Many of the homeopathic “Drs” have the Indian DHMS and BHMS qualifications. These qualifications may entitle them to call themselves “Doctor” in India and a couple of other countries but are totally unrecognised elsewhere. I have come across other homeopathic “Drs” with PhDs in unrelated subjects. I have also come across those with PhDs from unaccredited institutions, some of which are obviously diploma mills. Reply
Great work Zeno. I see the ASA rules on Dr & Herbs It nevertheless considered that in this context the title “Dr” would be understood to mean someone who held a qualification equivalent to a general medical qualification in the UK. Because the advertisers had sent no evidence of their practitioners” qualifications, the Authority concluded that the term “Dr” was likely to mislead. It seems that “Dr Batra’s” is now going to be subject to some serious lip and gum mumbling by the toothless ASA. Reply
Homeopathy fights back it seems: http://elephantsandmice.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/edzard-ernst-admits-fraudulent-credentials/ Reply
A fight back by homeopathy would need to consist of coming up with robust scientific evidence that homeopathy works better than placebo and a plausible mechanism of action, something they have failed to do in the last 200 years since it’s invention. Reply
@Zeno I appreciate your comment but I note that you haven’t attempted to defend Edzard Ernst. Everything I have read to date had led me to believe that he was trained in and practiced homeopathy in Germany? Reply
I’m not in the slightest bit interested in what your beliefs are and whether you think you were misled by whatever it was you’ve read about Ernst. The topic of this blog post is the misuse of the term Dr by quacks in their advertising to the public and the ASA’s rules about misleading the public. If you want to discuss something else, find another blog to do it on. Reply
Tzspence, As far as I am aware, Prof Edzard Ernst was trained in homeopathy – and I wouldn’t be at all suprised if it was in Germany (not least becuase he’s German). However, he is also an MD, PhD, FMed Sci, FSB, FRCP, FRCP (Edin.). So if you are somehow implying there’s a wrongful use of the term Doctor, then you are barking up the wrong tree. Or quacking, if that’s your preferred language. Reply
No I am not implying the wrongful use of the Doctor title, I am pointing out that when you upset a lot of people, a lot of people get upset and you should be squeaky clean. With regards prof Ernst training in Homeopathy, if this piece is correct, it would seem he did not. Reply
Ernst has no qualifications in any alternate or complimentary therapy. He assumes he knows best because only proper doctors know what they are talking about. Ernst is a fraud but has the support of lots of people who need dorks like him to create psuedo chaos, he claims all sorts of clap trap to support his position. Ersnt’s parents were homeopaths so what we are really seeing is some latent teenage freek out from him and what he really needs is deep councilling, some crystal healing and a sweat lodge to connect him with his umbilicus so he can be reborn. Reply
With regard to freedom from psoriasis being clap trap, how about the claims of childhood vaccination! Recent research shows that for every vaccine added to the infant schedule the infant mortality goes up, not down, for that population. Your site is totally disproportionate, far more people are being wooed into believing that vaccines do anything, which of course they do but not what is advertised on the tin. Reply
doublestandards Thanks for your ill-informed and irrelevant opinions about Edzard Ernst. If you think that something needs to be done about vaccines, I suggest you contact the MHRA: Yellow Card scheme Complaints about advertising of medicines — unless you’ve done that already, of course? Reply
So I take it you believe in the woo of vaccine? Is that because they are exempt from RCT trials against placebo, which they are of course or because they are exempt from litigation due to dodgy deals between governments and Pharma? Guess what Poland rejected the swine flu scam, with great tutting from real doctors at the time. Now their position is being exhonerated. They demanded evidence and none was provided. So lets get it into perspective, you take down a handful of alternatives that have hardly made a dent on mortality, they have no funding to even attempt defence. Meanwhile wankers like Bill Gates pump public funds along with his tax evasion scheme into companies that he has shares in to provide mass poisoning, along with threats to make it mandatory! What kind of hero are you? Reply
@doublestandards, Why are you wasting your time here? Vaccines have saved and will continue to save millions of lives. Both Zeno and I remain extremely grateful that our parents took vaccination seriously enough to get us all the jabs that were available in the 1950s/60s. I was lucky that I came through unscathed from the infectious diseases I did get but some of my schoolmates weren’t so lucky. Nothing you say is going to erase the memory of children I’d played and laughed with being left disabled by measles. I don’t have a moment’s regret for making sure my own children were fully vaccinated and I will my damnedest to make any grandchildren I have are too. Anti-vax campaigners like yourself are ignorant and deluded and, as far as I’m concerned, the scum of the earth. Reply
Oh and Ernst does no research of his own, only Daily Mail friendly cherrypicking meta reviews of system drivel. I made a complaint to OFCOM about that dreadful programme last year on the cervical cancer vaccine and to no surprise absolutely every point that was backed by FDA research that showed the programme was totally biased, missed out key known saftey issues, breaches of Ashfar ruling on informed consent the list went to dozens of pages was given the same answer: Beyond our remit to comment! The guy who won the Nobbled piece prize for discovering the fraudulent fantasy link between HPV and cervical cancer got into a bit of legal trouble too, half of the awarding committe were on retainers from the vaccine manufacturer! But that’s normal practice in medical circles isnt it. The FDA has known since the early 2000’s that there is no link, but that’s medicine for you, lie when it suits, dismiss and suppress anything that challenges. Pretending to save the planet from cancer is offensive in the least, no one in England was told that the American Cervical cancer vaccine had the following interesting bit of information not disclosed. All the girls in the first wave of vaccination were pre swabbed to see how many already had HPV. What they found out a year later was that in the group that pre tested positive with HPV that had had the cervical cancer the vaccine, the cervical cancer rate went up by 43%! So the vaccine in this group increased the cervical cancer rate! This knowledge has been known about for years by the FDA and you can read it for yourself in their report, how many girls were swabbed before in England? I think people have so lost faith in the woo of doctors, medical science and governance that even thinking that the ‘democratic process’ is valid feels offensive. Your one sided sniping is just part of this bigger pile, if it was funny I would laugh. I think Zeno we all know that the current Murdoch/government/banking/medical peer review process is all a pile of bollocks are you serious that it is possible to do anything about it? Reply
Skepticat, you quote from the trough of mammon. So how many disabled kids did you play with cos according to your rules that’s an anecdote and doesn’t count. The only vaccine tested against placebo and studied to see if it actually prevented the disease was the BCG, 20 years of study showed more TB in the vaccined group so Germany banned it! You are quoting anecdotal tosh ‘milliions of lives saved’ there isn’t a single efficacy study that supports this conjecture because all vaccines are exempt from RCT placebo trials. Infant mortality rates regressed against number of vaccine dosesroutinely given: Is there abiochemical or synergistic toxicity? Neil Z Miller and Gary S Goldman 2011 You are obviously not aware of this study, infant mortality goes up with additions to the infant vaccine schedule but I suppose that’s the problem with myths, especially when they are government backed. So how does that equate with your mythical proclamations and if you had the vaccines how come you came through ‘unscathed’ with some of them? which ones did you get that you got vaccinated for then? What about the recent epidemic in France then, it’s mandatory there and obviously doesn’t work. You need to stop reading government woo and start reading what’s happening. Reply
doublestandards said: I made a complaint to OFCOM about that dreadful programme last year… Is that it? Is that all you’ve done? Did it take you as long to write your complaint as it did to write your comments here? Reply
6. Do not resort to ad hominems — You well know that anyone who attempts to question orthodox woo like vacciination is subject to ad hominem attacks like the one Skepticat has just posted. This represents the sum of all vaccine evidence, emotive tosh. Until medical science becomes properly scientific with no funding bias (quote from ex editior of BMJ and New England Journal of medicine) then you cannot believe anything written in a medical peer reviewed journal. If we were living in a sane medical science community where promoting health was the objective we would be able to engage with it and move subjects like vaccination into medieval history where it belongs. Whilst there are teams of marketing people lobbying politicians it is futile to validate this flawed process and for you to suggest that all one has to do is engage and see proper process take place is either a joke or you are part of it, I have no idea which it is. So if the current scientific evidence shows that infant mortality goes up, not down, when vaccines are added to the infant vaccine schedule that is not my opinion it is according to your standards good evidence that there is not only a problem but a complete disaster. When people bring to your attention some witch doctor claiming that he can cure psorasis you are quick to act, why don’t you act on this evidence about vaccination, it affects far more mortality than a lone pin pricker. Reply
So based on the evidence if you have a daughter will you make sure she is pre swabbed so that if she already has HPV you can make an informed decision to decline the vaccine? Reply
doublestandards: Perhaps you’d like to regale us with what else you’ve done other than knocking off a quick letter to Ofcom? What else have you tried to do — and, presumably, failed in — so that people don’t suffer from the blight on humanity called vaccines? Perhaps you’ve set up a website to highlight your concerns and are rallying support as we speak so that you can make complaints and possibly legal action against our evil overlords? As a concerned citizen, please tell us. Or have you just thrown in the towel and instead resort to trolling blogs to berate others for not being believing in the same nonsense you do? Reply
Here we go, avoid the questions, avoid the issues stick to the same old pragmatic myths. Alan, there are plenty of good websites doing this work and quite well by their results. So answer my question, if you had a daughter who was being lined up for the Giardisil shot would you insist on getting her pre swabbed or just let her be used as a guinea pig? Just to update you as you obviously are not informed: if she has already got HPV the vaccine will increase her chances of getting cervical cancer by 43%. Another known fact by the FDA is that most HPV so called infections are naturally cleared in 3 menstrual cycles so surely it would be cheaper to just wait? Skepticat still hasn’t told us what dreadful infectious diseases she got as a kid and survived, were any of them the vaccinatable ones, go on let us know. I would hate to write her off as some anecdotal ranting system sucker but the evidence says otherwise! So now you have decided that peer review and published papers showing vaccination to be medieval are nonsense, perhaps you would like to share the evidence with us all, how do you decide that an evidence based opinion that is actually published in a peer reviewed medical rag is nonsense? Reply
It’s stunning that a man who sets himself up as some kind of EBM drag queen resorts to getting all emotive over vaccination! If you have done your own kids then that’s excusable as everyone wants to do the best by their kids. But the only way to stop a cycle of abuse is to stop the cycle of abuse. There are many reasons that vaccination keeps going. 1. A lot of people still think the system and proper doctors are acting in the interests of public health, why should they think otherwise? 2. Peer pressure and mythology. 3. Politicians like it, you spend loads of public money on a psuedo placebo and voila you are a great guy. 4. It’s a nice story. 5. No one is allowed to question it. There isn’t a jot of evidence that vaccinated communities don’t get the vaccinated diseases because this research is not done. All vaccine efficacy data is directed at short trials, no placebo and not to see if people actually get the disease. So what have you done Zeno, nothing has changed on the ground, sure a few wobbly people have been told to brush their teeth and change their towels but the real crime, medical voodoo has carried on regardless injecting shit into people with legal protection to abuse, infant mortality going up to boot. People like you are beyond description, you need therapy or euthanasia! Reply
Skepticat, you quote from the trough of mammon. LOL! Are you a lay preacher in your spare time? So how many disabled kids did you play with… Well, to be honest, only two children in my year suffered from permanent hearing loss after the measles epidemic. I’m not sure about the rest of the school. There were just a couple of polio survivors in calipers in my neighbourhood. How many children would have to be disabled or dead for you to be bothered? Or are you one of those anti-vaxer who scoff that only 16 children died in England and Wales in the year they launched the MMR? If so, I don’t think we can get on the same wavelength. …cos according to your rules that’s an anecdote and doesn’t count. Newsflash: When an anecdote is supported by a medical evience – or a coroner’s report – it becomes data. You evidently haven’t grasped the rules. I am not offering anecdotes as evidence that measles is a potentially dangerous disease. I’m sure you already know that. The point I’m making is that when one has had first-hand experience of the devastation caused by infectious diseases, then one recognises that they are a problem and the opportunity to protect one’s child is not one to pass up lightly, just because some ill-educated obsessive has got a bee in his bonnet about vaccines. This is not something I’ve seen you acknowledge. Perhaps you don’t believe that infectious diseases kill and maim? You are quoting anecdotal tosh ‘milliions of lives saved’ there isn’t a single efficacy study that supports this conjecture because all vaccines are exempt from RCT placebo trials. You don’t need an efficacy study when decades of experience and millions of doses provide a very impressive data set of both effectiveness and safety. The incidence of notifable diseases declines sharply whenever a vaccine becomes available and widely-used and the reverse happens when uptake of the vaccine falls, thanks to evil, scaremongering anti-vax campaigners like yourself (although, in fairness, as your ‘campaigning’ seems to be limited to trolling a handful of skeptic blogs, I don’t suppose you’ve personally had too much impact). You are obviously not aware of this study, infant mortality goes up with additions to the infant vaccine schedule but I suppose that’s the problem with myths, especially when they are government backed. On the contrary, I am well aware of that “study”. My attention was drawn to it by Orac, whose article goes into some detail and exposes the report’s many flaws. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/05/vaccines_and_infant_mortality_rates.php I suggest you read Orac’s piece carefully but, in the meantime, I’ll highlight a couple of quotes: “The first author, Neil Z. Miller, is described as an “independent researcher,” and the second author, Gary S. Goldman, is described as an “independent computer scientist.” This is not a promising start, as neither of them appear to have any qualifications that would lead a reader to think that they have any special expertise in epidemiology, vaccines, or science. (snip) Miller has a long history of anti-vaccine activism, having written books with titles like Vaccine Roulette: Gambling With Your Child’s Life, Immunization Theory vs Reality: Expose on Vaccinations, and Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective?, among others. But that’s not all; he’s also the director of the ThinkTwice Global Vaccine Institute and in fact is hosting a copy of this study on his website. Gary S. Goldman is even more interesting. It turns out that he is the President and Founder of Medical Veritas, a rabidly anti-vaccine “journal” that is into HIV/AIDS denialism, having published dubious “reanalyses” of autopsy results of victims of AIDS, such as Eliza Jane Scovill. He also notes at his website that he’s written books entitled The Chickenpox Vaccine: A New Epidemic of Disease and Corruption.” In your comment above you called Edzard Ernst a ‘fraud’ because (according to you) he “has no qualifications in any alternate (sic) or complimentary therapy”. That you should take this position on Ernst while according credibility to Miller and Goldman, would seem to indicate a certain inconsistency in your approach to evidence and the reliability of sources and, if I may say so, that would seem to be the major difference between us. I don’t know what has persuaded you to embrace the loony conspiracy theories you are promulgating but, speaking as someone who has no personal or financial investment in any aspect of healthcare and therefore no axe to grind for one side or the other, it is obvious to me that you are not interested in objective evidence and are not capable of evaluating it. You desperately cherry-pick any story that says what you want to hear and present it for our consumption, apparently thinking we are as gullible as you are. Not so. if you had the vaccines how come you came through ‘unscathed’ with some of them? which ones did you get that you got vaccinated for then? I got NO disease that I was vaccinated against. That’s why I said I was grateful to my parents for getting me the jabs that were available at the time. The diseases I caught were things like measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox for which there were no jabs at the time. What about the recent epidemic in France then, it’s mandatory there and obviously doesn’t work. You need to stop reading government woo and start reading what’s happening. *sigh* Nice try, but I’m sure you know damn well that the MMR vaccine is NOT mandatory in France and the epidemic took hold precisely because so many young French people were not vaccinated. If you don’t know this, then it is you who is not reading what is happening. Finally, 6. Do not resort to ad hominems — You well know that anyone who attempts to question orthodox woo like vacciination is subject to ad hominem attacks like the one Skepticat has just posted. This represents the sum of all vaccine evidence, emotive tosh. Your ignorance is becoming embarrassing and your dishonesty is reprehensible. An ad hominem is a logical fallacy because it disregards the substance of an argument and attacks the person making it instead. Your comments about Edzard, for example, is an ad hominem. This does NOT happen to “anyone who attempts to question orthodox woo like vacciination” as a cursory glance at this and any other skeptic blog demonstrates. I did not ignore the substance of your argument because you hadn’t made an argument. You simply had a cathartic rant, which seems to be your main purpose here. It follows that the comment of mine that you refer to was not an ad hominem, it was simply a gratuitous insult and one that you thoroughly deserve. Hope that clarifies. 🙂 Reply
The WHO did a study on measles fatality and found that malnourishment was the key in this. So often emotive rants and no context is the basis for false claims. Any death is a tragedy but claiming it is the vaccine when there is no evidence is piss poor. As to your ‘You don’t need an efficacy study when decades of experience and millions of doses provide a very impressive data set of both effectiveness and safety’ mythology statement this is what you scream at homeopaths, they too have decades of experience and millions of doses so what makes your anecdote any more impressive. The only thing that goes down with the introduction of a vaccine is notification by GPS. The coroners death rate does not. You truly are the anecdote queen of fatuousness! Reply
Logical fallacies are all too common in comments: the following websites describe several types of logical fallacy. Using any of these fallacies detracts from anything useful you may be trying to say and destroys what you are trying to say. You should read the guidelines on this blog Skepticat. There is no context for your statement on why the two children at your school became deaf with measles. It is well known by people who study the subject that the real issue with sequale from any so called infectious disease is malnourishment prior to the condition and random fever supression. It may surprise you that the latter issue on fever is well covered in the new NICE guidelines on fever management in children from studies done at Great Ormond street. You would do well to come up to speed on this by doing a bit of reading rather than quoting some medieval doc quack sermon on ‘millions saved by…..’ and someone might take you seriously. Immunity to measles in malnourished children H. C. WHITTLE, J. MEE, J. WERBLINSKA, A. YAKUBU, C. ONUORA & N. GOMWALK* Department ofPaediatrics and Medicine and *Department ofMicrobiology, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria (Accepted forpublication 30 May 1980) Reply
Sorry forgot quote in last post: all these well-nourished children did not have severe measles and none had any obvious secondary infection. We found it impossible to make a correct match as the nutritional state determined the severity of disease and the incidence of secondary infections. Immunity to measles in malnourished children H. C. WHITTLE, J. MEE, J. WERBLINSKA, A. YAKUBU, C. ONUORA & N. GOMWALK* Department ofPaediatrics and Medicine and *Department ofMicrobiology, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria (Accepted forpublication 30 May 1980) Reply
doublestandards I’ve tolerated your nonsense and off-topic diatribes on my blog long enough. If you feel you still need to vent your somewhat distended spleen on this subject, then please feel free to set up your own blog (which is very easy) where you can spout whatever nonsense takes your fancy to your heart’s content to whomsoever wants to hang on your every word. Just to remind you, since you appear to have forgotten, the topic on this blog post is misleading ads for homeopathy. If you post another comment that is off-topic, I will, as the rules say, delete it. Reply
Logical fallacies are all too common in comments: the following websites describe several types of logical fallacy. Using any of these fallacies detracts from anything useful you may be trying to say and destroys what you are trying to say. You should read the guidelines on this blog Skepticat. LMAO at this comment from the obsessive who has posted hundreds fallacious comments, virtually every one containing vicious personal attack on someone or other. It’s a bit late to get all sanctimonious, mate. You reap what you sow. Now crawl away, your time is up and all you have achieved here is to confirm the already widely-held impression that anti-vaxers are not only deluded; they are thoroughly nasty people who don’t give a shit about anything except their own sick agenda. Bye. Reply
Millions of doses of homeopathy and years of clinical experience what’s the difference, there is nothing off topic about this post unless you count pointing out the big hole in your reasoning. Reply
doublestandards You were warned. Your latest comment about vaccines is in the trash bin. You said: Here is a misleading ad for homeopathy ’10 23 there’s nothing in it’. And will you be complaining about it? Here’s some helpful information for you. Please remember to tell us how you get on. Reply
It is amazing or totally predictable that when one scores a major trashing of a septicat that the post is deleted. How on earth to you expect to get anywhere with this kind of religious purging? So how about deleting the cats last post as completely off topic, untrue and ad homem or are we talking double standards here? Can you find a single vicious post by me to support her anecdote or is this the kind of evidence you think is ok? Reply
doublestandards As I warned you, your comment was off-topic and irrelevant. If you want to think your comments have trashed anything, that’s up to you. I will leave you with your delusion. As I’ve suggested before, why don’t you start your own blog, where you would be free to talk about whatever nonsense you like? However, if you have something useful to say about the advertising of homeopathy, please feel free, but my warning to you stands. Reply
scumbag said Can you find a single vicious post by me to support her anecdote or is this the kind of evidence you think is ok? A single vicious post by you? Sure. How about this one, the first of many? It would seem that these ‘tank sites’ are populated with middle ages meddlers who hide behind the ‘save the poor’ ticket because they have nothing better to do. I would let them fester in their own hypocrisy, they offer nothing but suck chi from anyone who goes near them. Zeno is a ‘fall out hypothesis’ and the septic pussy is one of those abandoned bunny boilers looking to fight anything. How ever hard you try you can’t polish a turd, at least the ‘florence collaboration’ puts them all in the same room, keeps them out of harms way. Source: http://www.zenosblog.com/2009/07/taking-osteopathy-in-hand/ You’ve made countless stupid, ranting posts under countless different names and included countless insults against me, Zeno, Edzard and numerous others. Now you’re snivelling like a little girl because you’ve been dealt a few back. Better at dishing it out than taking it, then? Quelle surprise. Reply
In India all homeopaths are as qualified as allopaths with the same number of study years put in ..with the same salary @ govt. hospitals too . Reply
DR L KUMAR said: In India all homeopaths are as qualified as allopaths with the same number of study years put in ..with the same salary @ govt. hospitals too . Yes, it’s very unfortunate that the Indian Government gives homeopaths false legitimacy when what they ‘practice’ has no basis in robust evidence. Reply