact: hamish@thejoecell.com

Only cranks ever imagine they can own information or theories and legally stop people disseminating them.

First things first. A Joe Cell is a series of tins of water, arranged in a Russian Doll formation, kept at low pressure. Then you ‘charge’ it: hook the inner-most and outer-most metal cylinders up to a voltage and leave it for a bit. When you’re done, it becomes a never ending battery (which may explain why “Joe Cells are reportedly… prone to dying for no apparent reason”). But then they also say that you can test it by checking the pH of the water, which is just downright silly because it’s chemically impossible to make any pH above or below 7.0 using whole, pure water, because pH is a measure of how many H⁺ an OH⁻ ions there are and water is H₂O. That’s one of their saner ideas — they go on to say

Some people have claimed that the Joe Cell harnesses some type of magical life force energy referred to as Orgone. Others believe that it pulls energy straight from the very fabric on the universe – the aether.

That presumably being the same æther that was proven not to exist in the late eighties? Of the 19th century?

The website says the cell is “essentially a capacitor”, but one that doesn’t lose its charge as it, er, releases charge. This isn’t even bad science by this stage; this is a violation of basic maths. But the real genius lies on the “references” page. Highlights include Cold Fusion patent with similaries [sic] to Joe Cell.doc, Positive Electricity (doc), which explains that if you line up a load of protons, then “the positive charge of the hydrogen nucleus - a proton - passing rapidly down the chain by relay, without the proton actually moving down,” which is a lot like saying you can move the weight of a rock without moving the rock, and Water Car Instructions (PDF), which is just what it sounds like.

You should be careful when filling the Joe Cell, because

The Cells are reported to function only when a strong vacuum is created within the cell. For this reason, adding a pressure gauge is recommended. For the Cell to function properly, around 15 psi of vacuum will be required.

For reference, atmospheric pressure is a little over 14psi, so you will need some amount of negative gas in the cell. How you stop the water in there from instantly vaporising and thereby creating pressure I don’t know. I didn’t know atmospheric pressure in psi, of course. I read that claim and thought it sufficiently likely he’d just made the number up to warrant me looking it up on the off-chance. It paid off. Who knows how much of the rest of his site is nonsense I’m too ignorant to spot — or similar guesses that happened to be plausible?

Of course, what makes all this really perverse is that it’s designed to power a car. Even if they’d really discovered a way of getting more-than-100% efficient electricity, cars run on fucking petrol. They wouldn’t run better with a Joe Cell for the same reason that you don’t get a boost of energy when you swallow a AA battery and your car doesn’t run if you fill the petrol tank with brie. Even if it worked, it would only replace the car battery, and you won’t run a car long on batteries and no petrol (unless of course it’s an electric car). If you don’t put petrol in a car, it won’t drive from the starter motor until the battery runs out, it just won’t go. And if you modified the engine so it did, the motor would be destroyed before you hit second gear. Their “clean, green technology” is petrol. If this thing worked, he’d hook up eight of them to a copper and zinc electrode pair and run his entire house on a lemon.

In fact, he suggests having two in your car for “redundancy”, the idea presumably being that if the laws of physics don’t allow you to build a perpetual motion device, try try again. Apparently,

It would make sense to mount then on opposite sides of the engine bay, to reduce them interfering with each other’s magnetic field.

Hang on, what? What magnetic field? Beyond the same tiny field you get from any electrical current, I can’t see any part of the Joe Cell that would have a magnetic field, much less be influenced by one. He goes on to say that the water has to be utterly and completely pure. This is pretty well impossible, but he’s got an answer. Apparently you can mke 100% pure water using a device called a “conditioning cell”. Furthermore,

A conditioning cell is the same as a Joe Cell except it separate from the vehicle.

You’re just being deliberately silly now, aren’t you? Anything else it can do? Can it bringeth the rains to provide the water in the first place?

Because the Joe Cell is creating a cloud like condition on the ground, it makes sense that it could influence weather conditions.

Alright then.

Here’s a great bit explaining how to avoid interference. Also, it’s good advice for anyone who thinks the Joe Cell doesn’t yet look sufficiently ridiculous:

The charge state within the cell can be affected by electromagnetic interference from other electrical devices and power sources. This interference can be minimized by using insulating material to prevent shorting. Wrapping the Cell in Burlap (Hessian) and placing it in a plastic bucket, held in place with blocks of wood is recommended.

I love cranks. I can’t help but.

I challenge George Monbiot to test out which is the most dangerous fuel - coal or nuclear power. I am prepared to go into a room full of CO2 [sic] for two minutes, if he is prepared to go into a room full of radiation for two minutes.

Okay, let’s try that. He can stand in “a room full of CO₂” for two minutes, and then, when the paramedics have resuscitated him and explained that you can’t breathe carbon dioxide, we can discuss what “a room full of radiation” might be.

Presumably he has in all his years seen at least one dimmer switch. He might like to explain at what point the room becomes “full” of light. Because you could easily endure a small amount of radiation for two minutes with no ill effects. You do exactly that every two minutes of your life. In the same way, you can endure a small amount of carbon dioxide.

So first we need to work out exactly how much of each thing each room will need to be “full”. Then we need to decide if Scargill will be allowed to supplement his CO₂ with any oxygen — bearing in mind that if there’s room for oxygen, it can’t really be “full” of CO₂ now, can it?

We should also decide what kind of radiation to use. We could use alpha, beta, gamma, or anything we like from the EM spectrum including long-wave radio, heat or visible light.

After we’ve done that, and Scargill and Monbiot have spent the required minutes in their respective rooms — personally I vote to up Scargill’s sentence to five minutes as it’s by no means unheard of for people to simply hold their breath for two and that’s cheating — we can discuss what the hell any of that was supposed to prove because CO₂ is dangerous because a sodding greenhouse gas, not because it’s poisonous.

Scargill’s challenge is like the NRA saying guns are safe and proving it by standing in a room full of bullets for two minutes and failing to die. Or a company showing their new Arsenic Sandwich is safe by sitting in a room with it for two minutes. Or Dan challenging the claim that cigarette smoke is more toxic than car exhaust fumes by challenging me to inhale thousands of times more of the latter than he willof the former.

Another interesting bit of his article is this:

…we live on an island with more than 1,000 years of coal reserves from which we can provide all the electricity, oil, gas and petrochemicals that people need, without causing harm to the environment.

I was going to mock him for this too, but I’ve looked into it, and it turns out he’s right. Modern coal-fired power stations are really quite clever. You don’t actually need to burn the coal. Instead, a kitten gently caresses the coal, and the coal starts to give off heat. This is used to drive a turbine and create electricity. Meanwhile magical pixies suck any CO₂ the kitten may have exhaled into magic pixie bottles, which then vanish in a puff of pure joy. It’s true.

…to ask [them] to investigate fully the plight of increasing numbers of people who have become electro-sensitive (ES) or electro-hypersensitive (EHS) in the UK due to electricity or the new pulsed microwave radiation technologies such as TETRA, mobile phones and masts, WiFi, radar, cordless phones and a host of “wireless” gadgets.

ES and EHS are made-up conditions. They’re technophobic knee-jerk idiocy kept alive by people like Alasdair Philips so that they can sell you utterly useless shit. At first it was “wifi is dangerous, phone masts are cancer factories, and so on” but when it became too obvious even for them that the population at large was bathed in radiation and still basically limping on okay they decided to say it was just some people and give it a name. The prefix “hyper” was added to the condition to make it seem like they were just more suceptible to microwave radiation, rather than having a whole new way of getting disease. That makes it seem more plausible.

They also want:

1. Demand independent research into this “FUNCTIONAL IMPAIRMENT CAUSED BY ENVIRONMENTAL TRIGGERS” - which does have a distinguishing feature from other illnesses/conditions with similar symptoms i.e. the ES/EHS CAN AND DO recover if they are isolated from the cause(s) of the sensitivity.

The research has been done. The condition does not exist^[1-3]. (The third abstract there includes the phrase “Sham-Math” and is therefore excellent.) I’ve never seen a petition before which so repeatedly strives to establish some objective statement of (supposed) fact. It’s as if they think people don’t believe EHS is a real condition.

2. Demand monitoring by personnel trained or researching in this field who are aware of the effects of pulsed microwave radiation/electricity.

You’re demanding monitoring done specifically by people who know the monitoring is pointless.

“Pulsed” microwave radiation is just regular microwave radiation that turns on and off quickly. That doesn’t make it somehow more dangerous any more than turning a light on and off a lot makes it dangerous (assuming you don’t have epillepsy, anyway). I assume they go after pulsed radiation because that’s what’s used for modern things like mobiles and wifi, whereas regular, continuous modulated radiation must be safe because the wireless was around when they were little and nothing was dangeous then because they didn’t have the Daily Mail then.

3 Ensure that the Human Rights of the ES/EHS are observed fully and recognise electro-sensitivity as a disability in the UK, as in Canada and Sweden.

Maybe we should officially recognise stupid as a disability while we’re at it.

4 Provide safe zones so that the ES/EHS have places to recover/live in OR replace pulsed microwave radiation with a safer technology.

A safer technology? Like what? I hope you’re not advocating yoghurt-pots-and-string, because that string, stretched tight across streets, is a real hazard to cyclists, especially when it’s dark.

Just… no. Go and do something else.

Part of me hopes they get a lot of names on this, so I can see the government response. You can only say “your concerns are imaginary and we fully intend to ignore them” so diplomatically.

1. Rubin et al, Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity: A Systematic Review of Provocation Studies. Psychosomatic Medicine 67:224-232 (2005)
2. Seitz et al, Electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) and subjective health complaints associated with electromagnetic fields of mobile phone communication—a literature review published between 2000 and 2004. Science of the Total Environment 349(1-3):45-55 (2005)
3. Lyskov et al, Provocation study of persons with perceived electrical hypersensitivity and controls using magnetic field exposure and recording of electrophysiological characteristics. Bioelectromagnetics 22(7):457-62 (2001)

There are some scary quotes in there, but the stats are worse. From their own survey, 80% of 50 Muslim, Jewish and ‘accelerated Christian education’ schools taught Creationism as fact and ignore evolution. Of those, five were state-funded schools. That’s 74% of 19 Jewish schools, 100% of 21 Evangelical schools and 50% of 10 Islamic schools. None of these schools is breaking a law*, although of course Paul Kelley would have been had he been reckless enough to educate in a secular way. The law, as has been mentioned, is an ass.

Personally, I think the best argument for teaching evolution in schools is that it’s the only way I know that you can make biology into a passably interesting subject. I for one always found it crushingly dull — because it was mostly a list of information presented in a “here’s what happens; don’t ask why, just learn it” kind of a way. Throw in evolution and you can explain why these things happen. You can talk about DNA and all the weird ways genes try to get copied. You can tie biology in to all kinds of other subjects much more effectively. I’m sure you can teach vast tracts of biology without mentioning genes or evolution, but I defy you to make it interesting.

That aside, the best reason I know of not to teach Creationism is simply that it’s patently false. Of course, Creationists won’t accept that, so a better argument is that there is no evidence to support it (because it’s so false). The only argument in favour is the whole stupid “parents’ rights” thing. And I do accept that parents have a right to educate their children in whatever way they want — but I think they should be made to look up the word “educate” before they start paying someone to preach at them, because filling impressionable young minds with damaging lies to promote an ideology is nothing more or less than exploitation — and it’s not even for personal gain: we’re talking about exploitation for the sake of an abstract concept. And I think it’s utterly abhorrent that the government would fund this.

I blame the parents for this. They should be outraged if their kids are being taught such bullshit, and they should get something done. The government are also in the wrong, of course, but you can hardly expect the government to act if the people don’t care. (You know, because the government only ever does what the people want.) People listen to parents. God knows why.

I’m not against the ides of schools being different and parents having choice. I’m not against the idea that some of those differences might be based on a religion — a school aimed at Muslims that makes sure the textbooks don’t have illustrations in articles about Mohammed, or a school aimed at Jews that only serves kosher food, that’s fine. And hopefully the genuine followers of those religions would be able to get places in those schools, because since all schools would be required to teach the same curriculum non-religious parents presumably would just pick the nearest school, or the one the kid’s friends were going to. The moment you let them teach different things then the idea of “choice” becomes an illusion: when you’re presented with one good school and one bad school, you don’t have a choice. Everyone with a brain will try to get into the good school and then you’re back to pot luck (or selection, if it’s a faith school). It’s just the same as the ridiculous claim made by the Department of Health the other day, that “operation success rates help patients choose treatment”. Their theory is that by publishing statistics on survival rates at different hospitals, they give patients a choice. No, you don’t. You just make life difficult for everyone, and worry people who can’t get into the best one. The stats should be public, certainly, but not for that reason. I think that all schools and hospitals should be good enough that you don’t care which one you use, and I think that if they’re not then you should fix it rather than shifting the onus onto patients and parents to find an acceptable one.

More to the point, if it’s legal to teach Creationism, that must mean there is no requirement for schools to teach facts that are true.

But of course, I don’t get a say. Because I don’t live in Normanton. If I did, I’d be allowed to vote against Ed Balls’ continuing reign of lunacy over the Department of Children, Schools, Families and Kittens, or whatever they’re calling Education now. (Honestly, the system of government we have here is utterly mad if you look into it for any length of time.)

• The Perfect Day: O + NS + Cpm/T +He, except when it’s [W+(D-d)]xTQ MxNA
  As in the Telegraph, this was repeated year on year on year on year.
• The Perfect Christmas: PX = (8F * 4P +£23 * 8F + 3G + 2W + 2W:3C + 5T:1NR / 3D) / 3D
  As covered previously. Presumably even following this formula Christmas is still worse than June 20th.
• The Perfect Bacon Butty: N = C + (fb (cm) . fb (tc)) + fb (Ts) + fc . ta
  Apparently, “the experts at Leeds University tried 700 variations on the traditional bacon butty.” I did my undergraduate degree at Leeds and I can vouch that this is true, although I had no idea it was research. Dr Graham Clayton is to blame for this.

Out of interest, N = force in Newtons required to break the cooked bacon. C = Newtons required to break uncooked bacon, fb = function of the bacon type, cm = cooking method, tc = cooking time, Ts = serving temperature, fc = function of the condiment/filling effect and ta = time or duration of application of condiment/filling.

• The Perfect Present Wrap: {(d+2h+w)2 2(w+h)2 — whatever that means
  Thanks to Dr Sara Santos at the University of Manchester, “we now know why we put everything in boxes”.
• The Perfect Sitcom: formula not properly explained
  As in the Telegraph. Repeated, presumably on Dave.
• Staying Awake At Work: CDA + CT + KF TMT
  Bear in mind that KF stands for “knacker factors”, so this is Maths. This comes from “experts at fatigue management consultancy Awake”.
• The Perfect Cheese Sandwich: W = (1 + bd/6.5 - s + (m-2c)/2 + (v+p)/7t) * (100+l)/100
  “Geoff Nute and his team” of “sensory analysts at Bristol University” produced this equation, which says that without a tangy sauce, you need infinite cheese. This was in the optimistically named “science and tech” section.
• The Perfect Penalty: (((X + Y + S) / 2) x ((T + I + 2B) / 4)) + (V/2) -1
  As in the Telegraph.
• The Perfect Breasts: the nipple should be 45% of the way down. Apparently.
  “Patrick Mallucci spent many hours poring over photos of topless models in lads magazines and tabloid newspapers to formulate his theory.” Enough said.
• The Perfect Teeth: no formula
  This isn’t strictly a formula. It’s really a set of rules about what makes a nice smile, of use to cosmetic dentists. I’ve seen at least one of them discussed in the British Dental Journal, but that was to debunk it. Hard to say what the truth is. Better at least than “the perfect cheese sandwich”, but still…
• How To Beat The Post-Holiday Blues: ((j+c) x (r+t) - (h+o))/b
  Professor David Holmes of Manchester Metropolitan University “carried out the research on behalf of Churchill Travel Insurance”, who will presumably use it as a basis for premiums on Post-Holiday Blues Insurance. As ever, all the variables are listed on wholly arbitrary 1-5 kind of scales. According to the Mail, b represents “whether gaps between holidays too long”. Yeah. Gaps too long. Also, verbs for losers.
• Will You Get Seasonal Affective Disorder?: X a x ((24-b) x (c+d+e) + f x (g+h+i))
  Here, we learn why you should always use the multiplication sign instead of the lower case ‘x’. Also why you should remember to include the equals sign. This was devised by “consultant psychiatrist Dr David Wheatley” and “commissioned by Kira St John’s Wort, makers of a herbal “happiness” supplement, as part of a study on depression”. It has to be said, the list of instructions is sufficiently varied and complex to give the whole thing an air of credibility. But still…
• How Beer Goggles Work: no formula supplied
  “Bausch & Lomb PureVision, one of the world’s biggest eyecare firms” got “Professor Nathan Efron, Professor of Clinical Optometry at the University of Manchester” to do this. I don’t know why it’s so often universities I’m at where this stuff happens; before I started at Leeds, Dr Clarke, who took our electronics lectures, was asked by some supermarket or other to work out an equation for how to flip a pancake, and I guess they were expecting him to wander off and make something up, but no, he built a huge red trebuchet-looking thing to flip a strange cardboard pancake. I was there for four years, and some of my friends worked on this for a brief period. Partway through my course he retired, an act which made him much easier to locate — his workload went from insane to average. To my knowledge, the only thing this project has ever achieved is to break countless platinum-iridium tips for the tunnelling microscope. I suppose that means that they at least have more credibility than the “oh, it’ll be b times a plus 4d over qpr” crowd, but still…
• When Heyfever Is Worst: 6.02pm on May 29; no formula supplied
  Stay indoors at that time, is my advice. “Dr Adrian Morris, allergy specialist for Boots Health Club, … created the hayfever formula”.
• The Perfect Horror Film: (es+u+cs+t)² +s+ (tl+f)/2 + (a+dr+fs)/n + sin x - 1
  Who says modern films are too formulaic? This is science! Look! It has a fucking sine function in it:

  The experts have taken blood and guts (Sin x) and subtracted it by the stereotypes (1), to make Sin x - 1, saying Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining turned into the total opposite of a protective father figure.

  See? That’s Science! Don’t say it isn’t! “Mathematician Anna Sigler, … a former graduate from King’s College, London” did this research. A former graduate, no less. Presumably her degree was revoked when they saw what she was doing with it. The Shining won, by the way. “The research was carried out for Sky Movies, which will be showing The Shining and other scary movies this weekend.” Coincidence.

• How To Wash Your Hair: formula not stated
  “Kerys Mullen, technical manager at Dove, said: “A lot of people ask us about the best way to wash their hair so we decided to work out the ideal formula.”"
• The Perfect Boiled Egg: formula not stated
  How to boil an egg, by several chefs. At the bottom, input from “Dr Charles Williams A physicist from Exeter University [sic]“, who “has worked out a formula for the perfect boiled egg based on the ‘heat-diffusion equation for spherical objects’”. Fair enough, but I for one will trust the chefs on that one.
• The Perfect Day To Change Your Life: M x O + Bh (H+R) x S; max. May 18
  This is the handiwork of Cliff Arnall, the same Cardiff University muppet responsible for the best/worst day formula the Mail and the Telegraph obligingly publish twice every year. If anything this is worse than that one: “Under the formula M stands for motivation and O for opportunity while Bh is bank holiday proximity. The H in the second half equals increasing hours of daylight, while R equals reflection time and S, simply success.” Yes. And..? Surely the aim is to maximise S? In which case, shouldn’t it be on the other side of the equals?
• The Secret of True Happiness, no less: P + (5xE) + (3xH)
  Thomson travel got “psychologist” Carol Rothwell and “sports scientist and ‘life coach’” Pete Cohen to “insist their equation is a useful guide to our levels of satisfaction with life”. Because just asking “are you happy” doesn’t work. Not enough maths, see.

• What homeopathy is
• Why people with cancer use homeopathy

Strangely, the word “ignorant” does not appear in this section. It does say “Some people choose homeopathy because it offers a completely different type of treatment compared to conventional medicine.” Which is true, but it’s a bit like saying “some people choose spaghetti because it offers a completely different type of support compared to a conventional bungee cord”.

• Evidence on using homeopathy in cancer treatment
• What homeopathy involves
• Side effects
• Who shouldn’t use homeopathy

Ooh, I know! Is it “anyone who wants to get better or has a finite supply of money”?

• What homeopathy costs
• Finding a homeopath
• Homeopathic hospitals in the UK
• Homeopathy organisations

For context, this page sits in their “complementary and alternative therapies” section, (surely by definition all therapies are either complementary or an alternative?) which lists a huge number of options including the harmless, the spiritual and the quackerific. They’re all split into the same sections as the homeopathy page. They’re mostly good stuff:

• There is no evidence to suggest that acupuncture helps in any way with treating, preventing or curing cancer. Both the World Health Organisation and the Cochrane Library have published reviews on chemotherapy related sickness, concluding that acupuncture can help.
• There is no scientific evidence to prove that Aloe vera can help treat, prevent or cure cancer in people in any way.
• There is no scientific evidence to prove that aromatherapy can cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer.
• Many people say these therapies help them to cope better with cancer and its treatment. But there are treatments which are part of ayurvedic medicine such as special diets and herbal remedies that we don’t know enough about to support their use. These treatments could be harmful to your health or interfere with your conventional treatment.
• Some people have claimed that black cohosh may reduce your risk of getting breast cancer or prostate cancer. There is not enough evidence for this at the moment.

And so on, all the way down to

• There is no scientific evidence to prove that yoga can cure or prevent any type of cancer. But there are some studies to suggest that it might help people with cancer sleep better and cope with anxiety.

Yeah, it’s tiring is yoga.

I also like that they discuss the evidence in an adult way, rather than simply saying “this works; this doesn’t work”. The point is, though, that I can’t help think that the following text lends far too much weight to the insane fringe view that there is even the slightest possibility that homeopathic ‘medicine’ could cure cancer:

There are over 100 published clinical trials looking at how well homeopathy works in treating various illnesses and symptoms. None of these trials provide us with any scientific evidence to prove that homeopathy can cure or prevent any type of disease, including cancer. Many individuals say that homeopathy has helped their symptoms. And some small trials have shown that homeopathy can have a positive effect. Two studies suggest that homeopathy may help women with breast cancer to cope with menopause symptoms. But these are small clinical trials and they don’t provide enough evidence to show if homeopathy really works, or how.

Remind me again why I should give you money, Cancer Research UK? This is sort of implying you’ll waste it.

We don’t really know whether the effects of homeopathy truly come from the homeopathic medicine or if they are simply a placebo effect.

…

Using homeopathic medicine is generally safe. Some homeopaths warn people that their symptoms could get slightly worse, before they settle down and improve.

Sort of like illnesses do on their own, then..?

But this does not happen very often. A Swiss meta-analysis of homeopathy trials in 2006 found homeopathy applied appropriately by a trained homeopath to be safe and with few side effects.

Yes, because it’s totally inert!

If you are having treatment for cancer it is important that you let your specialist doctors know if you are planning to use homeopathic medicine.

It’s a difficult thing to do, of course, because it’s important to say “look, here is the evidence, do you still think water is magic medicine?” rather than “it just doesn’t work, okay?” because it’s the only way any real progress will be made against the nonsense we’re all surrounded by. But equally, there really is no good evidence at all on the homeopaths’ side, so representing the evidence in a truly balanced way looks a lot like saying “it just doesn’t work”.

Ultimately, though, it’s the links sections at the bottom that annoy me. They link, for example, to the CORH, saying “look on their website for a list of the organisations who are members,” but the CORH are happy to link uncritically to the almost totally mental Society of Homeopaths, whose record on such things is pretty dismal (and it’s hard to over-state their satisfaction), and to the Faculty of Homeopathy, whose president I recently caught on television endorsing the Faculty while claiming to be an ordinary member. She said:

If people have a serious medical condition I would strongly advise them to approach [the Faculty of Homeopathy].

Homeopaths have a record of giving bad advice, mostly by recommending people avoid real medicine (or as above failing to recommend they seek it out), and I don’t think it’s appropriate for a cancer charity, or indeed anyone else, to endorse their organisations in this way without a large disclaimer saying “warning: many homeopaths are a bit mental and think their water is magical. If they tell you they can cure cancer or AIDS or that they can basically do anything at all apart perhaps from making you feel vaguely better, leave and report them to their governing body and Trading Standards”.

For all I know practitioners of the other alternative therapies are no better, but I’m aware of a lot more evil done in the name of homeopathy than in the name of acupuncture or yoga. Generally, homeopathy and ‘herbalism’ are the pseudosciences most likely, in my experience, to have delusions of efficacy beyond palliative care, and that makes them dangerous.

Just because the pill is harmless doesn’t change that.

• The Perfect Sitcom: quality = (rd+v)f÷a+s
  Dr Helen Pilcher, a neuroscientist (according to the Telegraph) whored her name to this ‘research’ which was commissioned by UKTV Gold to promote their endless repeating of that clip of Del Boy falling through the bar: f in the equation means “the amount someone falls over”. This is about the level of humour the Telegraph seems to like, because…
• The Perfect Joke: x = (fl + n^o)/p
  In this case, n represents “the amount someone falls over”, and is raised to the power of “the “Ouch” factor”. It won’t surprise you to learn that this is the work of the same Helen Pilcher, although this time helped by comedian Timandra Harkness. It should be some measure of Harkness’ fame that I wouldn’t like to guess what gender the name Timandra indicates. To their very limited credit, the telegraph article does include rants from Jimmy Carr, Bernard Manning and Ruby Wax explaining that the formula was stupid (in their own obnoxious ways). Also Nicholas Parsons, but he’s not obnoxious. Why was this in the news? “The Comedy Research Project, a live stage show featuring Helen Pilcher and Timandra Harkness, will be performed at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre on June 15 and 22 [2006].” I bet that was a fucking blast.
• The Perfect Day: quality = O + NS + Cpm÷T + He
  This was pulled out of the arse of Cliff Arnall (not Lou Reed), a psychologist and former tutor at Cardiff University, because Wall’s Ice Cream asked nicely. The Telegraph notes it “does not take into account the gloomy forecasts for the British economy, fears caused by falling house prices, rising inflation and stagnating pay rises, England not playing in the Euro 2008 and a damper than normal start to the summer”. All the factors in the formula are utterly subjective and the whole thing is worse than most. The comments on the Telegraph pages are fun. This is especially perverse because in 2006 the perfect day was three full days later. (The Telegraph really do obligingly report this, from either end, every time they’re asked.)
• The Perfect Bra: formula not supplied
  This one is actually real (albeit slightly over the top) research! It could genuinely improve your life (moreso if you are a woman). I know; I was as surprised as you are.
• The Perfect Rugby Kick: KP = CSP - s + w + r + yⁿ + cr + sc + mt + xⁿ + ctw
  This is just a shopping list of things that affect a rugby kick. And “y to the power of n represents other factors”. My word. This drivel comes to us no thanks to “Andrew Cushing and Prof Paul Robinson at University College Worcester for the research company QinetiQ”.
• The Price Of Cleaning: price = time × £6.16/hour
  This is a note that the average wage has increased, listed in terms of how much people lose out on by not being paid to brush their teeth (30p, although it doesn’t say how much they save by not having to get private dental treatment if they don’t brush). Barclaycard convinced Prof Ian Walker, an economist at Warwick University to endorse it.
• The Perfect Marriage: formula not supplied
  “Prof James Murray of the University of Washington” says this formula has a 94% success rate in predicting if a couple will divorce, although really I’d want to know sensitivity and specificity, otherwise you could conduct a survey of evangelical Christians and the terminally ill, say they’ll all stay together, and declare yourself the winner. They later ran a second article about how it was nonsense.
• The Perfect Chip: formula not ready at time of press
  That’s right, because Dr Gama Khan won’t just sign off on whatever nonsense Tesco ask — that, or Tesco asked for a big long experimental phase they can publicise for months. Khan says “The competition is intense because everyone wants to go down in history and finally crack the secret of the perfect frozen oven chip. I am looking at a lot of chips. Some days I’m testing them continuously from 9.30am to 4pm. It actually can get quite sickening, particularly when I always smell of chip fat.” And it’s true. Everyone wants a slice of the elusive Nobel Prize in Fast Food.
• The Perfect Football Penalty: odds of scoring = (X + Y + S)×(T + I + 2B)÷8 + V÷2 - 1 [simplified]
  This was commissioned by Ladbrokes, and is credited to “by scientists at John Moores University in Liverpool”, which quickly becomes “Dr David Lewis, a mathematician”. I think this quote tells you all you need to know about the mathematical ability of everyone involved in this report (emphasis mine):

Dr Lewis and his team found the six variables that influence a successful penalty kick are: V = velocity of ball once struck, T = time between placing ball on spot and striking the ball, S = number of steps in run-up to strike, I = time that the ball is struck after goalkeeper initiates his dive, Y = vertical placement of ball from ground, X = horizontal placement of ball from centre and B = striking position of boot.

• The Perfect Sandcastle: 0.125S = OW
  This simply states the ideal ratio of sand to water. Personally, I would just use the pre-prepared wet sand b the beach, which must surely be about right because it does seem to work. “Prof Matthew Bennett, the head of environmental and geographic sciences, Dr Brian Astin, the head of the School of Conservation Sciences, and Rob Haslam, laboratory and technical services manager, then spent two days testing the samples for their suitability for sandcastle building. … Teletext Holidays, which commissioned the research, will be holding a sandcastle-building championship on July 24 [2004] in Great Yarmouth.” This work was replicated the following year by “an MIT team, led by Sarah Nowak and Arshad Kudrolli” who reached exactly the same conclusion (although they phrased it in a simpler way). This might be nearly useful to some engineers somewhere.
• How To Open Champagne: P = T÷4.5 + 1
  P and T are pressure and temperature. I think this is not made up, although not really that useful in real terms: essentially it says that if you cool the champagne it is less likely to explode on you. This comes from “Dr Steve Smith, a lecturer in wine studies at Coventry University”, who “was commissioned to develop the formula after a Marks & Spencer survey found that 50 per cent of women are too frightened to open a bottle of bubbly because they fear that the cork will fly out prematurely, hitting them or a precious ornament”.
• The Perfect Place To Shop: D=f(m,b,c)
  The function f is undefined. “Retail and consumer trends expert Tim Dennison has come up with a formula to help Yellow Pages calculate how diverse and lively high streets are.” It says little town streets are more diverse than city centre ones. Nobody is surprised.
• The Perfect Newspaper: no formula
  It’s the Telegraph. Shocking. I suspect this is bad self-congratulatory reporting of some tiny little statement the academics made, but then I work for Manchester University so I am biased (although I’m not certain which way).
• How To Pour Gravy: amount of gravy = (W - D÷S) ÷ D × 100
  According to “Dr Len Fisher, an independent food scientist at Bristol University… who was funded by the manufacturer Bisto”, this is important because “more than 150,000 gallons of gravy is left every week.” Hard to see what Bisto have to gain by this, except of course that they’re in a newspaper.
• The Perfect Book: formula not done at time of press
  …although it’s going to be Agatha Christie, says Dr Roland Kapferer.
• The Perfect Biscuit: formula deemed to complicated for Telegraph readers
  This was led by Professor Bronek Wedzicha of Leeds University and “half funded by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and half by United Biscuits.” The researchers insist that this is real research rather than a publicity stunt, and I see no reason not to believe that, especially since they spent £91,000 on it.
• The Perfect News Story: “never trust your own instincts” but rely on “tried and tested formulas, bland ingredients and using up old scraps and leftovers from the day before, particularly the choicest cuts from the Daily Mail - no matter how stale.”

Some time I might do this for other newspapers, although I’m not sure I could read the ones in the Daily Mail faster than their hacks can produce them, so perhaps I won’t.

A Government report yesterday called for “urgent” controls on herbalists, acupuncturists and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, amid fears over patient safety. Its recommendations, to be considered by ministers, include a proposal that new practitioners would have to study for a degree in their field before they could practise.

Yes, that will help a lot. Can’t have people doing acupuncture wrong, can we? (Answer to rhetorical question: yes.)

These are the homeopathy mistakes:

A £40 million industry in the UK, homoeopathic remedies claim to be able to prevent yellow fever, typhoid, polio and even leukaemia, as well as cure symptoms ranging from toothache to hearing loss. But there are growing concerns over whether the homoeopathic remedies have any effect.

No, there aren’t. There is a total consensus that homeopathic remedies are nothing more than placebo. (Obviously I’m aware that there are people who dispute this consensus, but those people are cranks, or ignorant, and in any case too few in number to count — remember, there are those who dispute the holocaust.)

Homoeopathists differ from herbalists, who use a variety of plants to combat diseases, because their treatments are heavily diluted. There can often be as little as one millionth of the original ingredient in a homoeopathic remedy.

Setting aside that this last sentence doesn’t actually mean anything, the fact is that most homeopathic remedies do not contain even one molecule of the original ingredient. None at all. That’s not the same as “heavily diluted” or “one millionth”. That’s the same as a nice glass of water.

Then the Telegraph invite readers to “Have Your Say: Do you believe in homeopathy?” Because what we need to settle this one isn’t evidence, my word no. It’s the ill-informed rants of internet cranks such as Mike Abrahams, who says (all links and emphasis in these are mine; I’m sure you’d have worked that out soon enough):

At the moment, “properly applied/prescribed” medical intervention “accidentally” kills over 250,000 people a year in the USA alone (Journal of American Medical Association)…

I didn’t know it was possible to commit libel using only punctuation marks.

…So let’s get a perspective on this. Just how many people are killed by homoeopathy - last year? - in the last 50 years? …

(Answer to rhetorical question: lots, and here are 8 that even Dave Hitt can’t argue with.)

…Even if Homoeopathy used just the placebo effect it is much safer than orthodox drug treatment.

…because it doesn’t do anything. Or Graham, who says:

i think that you can apply the one rule for all principle here, that is when doctors have their medicines and procedures, in all combinations tested with randomised control trials and they are proven to be safe, then perhaps other CAM therapies would do the same. … i thought the idea was to heal people, this homeopathy does with out a doubt, or it would have died out years ago. i gave my son a remedy for a croup attack when he was about 14 months old. within 30seconds he was calm and breathing normally, from being blue and gasping for breath. i don’t really give a flying fig how it worked, i just know that it did, its called imperical evidence its what doctors use when they give new mixes of medicines that have not been tested together. the difference is i saved a life doctors are often just trying to clear up their own drug induced side effects…

Or “Cured!”, who says:

Perhaps the medical profession is sceptical of hoemopathic remedies because they are not patented, can’t be licensed and can’t be used to derive monopoly profits.

No, but these would be the same homeopathic remedies that are made out of pure water and sell as a “£40 million industry in the UK” according to the article Cured! just commented on, yes? Yes. Yes, they would.

Lucy Puglia says:

MY DOG HAD SKIN CANCER ON HER PAW,IT WAS MALIGNANT,AFTER IT WAS REMOVED ,WE CHOSE TO GIVE HER VITAMINS AND HOMOEOPHATIC REMEDIES,SHE LIVED A FULL LIFE ,RUNNING AND HAPPY, … .HAD WE CHOSEN ANOTHER TREATMENT ,SHE WOULD HAVE SUFFERED SIDE EFFECTS.WE HAVE SEEN A HOMOEOPHATIC DOCTOR FOR OVER 20 YEARS,AND IT WORKS FOR MY FAMILY,INDIVIDUALS SHOULD HAVE A CHOICE,ON THE TREATMENT THEY WISH TO HAVE ,AFTER ALL DOCTORS ARE NOT ”GODS”,PEOPLE ARE DYING IN HOSPITAL FROM ALLERGIC REACTION TO DRUGS EVERYDAY,I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW MANY ARE DYING FROM ”HOMOEOPHATIC REMEDIES SIDE EFFECTS”.I AM ALLERGIC TO GRASS POLLEN,THERE IS NO MEDICATION THAT HELPS,IN 32 YEARS OF SUFFERING ,THE ONLY MEDICATION THAT HELP ME ,IS HOMEOPATIC,THE NOSESPRAY,EYEDROPS,DROPS TO KEEP MY NOSE CLEAR,PILLULE .I TOOK ANTIHISTAMIN TABLETS FOR YEARS,AND HAD 2 CAR ACCIDENTS ,BECOUSE OF THE SIDE EFFECTS,AND NEARLY FELL OFF THE BUS,MISSED THE STEP.WE SHOULD HAVE MORE HOMEOPHATIC HOSPITALS ,AND CHOICE,INSTEAD ,THE HOSPITALS ARE BEING CLOSED BY THE TRUSTS,LIVING PATIENTS WITH NO CHOICE…AFTER ALL THIS IS A DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY…LUCY,ISLINGTON..

How great is she!? Peter Walton says:

Homeopathy does work, which is exactly what the major pharmaceutical companies are fearful about. They put their money into supporting those who outwardly conduct research supposedly disproving the efficacy of homeopathy. Most of this research is based upon double blind tests which may have some value, were it not for the fact that homeopathic treatment, unlike allopathic, uses individualised remedies. …

(Double-blind trials can account for this. Many do. Homeopathy still doesn’t work.)

…The �researchers� carrying out double blind testing on homeopathic remedies of course must know this, and therefore one may conclude that they have alternative agendas.

One other point; arguments are put forward that there is no scientific evidence for homeopathy. May I suggest that science will one day be able to provide that evidence, it is for ever amending its theories to explain the observed, unlike homeopathy which has essentially remained unchanged for 200 years. There is no need to change that which is correct!

Let’s not mention the inconvenient advent of Avogadro and germ theory during those 200 years, though, eh? Or the countless other wrong ideas science has failed to eventually prove. Or…

G Payne says:

Just because, like all remedies, it is not and does not clainm to be a panacea, is not a reason for the attacks upon it by allopathic doctors and chemists - except for their inbuilt self interest. The point is, that the proof lies in the fact that, in so many instances - called “anecdotal” homoeopathy does work.

Steve Scrutton (which is a name I recognise from other homeopathy rants) says this:

It is remarkable that spokesmen for conventional medicinem, and ConMed drugs, like Ernst, can still believe that seeing a doctor, and taking ConMed drugs, is safer than seeing a homeopath. What they consistently deny is that ConMed is killing more people year on year, and that the more drugs we take, year on year, the greater the rise of disease epidemics (Alzheimer’s, Autism, et el) -

Can you have an epidemic of a non-infectious disease? I suspect you can’t.

- many of them diseases that were unknown prior to drug taking becoming ‘free’ on the NHS…

The prevalence of a disease which predominately affects the elderly rose sharply when medical care became free? Clearly medical care causes Alzheimer’s. There’s no other explanation!

…He also ignores another undeniable fact - that tens of thousands of people have been treated successfully by homeopath, many after failing to get better with ConMed. When they hear Ernst, and others telling them that homeopathy is ineffective, they yawn, wonder why he should consistently come out with such nonsence, ponder who is speaking for, and tell their friends.

The drug companies are under pressure as more of their drugs are being withdrawn, and they face an increasing number of law suits in the USA.

Keep your campaign going, Professor Ernst - perhaps one day you will actually be able to convince us that ConMed is safe too!

Jayney says:

I think these attacks on homeopathy are just providing a smoke screen to take the emphasis off the 40,000+ deaths that occur each year due to totally avoidable medical blunders (quoted in the BMJ.) Close to 1 million people are injured by conventional medicine too - every year. Agsin this is a matter of public record . There is only one record of a homeopath being linked to a person dying - this was a doctor who told her patient that she should stop takng her heart medication. This doctor is now being investigated by the GMC.

Shathejas says:

in my shortlife i saw various patients who got remedy by homoeo,while modern medicine said goodbye in such cases. many many examples can be given. but iam not a homoeopathistic.

No. No, you are not. And lastly, a homeopath speaks. Francis Treuherz says:

How do I prove that my work as a homeopath is successful? I suggest just as hard with my wrong remedy as my right one in almost 25 years of practice my patients know when they receive the right remedy…

Well, yes, because you define “the right remedy” as “whichever one you’re doling out when the patient happens to get better on their own”.

…The way we decide what makes a remedy is known as a proving. We test potential medicines on healthy humans and the symptoms and signs which appear are then used to inform treatment. I suggest that Professor Ernst, or any one else who does not think that homeopathy works, undertakes a proving of Aesculus hippocastanum and observes the effects. This is a remedy used in painful haemorrhoids.

This is a common brain-failure experienced by homeopaths: they refer to something as “a proving” and assume that therefore it proves something.

This was rather longer than I expected, because I hadn’t planned to do the comments, so I shall post the second article I want to criticise some other time. If I remember. Hopefully, I’ll get it out within the Awareness Week.

Also, look out for another bit of Homeopathy Awareness Week fun that I’ll show you when it’s finished.

Something must be done.

there are common (but lacking in substance) tactics that are used to discredit and refute my assertion that we don’t know if MMR causes autism or not.

Here, I think, are the main ones:

1. Claim that I should provide the evidence that MMR can cause autism (even when that it’s not my position that MMR causes autism).

His position is this (from the same post):

I maintain that with the state of the evidence as it is that we don’t know beyond reasonable doubt that MMR does not cause autism.

That’s wrong. If you replace the word “reasonable” with “all” then it’s true, but the phrase “reasonable doubt” was invented precisely to stop people claiming exactly this kind of nonsense. If he wants to suggest that there are reasonable grounds for doubt, then he should provide some, and given how many studies have failed to show any link between MMR and autism, I think those grounds will have to take the form of some studies that do. Essentially, evidence. Words aren’t going to cut it.

Meanwhile, he is arguing that ‘we’, as scientists who think that MMR is effectively vindicated with regard to autism, should provide further evidence to back up this claim, which was a near certainty even before the first study and is pretty-well unassailable now. He is using the very tactic he accuses us of.

2. Argue that because we don’t have evidence definitive evidence [sic] that MMR causes autism, then that MUST mean it doesn’t (this is illogical, but you’d be surprised how many times this card is played scientists who really ought to know better).

Well I think I’ve explained often enough already that nobody is doing this. (His response seems to be to find something I’ve said which, if cunningly misinterpreted and then fed through several steps of inference, appears to imply that I secretly think otherwise.) His basic accusation is that we say the evidence says something it doesn’t, but the fact of the matter is that he is saying we say something that we don’t. He is using the very tactic he accuses us of.

3. Misrepresent the strength of the science (this is actually the most common one, and my assertion is that the evidence used to vindicate MMR with respect to autism, from a scientific perspective, doesn’t amount to a hill of beans)

Dr Briffa says that

there’s a huge pile of anecdotal evidence and some experimental evidence too which supports the idea that MMR vaccination might cause autism.

There is “no credible evidence” to support this claim. He is using the very tactic he accuses us of.

4. Insult me (e.g. call me ‘wilfully ignorant’)

Dr Briffa told me

you have a very flimsy grasp of even the most simple logic, as well as the application of scientific principles and evidence in the real world. … you do not really know what you are talking about, and have no integrity either.

And he told a commenter on his blog

I suspect I won’t be the only person reading your assertion that the ball is red as an example of quite breathtaking stupidity.

“I’m a complete tool!”

Yes, and this comment appears to have come from an uncharacteristic moment of mental clarity for you. See, you can do rational thinking, after all.

…

If [you are] really not as bewilderingly stupid as I believe [you] to be, then [you] would have given the right answer - actually the ONLY answer one can honestly give.

…

Reading your last post caused a vision to flash through my mind. This is it:

A little boy told did a very stupid thing and needed to be corrected severely by his father. The boy, now upset, crying, snotty, red-faced with tears running down his cheeks then shouts at his father ‘I hate you!’. Where that came from is anyone’s guess…

…

“As my mother used to say ‘ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.”

Or, as I prefer to put it, ‘ask someone stupid a question, get a stupid answer.’

All of the above was collected from his own comments underneath the post where he said we insult him. Against one person. He is using the very tactic he accuses us of.

5. Say nothing

Dr Briffa says nothing. He just hides that fact by talking a lot. He is using the very tactic he accuses us of.

The more astute of you will have spotted a pattern.

His thesis remains much the same: no matter what anyone does, since science can’t prove a negative, we can’t be sure MMR doesn’t cause autism. Which is true, but of course can be applied to any stupid hypothesis you care to come up with. In his recent post, which is called “Why the MMR-autism ‘war’ is far from over”, he says

What I am saying though is that there’s a huge pile of anecdotal evidence and some experimental evidence too which supports the idea that MMR vaccination might cause autism.

This really isn’t true. The Cochrane Collaboration examined 139 studies about MMR (not all about MMR-autism) and concluded that

No credible evidence of an involvement of MMR with either autism or Crohn’s disease was found.

In any case, this always goes the same way. There’s a bad study done that “suggests” something, in this case that MMR might cause autism, and a load of people latch onto this for some personal reason, then when someone points out that the research is rubbish they deny it. Eventually the weight of evidence becomes so great that the course of least resistance is to drop that one tiny part of their stance: their position switches to “that study was bad, yes, we can see that, but our theory is still right”. If you ask them to show some non-bad research that supports their hypothesis then they’ll go and do a literature search vast (if not rigorous) enough to put any PhD student to shame, before coming up with some bizarre study about giving vaccinations to chimps or something, and I always look at those and think “hang on, where the fuck did that come from? You’ve been ranting about how bad MMR is for years, and this is the first time you’ve mentioned that study. In fact, you were ranting about MMR for years before it was published! How do you expect to convince me that that’s influenced your opinion in the slightest? I want to see the evidence on which you’ve based your opinions, if there is any.” Of course that doesn’t invalidate their chimp-based study, but it does show that they’re starting with a conclusion and then collecting evidence to support it, when they should be starting with evidence and basing the conclusion on that. Once you’ve established that, the last thing you should do is to criticise their evidence — it’s much quicker for them to find more shaky evidence than it is for you to dismantle it, so they’ll always be a couple of steps ahead if you let yourself get drawn into that fight.

The evidence used to persuade us of the safety with regard to autism is simply inadequate. The fact is, I don’t know whether MMR causes autism or not. But then again, it seems neither do those who insist it is safe.

He also says

Now, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that those of the pro-vaccine lobby will want to claim that this blog is scaremongering by making out that MMR vaccination causes autism.

I agree with jdc about that quote.

And while the reason that the debate rages on is usually put down to the likes of Dr Wakefield and the parents who believe their children were damaged by MMR, the real guilty parties here have been our Governments whose intransigence regarding proper, definitive research in the area has inevitably left a huge question-mark hanging over MMR.

That’s plain wrong. As I said in his blog comments (assuming that he hasn’t deleted them, although he’s been good to jdc’s, so I don’t want to imply that he will), it would be unethical to do that study: if the study group was large enough to show the effect (which even anti-MMR types claim is very rare, even when they’re demanding that all three of their children were hit by it) then you’re deliberately avoiding giving a potentially life-saving vaccination to at least hundreds of children, on the basis that a few ill-informed, untrained, tabloid-reading morons think there might be a risk. There’s no way that would ever get past an ethics committee.

You have to be a little bit detached and just accept that the so-called link between MMR and autism is, in fact, just made up. That doesn’t prove it’s false, but it puts its odds at much the same level as other made-up hypotheses, such as “cider causes shortness” or “MRI scans cause blindness”. (I just pulled those out of thin air.) Doing huge studies to attempt to disprove things you’ve made up would be a tremendous waste of time, and that doesn’t change just because they were made up a long time ago by someone else and then relentlessly repeated by bad journalists and angry but unqualified mothers.