My BMJ interview: more material for ad hominem attacks? | Edzard Ernst

When the British Medical Journal (BMJ) asked me for an interview, I felt very honoured and obliged with great pleasure. The result was published in the BMJ earlier this year. I take the liberty of re-publishing it here on my blog because many of my readers do not see the BMJ, and I think it’s rather fun. Moreover, I hope it might provide my critics with more diverse material for ad hominem attacks – the constant allegations that I am in the pocket of ‘Big Pharma’, that I have never done any original research etc. etc. are getting just too boring.

HERE IT IS […]

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Homeopathy in Liverpool: finally two homeopaths who don’t tell overt untruths | Edzard Ernst

A recent article in the LIVERPOOL ECHO caught my eye. It is about the possibility that the NHS in Liverpool might stop funding their homeopathy service . Maybe I should read the LIVERPOOL ECHO more often, because the short article is most revealing.

It first cites the chairman of the local NHS Clinical Commissioning Group, Dr Nadim Fazlani […]

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Dana Ullman, the ‘spokesperson’ for homeopathy | Edzard Ernst

Anyone who has looked into the discussions around homeopathy for more than 10 minutes will have come across Dana Ullman (DU). Some 15 years ago, I had the pleasure to meet him in person during a conference in Boston. After the brief chat, I asked a UK homeopathy who this bizarre person was. “Oh Dana!” he replied “Dana is alright.”

But is he? Let’s have a […]
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Multifactorial beats ‘pseudo-holistic’ by a mile | Edzard Ernst

One of the most common claims of alternative practitioners is that they take a holistic approach to health care. And it is this claim which attracts many consumers. It also makes conventional medicine look bad, reductionist and inhuman, as it implies that mainstream medicine is non-holistic.

The claim can be easily disclosed to be a straw man, […]

Read on: Multifactorial beats ‘pseudo-holistic’ by a mile

Crying “wolf”

Remember all those tearful posts and editorials about WDDTY being bullied? Well, here’s a crystal clear explanation of what they consider to be bullying....

WWDDTYDTY scrutinises the claims made by the so-called health magazine What Doctors Don't Tell You

Prof Frass’ remarkable studies of homeopathy | Edzard Ernst

Homeopathy seems to attract some kind of miracle worker. Elsewhere I have, for instance, reported the curious case of Prof Claudia Witt who published more than anyone on homeopathy in recent years without hardly ever arriving at a negative conclusion. Recently, I came across a researcher with an even better track record: Prof Michael Frass.

Wikipedia describes […]

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Ever heard about ‘Shujing Massage’? | Edzard Ernst

I had thought that I know most alternative therapies. However, Shujing massage was new to me. It seems to be a massage technique from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) along the Yin/Yang concept; a bit like Shiatsu perhaps.

Does it work? This study might easily be the first to address this question. It was aimed at comparing the […]

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Finally a rational, considered defence of homeopathy !*** | Edzard Ernst

Homeopathy has its fair share of lunes who are unable to make a reasonable case for it without telling overt falsehoods; we have seen some of then on this blog, for sure. Therefore I was encouraged to finally find a well-argued, rational defence of homeopathy. It comes from an unlikely source – Christian Boiron (CB) is the General Manager of the world’s […]

Read on: Finally a rational, considered defence of homeopathy !***

Chiropractic ineptitude camouflaged as research | Edzard Ernst

No, I kid you not!

This abstract was actually published in the leading chiro-journal. The authors include three professors from the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College, Research, Toronto, Canada. Its title is impressive but made my alarm bells ring a bit:

A Randomized Pragmatic Clinical Trial of Chiropractic Care for Headaches With and Without a Self-Acupressure Pillow.

And the actual texts does not disappoint those looking for of pure pseudo-science […]

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Will Stanislaw Burzynski finally face real justice? – Respectful Insolence

The other day, I suddenly realized that it’s been a long time since I’ve written about the Polish expat doctor in Houston who treats patients with advanced brain cancer with a concoction that he dubbed antineoplastons (ANPs). I’m referring, of course, to Stanislaw Burzynski who, despite the fact that he has no training in medical oncology, has treated thousands of cancer patients with ANPs beginning back in the late 1970s. Somehow, despite the fact that he’s never even come close to showing that ANPs are effective and safe against the cancers for which he uses it, the FDA has, with a brief interruption, continued to let him do his clinical trials, and the Texas Medical Board, despite trying every several years to do so, has failed to strip Burzynski of his medical license. Indeed, when I did a search on this blog to see when the last time I wrote about Burzynski was, I was shocked to discover that it was over a year ago, when one of his patients died...

Read the full post: Will Stanislaw Burzynski finally face real justice? – Respectful Insolence

A homeopath talks shite

... I freely confess that I didn’t know what meconium is. But Wikipedia (from where ‘DrPaul’ nicked the photo) soon enlightened me. Though as to what exactly he did with ‘The sample [he] derived from the drug free home birth of a friend of mine… ‘ (so why could he not take his own photograph?), I remained mystified. As such, I perhaps ought to qualify any statements I’m making by declaring my ignorance, thus leaving him retaliation room should he take the opportunity to lambast my admission that I do not wholly comprehend his ‘triturating’ and ‘proving’ of foetal faeces. Because he has not, I consider, made himself very clear...

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Should homeopathy be blacklisted in general practice? Doctor Michael Dixon’s profoundly misleading comments | Edzard Ernst

We could have expected it, couldn’t we? With so much homeopathy in the press lately, Dr Dixon (we have seen him on this blog before, for instance here, here and here) had to comment. His article in yesterday’s NURSING IN PRACTICE is far too perfect to abbreviate it; I just have to cite it in full (only the […]
Read on: Should homeopathy be blacklisted in general practice? Doctor Michael Dixon’s profoundly misleading comments

Is the Queen’s homeopath telling the truth? | Edzard Ernst

Not long ago, Peter Fisher fired me from the editorial board of ‘his’ journal ‘HOMEOPATHY’. I thought that this was a surprisingly daft move, particularly as we used to have respect for each other and even published together as co-authors (for instance here). But perhaps I should not have been surprised because, already in 2007, he published an important, potentially libellous falsehood about me.

In this article which he published as Dr. Peter Fisher, Homeopath to Her Majesty, the Queen, he wrote […]

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More very bad news for homeopathy | Edzard Ernst

A friend alerted me to this website: Hungarian Academy of Sciences statement proposing the same scientific standards for homeopathic drug registration as for normal drugs 

 Members of the Section of Medical Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS) voted unanimously on 9 November 2015 for supporting the earlier proposal of the Royal Swedish Academy of […]

Read on: More very bad news for homeopathy

Minimising the risks of quackery: A simple classification of charlatans | Edzard Ernst

Having just finished reading an ‘satirical esothriller’ entitled ‘VIER FRAUEN UND EIN SCHARLATAN’ (it’s a good book but it’s in German, I’m afraid), I have been thinking more than usual about charlatans. A charlatan is defined as a person who falsely pretends to know or be something in order to deceive people. In the book, the charlatan character […]
Read on: Minimising the risks of quackery: A simple classification of charlatans