NONSENSE ON STILTS 2018

Here we go again, then. The annual round-up of the good, the bad and the ugly in healthcare, nutrition and general daftness.

Let’s start with some good news: this is a great thread by Simon Singh on Skeptic successes in the past few years. 

HEALTH

Following a consultation, the Charity Commission has decided that charities must support their alternative medicine claims with good scientific evidence.

In other good news, homeopathy is no longer publicly funded on the NHS – and about bloody time too - but of course they won’t go down without a fight: homeopaths are going to take the NHS to court. 

Homeopathic vets also had a hissy fit because the RCVS demands its members use evidence-based treatments. Because science doesn’t know everything, right? Even though vets are scientists. 

Cancer patients using alt med rather than conventional treatments have a worse survival rate. And it’s not just people self-treating; research finds that ‘Doctors who are attracted to homeopathy despite a lack of evidence may be generally less good at keeping up to date on treatment guidelines and safety alerts or be less willing to work with colleagues to improve. Doctors who offer it to patients tend to do worst on scores for effective use of conventional medicines.'

Mixing alt med with real meds is like running an unsupervised and potentially deadly experiment.  Natural does not equal better. Or safe. Look at what happened to that great self-doser Dr Jekyll.

Twenty years on, the legacy of the MMR vaccine and autism scare lies continues to take its toll across Europe. Cases of measles have hit a record high, according to the World Health Organization. Experts blame the surge in infections on a drop in the number of people being vaccinated. Although, inevitably, it’s a bit morecomplicated than that.

There has been some interesting research on how anti-vax attitudes correlate with belief in conspiracy theories and how this may affect pro-vax campaigns. It’s not surprising that there would be cross-overs as the same mindset is transferrable from one false belief to another.

It wouldn’t be a Skeptic Round-up without some mention of La Paltrow. Don’t put coffee up your bum even if she tells you to. And don’t use live bee stings either, even if she says ‘I’m open to anything. I’ve been stung by bees. It’s actually pretty incredible if you research it.’ Probably not so incredible for the bees, though.

Paltrow says anyone who challenges the healing powers of her 'wellness' products is against the empowerment of women. As if that passive aggressive act would shut down all debate. Lucky for us, her main challenger is a woman.  The wonderful Dr Jen Gunter attended the GOOP conference and reported from the frontline of 'wellness' where she found that the Goop store is “90% quackatorium, and there was no evidence supporting Gwyneth Paltrow’s claim that Goop does not engage in pseudoscience as a commercial venture."

There is some good news. Goop has agreed to pay a substantial settlement over unproven claims about the health benefits of its infamous vaginal eggs.  ‘Under the settlement Goop is banned from making any claims regarding the efficacy of its products without reliable scientific evidence.’

Enough about her.

Plain packaging doesn’t decrease the number of smokers – quite the opposite. It’s also failed in France and Australia. It certainly wouldn’t have deterred me when I smoked. The intention may be to deter new smokers (children) but it's impossible to determine accurately whether any one factor has an influence on either current or potential smokers.

A naturopath treated a child with rabid dog saliva to cure behavioural problems, claiming he was in a ‘dog state’. She claimed that "The dog that bit him may have recently been vaccinated with the rabies vaccine or the dog bite in and of itself may have affected the boy with the rabies miasm … Either is possible and the phenomenon is well-known in homeopathy. A bite from an animal, with or without rabies vaccination has the potential to imprint an altered state in the person who was bitten, in some ways similar to a rabies infection."

A miasm is a homeopathic term for ‘the ghost of the disease state still rampant in the energy system.’  The non-homeopathic definition of the word is ‘noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the atmosphere’. Pretty much sums it up. Just as well it wasn’t a werewolf that bit him.

Another naturopath is promoting peat tampons. Just don’t go there. 

DIET

Weight loss magnets – at last, what we’ve all been waiting for! Oh, wait a minute … This is why magnets don’t work like that.

Taking fish oil supplements for a healthy heart is nonsense says a Cochrane report.

Is sugar the new heroin? Normally everything ‘bad’ is compared with smoking these days. And ‘bad’ has become shorthand for ‘I disapprove of…’ Sugar is not addictive. Repeat. Sugar is not addictive. Sugar is not addictive.

The truth about Public Health England’s sugar reduction scheme: ‘The idea is to reduce sugar content in most foods by 20 per cent by 2020. The first target was a five per cent reduction by 2017 but this has not happened. It was never likely to happen. Instead, there has been a two per cent reduction across the eight categories that PHE is most interested in… Food companies need little incentive to shrink their products while keeping the price the same (Nestlé and Mars were frantically shrinking their products before the sugar reduction plan officially began - and before Brexit). But the government is now encouraging them to do it. Indeed, it is effectively compelling them to do it because that is the only realistic way of cutting sugar content in chocolate, confectionery and biscuits, which are the main sources of sugar.’

In some cases, the sugar content has gone down but overall calories have gone up. If you take the sugar out you have to put something in so that the product doesn’t taste like cardboard smeared in brown fat.

And other research states "We were unable to find evidence that any sugar tax actually implemented anywhere in the world has led to improvements in health." Sorry, Jamie Oliver. 

Water has become a big fad this year. There has been a new raw water craze. Mmm yummy poo and germs and bits of twig and insects and insect poo.

Need a mental boost? Try rosemary water. Only £4 a bottle. Check out the science section: ‘The herb features in Greek mythology, the New Testament, and Shakespearean drama’. Yes, it did say science.

Or there’s alkaline water that has been treated to have a higher pH level than the usual 6.5-7.5. The makers say it provides “better hydration” and is “designed to obtain optimum body balance” because it “uses specialized electronic cells coated with a variety of rare earth minerals to produce scientifically engineered water”.

Science says: “Your body regulates its [blood] pH in a very narrow range because all our enzymes are designed to work at pH 7.4. If our pH varied too much we wouldn’t survive… you’re literally just flushing money down the drain”.

GENERAL NONSENSE

A sceptical look at the long history of Personality Testing – including the bunk that is Myers-Briggs which is basically corporate astrology. 

Exorcism is on the rise. These truly are the Dark Ages.

A Mexican priest claims: ‘The vast majority of people who see him have normal problems or mental illnesses, and he says he has sent people to seek psychiatric help. But he says 2-3% show signs of demonic “vexation” … His subjects, he says, have problems that cannot be explained in normal medical terms. One, who he believes may have been cursed by her mother-in-law, feels an almost constant sensation of daggers entering her legs, knitting needles in her arms, and a clenched hand at her chin. Another was so obsessed by self-gratification that he masturbated 40 times a day. “Normally speaking it is humanly impossible … so that is a satanic thing”.’

I do like the term ‘vexation’ and will attempt to use it in general conversation. How does the woman know what daggers entering her legs actually feel like, or knitting needles in her arms? As a knitter, I can say that it would be bloody hard to stab with a knitting needle, they’re just not sharp enough. I’d use an embroidery needle.

It’s not just Mexico where exorcism is on the rise. A top Irish exorcist called for more exorcists because ‘there has been increasing evidence of the malicious activity of the evil one’. Pope Francis gave formal recognition to the International Association of Exorcists in 2014. According to Fr Collins, ‘it’s only in recent years that the demand has risen exponentially’ and he blames ‘a growing apostasy within the Church’. Scare tactics, then. Come back to Church or the Evil One will get you.

The ‘malicious activities of the evil one’ has a great ring to it. I shall be using it to refer to anyone I don’t like in future.

According to vets, the government is being very economical with the truth about the efficacy of badger culling: “Badger culling has not worked. They are issuing barefaced lies in this matter." The former head of DEFRA’s wildlife epidemiology unit who advised the department on its TB strategy for more than 40 years says: "Defra has been cherry-picking the science since they started culling. The fact that they are rolling it out on such a vast scale is a travesty of the available science." 

The Indian education minister says evolution is ‘scientifically wrong’ because no one has ever seen an ape turn into a man. He seems to be confusing science with shape-shifting. I have however seen a man turn into an ape on several occasions. Generally after the application of alcohol.

This debunks the myth that women talk more than men. Men of course have much more important things to say. At great length. Even when we’re the expert in the subject and they just read an article by Jordan Peterson and shut up or I’ll send you death threats on social media for daring to mention this. 

The ‘psychology’ of the power stance has also been debunked. Politicians should keep on doing it. So much of what comes out of their mouths is inane/terrifying/depressing that they might as well give us a laugh.

So-called ‘healing crystals’ often come from ethically and environmentally dubious sources. So they’re not just pretty shiny things.

Koko the gorilla’s language skills were not at all as we’d been lead to believe, more a mixture of wishful thinking and ignorance about how language actually works. Damn it.  Who doesn’t love a chatty gorilla with a pet kitten? 

There is no evidence that tech is as ‘addictive as cocaine’. Nor are cupcakes, ice cream, power, carbs, World of Warcraft, sugar etc etc. Claims are often based on a misunderstanding of what addiction is and an oversimplified description of what the brain chemical dopamine does, according to clinical psychologist Vaughan Bell.

Hunt’s screen time limits for kids is yet more evidence free policy, yet another moral panic: ‘the recognition of so-called gaming disorder by the World Health Organisation is premature.’.

Andy Przybylski, associate professor and director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute said: “The thing that is very, very important to understand about this is that these correlations are extremely small,” he said. “And 99% of a child’s wellbeing has nothing measurable to do with screens, no matter how you measure them.”

It turns out it’s a myth that Victorian doctors treated hysterical women with vibrators. Damn, that’s another fun one out the window then.

There are times when I so wish magic was real. A coven of New York witches put a hex on US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and, just to make the story even more fun, a Catholic priest and exorcist in California countered the spell by saying prayers for the justice at Mass, saying "This is a conjuring of evil - not about free speech."

They claim that similar hexes on Trump have been successful "We feel the rituals were a success as they sought to expose Trump for what he is, and that has happened on many levels; from the Russia probe to the exposé on his finances to Stormy Daniels."

It is of course impossible to tell without an unhexed control Trump whether they worked or not.

A real treat to end with– an archive of occult recordings. Everything from the voice of Alistair Crowley to voices beyond the grave to all manner of spooky shit. Enjoy.

For vaccination against nonsense, dangerous or otherwise, join us at London Skeptics in the Pub  or find your local Skeptics group. London is the original SitP and 2019 sees the twentieth anniversary of our founding. There will be celebrations and they will not be carb-free.

2016 – Another year of nonsense on stilts

As part of running London Skeptics in the Pub, I like to collect stories for our members. These are some from this year that caught my attention. They cover three main areas: health, diet and random nonsense.

Let’s start with the health-related stories.

HEALTH
Antibacterial soaps are often sold with scare tactics – buy this or your children will be eaten by bacteria and you will be a Bad Parent. But there is mounting evidence that they are no more effective than regular soap and water and they may be driving antibiotic resistance.

Glucosamine has become a popular remedy for joint pain but it looks like it’s no better than placebo. This means that it may work – because placebos work, especially in pain management – but it’s not cheap and you might well be better off using exercise. I wrote about glucosamine six years ago and back in 2001 the BMJ found that it doesn’t work, yet it’s still a huge money-spinner.

Staying with pain management, we’ve all used paracetamol but again there is mounting evidence that it’s no better than placebo.

So-called alternative medicine has had a fair few stories in the news this year as well, some more worrying than others.

Cupping was popular with some athletes at the Olympics. It’s done by setting fire to a flammable liquid in a glass cup. The flame burns away the oxygen, creating a vacuum. Once the flame goes out, the vacuum creates suction that sticks the cup to the body.

Along with the drop in temperature, this sucks the skin up and draws blood to the surface. There is also a version that doesn’t involve fire but it’s much less dramatic and so lacks the theatricality that witchdoctors and quacks often use to convince their ‘patients’ they’re actually doing something other than fleecing them.

The red spots last a few days and are caused by ruptured capillaries beneath the skin. It’s claimed to cure muscle problems and pain, arthritis, insomnia, fertility issues, and cellulite. Needless to say, there is absolutely no evidence for any of these claims and it will make you look like a twat. Stalwart skeptic Dr David Colquhoon was on TV explaining why it doesn’t work.

On the upside, yet more trials find homeopathy doesn’t work and NHS Wirral has stopped funding it.

The US government has ruled that homeopathy treatments will now be held to the same advertising standards as other products claiming health benefits. This means that all homeopathic products will have to include the statements ‘There is no scientific evidence backing homeopathic health claims’ and ‘Homeopathic claims are based only on theories from the 1700s that are not accepted by modern medical experts’ if they are to be stocked in chemist shops. So that’s at least one good thing America has done this year.

Many vets are calling for homeopathy to be banned, too. Of course, some people will see this as a victory for Big Pharma and carry on buying it. Because there’s no cure for stupidity.

Vets have increasingly been offering a range of ‘alternative treatments’ including chiropractic and acupuncture; the cost of them has pushed up pet insurance by 9% according to the Association of British Insurers. Of the 370 policies on the market, 96% include alternative therapies. It’s hard to tell whether vets are offering these treatments because people want them or whether people want them because vets are pushing them. Either way, this cat looks really pissed off its owner is so dumb.

Back to humans and there is no evidence that brain training helps prevent dementia. As the population ages, the various forms of dementia are on the increase and the race is on to find a treatment, especially as the NHS may not be around much longer.

Staying with the brain, the term ‘brain plasticity’ (or neuro-plasticity) gets bandied about a lot but means pretty much nothing. It’s one of those terms that people who don’t know much about science use to make it sound like they do.

It could be argued that it’s up to adults what they do to themselves but it’s different when they force children to take alt med. In October this year, a four year old boy nearly died after being given supplements from a naturopath to treat autism.

DIET FADS
This year has seen the usual crop of diet fads. Our appetite for them is equalled only by our appetite for fat and sugar (well, my appetite for sugar, certainly).

Superfoods are claimed to have all sorts of miracle powers. There is no good evidence that pomegranates have any particular benefits, goji berries are no better than any other fruit, there is little evidence for chia seeds, beetroot juice does seem to lower blood pressure slightly but if you have high pressure, get to the doctor, change your diet and do some exercise rather than looking for a quick fix. Eating too much seaweed can be bad for you and kale has no magic powers. It doesn’t seem to matter how often the antioxidant myth is debunked, people keep buying into it.

The idea that you need to drink eight glasses of water a day just won’t die despite the total lack of evidence.

Another thriving fad is clean eating. Spiralised vegetables, kale and pomegranate (again) and NO EVIL CARBS. Bread and pasta are evil and ‘full of chemicals’. Apparently fruit and veg contain no chemicals at all. That’s because they are made from fairies’ breath. The supermarkets are increasingly stocking cauliflower ‘rice’ and butternut squash or courgette ‘noodles’. And of course they are not cheap.

There’s a serious demonizing of sugar but a lot of the ‘clean’ recipes that claim to avoid sugar are still sweetened with honey, dates, coconut sugar, agave syrup and so on. I’m sorry to tell you that these are all still sugars. Paying a lot more for something with virtuous-looking packaging won’t change that.

Yes, it’s mostly another dumb middle class fad but it has repercussions for people with eating disorders, assigning some foods to the ‘dirty’ category, making food a moral choice and piling on the body shaming if you stray from the straight and narrow. Don’t you want to Get The Glow? Like a lot of cult members, clean eating converts really don’t like it when confronted with evidence.

Another dumb idea from this year was that activity icons on food packaging would help combat obesity by showing how long it would take to exercise off the calories. They won’t. As ever, the truth is boring: eat a balanced diet and get some exercise.

Finally, this story suggests that eating chocolate can make you smarter. I don’t care if it’s good science or not, I just want it to be true.

December 26. A late entry is the protein supplement. Even most athletes don't need extra protein. According to Tom Sanders, professor emeritus of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London,“There’s been a lot of hype in gyms pushing high-protein shakes, there’s also a need to get rid of a waste product from the dairy industry, which is whey protein,” he said. “It’s a lot of crap, a way of selling a cheap product at a high price.” Excess protein is excreted through urine so you're basically paying for expensive pee pee.



RANDOM NONSENSE
OK, we’ve done the serious stuff, now here’s the fun.

During the run-up to the Brexit referendum, there was much talk about an EU cabbage regulation that runs to 26,911 words. This myth has been around since the 1940s in one guise or another. There are some lengthy British guidelines but EU regulation contains precisely none that are specific to cabbages.

The idea that it takes 10,000 hours to get really good at something has been endlessly repeated. Malcolm Gladwell conveniently or willfully misunderstood the research his claim is based on and made a lot of money from it. But it’s nice and sound-bitey so expect to see more of it.

If you’re tempted to get your DNA checked to find out who your ancestors were, you may well be paying for what scientist Dr Adam Rutherford has described as ‘mostly total bollocks’. What’s more, a general misunderstanding of how genes work has led to some people thinking their ancestors give them some sort of ‘pedigree’ or explain their behaviour. One of my great-grandfathers was a convicted bigamist. What does that say about me? Absolutely bugger all.

This year there was a story that went on far longer than it should have about an eight foot werewolf terrorizing people in Yorkshire. According to one ‘expert’ it’s our ‘collective guilt’ about exterminating wolves that keeps these myths going. So not horror movies, alcohol and attention-seeking, then?

Oh, and apparently Uri Geller predicted that Theresa May would become Prime Minister. Of course he did.

There are three main threads running through all these stories. Firstly, desperately ill people will try anything – and who can blame them? They are often vulnerable to exploitation. There is always money to be made from intractable pain and incurable conditions.

Secondly, many of us want a quick fix to lose weight. With the increasing incidence of obesity, diabetes and other health consequences, the market is ripe for exploitation and there is no money to be made from common sense.

Finally, some people will believe any old nonsense if it makes a good story, suits their prejudices or requires a bit of effort to check out.

Come and join us at London Skeptics and watch us sort crap from Christmas for another year. You can find the stories I collect on our Facebook page and on Twitter @LondonSkeptics. Thanks to my right hand woman Carmen, to all our speakers, our audiences and the Monarch for hosting us.

The truth is out there. Keep ‘em peeled.

What doctors don't tell you

Warning: May cause apoplexy.

Since 1989 husband and wife team Lynne McTaggart and Bryan Hubbard have been running a website called What Doctors Don't Tell You. Now they are publishing a magazine with the same title.

It wasn't easy finding a copy, which is a mercy. One newsagent in Camden told me he received an unsolicited batch yesterday and sent them straight back because he didn't like the look of them.

Who are McTaggart and Hubbard? She has form as an anti-vaccination campaigner. In one of her books, The Intention Experiment, she says that the universe is connected by a vast quantum energy field and can be influenced by thought. He recommends vitamin C as a treatment for cancer and they complain about the Cancer Act which prevents them promoting their 'cures'. So I think we know what we're dealing with.

There is a bit of common sense here - get some exercise, don't eat junk - but my main issue with WDDTY is that the average reader has no way to tell crap from Christmas and, for some of the articles, nor do I without reading every single research paper they mention to check all the trials and tests were randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, peer-reviewed and had sound methodology and good sample sizes. But I do know when I'm being obviously manipulated. I may not be a rodentologist but I can smell a rat a mile off.

The main message of WDDTY is BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID.

Doctors misdiagnose, make mistakes in prescriptions, constantly break the law by treating patients like 'lumps of meat' and not discussing treatment options properly. If your doctor doesn't kill you, your dentist will by X-raying your teeth. Whipping up fear that a visit to the doctor might kill you is McTaggart and Hubbard's strong suit. Even worse, it might kill your children. This is the trump card as the main audience for magazines like this is women. Around 80% of the pictures of people in WTTDY are of women (I'm not sure about the dogs and the piglet).

There's more. The antidepressants your doctor prescribes you will probably kill you. So will painkillers. Two thirds of people on prescription drugs end up in a worse state because of them. Cancer screening doesn't save lives. Sunblock causes diabetes. Prescription drugs 'are playing a big part in the mental and physical decline of the elderly, and may even be a contributor to premature death'. Note the 'probably' and the 'may even': there's a lot of that in WDDTY.

It's one scare story after another. But there is some good news. Forget about medicine, don't go to the doctor, take supplements. Pretty much every article has a suggestion of a 'proven' alternative to medicine which is either dietary supplements or 'alternative' medicine. Oh, and homeopathy works! This has been proven by a Swiss study that relies on 'real-life' cases rather than academic studies, they say.

There is a long list of superfoods too. Because they're natural. And natural is good. Unlike doctors and prescription medicines, which are unnatural and very very bad.

WDDTY is big on food allergies too. There are lots of stories about various conditions caused by them. Perhaps this is because the magazine is 'supported by some of the world's leading pioneers in nutritional, environmental and alternative medicine'.

Whatever is wrong with you, or whatever you fear you might get in the future, supplements will see you right. It's a bit like psychics who make a prediction then, if you say it hasn't happened, they tell you it soon will.

In the same way that cigarettes are nicotine delivery systems, WDDTY is a supplement advert delivery system.

There is a huge range of unscientific and anti-science propaganda here, all the usual cobblers that a proper scientist could spend weeks demolishing. There are also a couple of articles that are more worrying.

The first is the case study of Nerissa Oden. She says 'I healed myself of severe dysplasia (abnormal cell growth) and HPV (human papillomavirus) in just six months'. How did she do this? 'A friend who is a chiropractor and nutritionist suggested I get tested for hidden food allergies'. Nerissa also went to a naturopath 'who recommended a list of vitamins and supplements that I should start taking'. Nerissa turned down a biopsy and a D&C (dilatation and curettage). After six months on the special diet, she got a good result on a Pap test but then fell off the diet wagon and got a bad result, so she went back on the diet for another six months and upped the supplements.

Bingo. A Pap test came back normal and a gynaecologist declared her cured.

At the end of the article is a handy list of 'helpful supplements'. There's a surprise. It's like a kind of cult. A cult of idiocy.

Why is this worrying? It may cause women to self-diagnose, self-treat or turn down life-saving medical procedures. It will certainly cost them a lot because supplement manufacturers are not charities. It will put readers in the hands of unqualified, unregulated shysters. It may make them take an equally irrational and dangerous approach to other health issues and other areas of life. And if not them, then their children (see, I can play the kiddie card, too).

The second article, the longest one in the magazine, is about HPV vaccines. They are evil. Lynne and Brian don't seem to have read Nerissa's story where she lists all the cancers that HPV can cause and says how serious it is. Nor do they seem to know that the NHS and Cancer Research UK says that it's the second most common cancer in women under 35. In the editorial, they say it's not a serious issue and the article says it's 'uncommon'. But, given how inaccurate and unscientific the rest of the magazine is, why would this article be any different?

The article, by McTaggart, says that cervical cancer is a third world problem, a 'disease of poverty and unhealthy living'. She talks about the huge number of side-effects but lists only the serious, scary ones. The article bombards the reader with statistics and 'facts' and ends by claiming that the vaccination will 'at best' save 40 lives in the UK while harming huge numbers.

She accuses drug companies of using extreme scare tactics to promote the vaccines and make money - which is a bit rich when the magazine is shot through with scare stories to promote supplements and alt med. Incidentally, the supplement market was reported as worth 27 billion dollars in the US in 2009, and growing.

I don't know if the vaccine is safe or not. I don't know if it's as effective as it claims. I don't know how many lives it will save. But I'm much more inclined to listen to the opinions of scientists than quacks peddling what I do know are unproven and potentially dangerous treatments. There's some common sense about the vaccine 'controversy' here.

If this post has given you apoplexy, take a vitamin supplement and you'll be fine. I'm a doctor* and I'm most certainly not telling you to buy this magazine.




*Not a medical doctor. I may start a magazine on all the things that humanities PhD doctors aren't telling you.

The Emotional Eating Kit

There's an ever-growing number of stories in the media about the rise of obesity and related diseases in the UK - hardly anyone can be unaware of the scale of the problem. For most people, this is a serious health issue. For others, it's a marketing opportunity. Bach Remedies have not been slow to milk the cash cow.

According to them, it's not what you eat, it's why you eat.

The Emotional Eating Kit contains 'three flower essences that can help with comfort eating and offer a helping hand with diet and healthy living regimes'. It is 'the first product available in the UK of its type to specifically help deal with the emotions linked to comfort eating'.

What are flower remedies?
Bach's remedies were invented in the 1930s by Dr Edward Bach (pronounced Batch), originally a medically-trained doctor.

He was guided to choose his remedies by his psychic connection to plants, then suspended them in spring water and let sunlight pass through them. There is no part of any plant in any remedy, just its vibrations.

His theory was that by correcting the body's vibrations with plant vibrations, the body would then be able to heal itself. There is no explanation on the web site of the physical mechanism by which the remedies operate, no attempt at science, no placebo-controlled, double-blinded, randomised testing reported in peer-reviewed papers. There is this:

'Each remedy is a correcting vibration for a state of mind or emotion that needs to be gently rebalanced. Since the body is a direct reflection of the mind, transforming negative vibrations into positive good vibrations allows the body to respond naturally with better health'.

In other words, it's a 'cure' based on an idea not dissimilar to a Beach Boys song.

You can read more about each of the 38 remedies here along with a whole welter of New Age nonsense.

This is not herbal medicine

Flower remedies are not the same as herbal medicine based on plants that contain chemicals that have tangible physical effects - and side-effects. There are no side-effects of the Bach remedies because:

'Bach Flower Remedies can be taken by anyone, safely and without fear of side effects, overdosing or addiction. Since flower remedies work on a higher vibrational frequency they will not interfere with other forms of treatment. No harm comes from choosing the wrong remedy as it will cancel itself out if not needed'.

The self-cancelling and lack of interaction with other treatments would be very useful for real medicine (and herbal medicine), but strangely, no research time and money have been given to these remarkable attributes.

Bach experimented with homeopathic remedies in the early days and this claim bears more than a passing resemblance to homeopathic claims, particularly because there is no active part of the plant used, just its vibrations.

In other words, they can't harm you because there's nothing in them. They can't interact with other treatments because there is nothing acting in the first place.

The Emotional Eating Kit

The three remedies in the Kit are Cherry Plum, Crab Apple and Chestnut Bud.

Cherry Plum 'When you fear you might lose control of your diet, Cherry Plum can help you to think and act rationally'.

Chestnut Bud 'When you find yourself repeating the same dieting mistakes, Chestnut Bud helps you gain knowledge from your experience'.

Crab Apple 'When you feel unclean or dislike something about yourself, Crab Apple helps you accept yourself and your imperfections'.

It's a tiny therapist in a bottle!

Just for good measure, the Kit also claims to help with detox, that magic word so beloved of advertisers. Sense about Science say that 'Detox has no meaning outside of the clinical treatment for drug addiction or poisoning' and there is much other evidence that 'detox' is just shorthand for 'a good way to separate people from their money'.

There's no point asking how these three plant vibrations work to alter brain chemistry and the complex physical/mental interactions involved in comfort eating or 'feeling unclean' (whatever that means). There are no rational answers.

Instead, ask if it really matters that people who are genuinely trying to change their eating habits are being gulled into buying them. Of course, the advertising uses the weasel words 'can help' so that if it doesn't, there's no come-back. And it won't.

There is no quick fix
There's nothing wrong with occasional comfort eating. If you're doing it so often that it's a problem, then it's going to take more than a few drops of Dr Bach's magic potion to fix it. If any one diet or dieting aid worked, then we would only need to use it once. The diet industry would be tiny, not a multi-billion pound industry.

Losing weight and keeping it off is hard. If it were easy, we'd all be skinny. It involves commitment to life-style changes, possibly with professional help. There is no quick fix.

Contributing factors to being overweight include lack of exercise, the easy availability of food, constant junk food advertising and the high levels of fat and sugar in many foods, even some we think are healthy.

High fructose corn syrup is in most junk foods; it has an effect on the brain that make us crave them without ever feeling full.

Comfort foods are comforting/rewarding because these were the foods that were in short supply when we were hunter-gatherers. If you craved them and felt good after eating them, you'd put more effort into finding them and be more likely to survive to pass on your comfort-eating genes. In other words, an evolved survival strategy has come back to bite us because our bodies haven't evolved as fast as our societies.

And that's before we even address the complex psychological reasons for overeating.

The placebo effect
If the Kit works, does it matter how it works?

A systematic review published in 2010 by Professor Edzard Ernst concluded: 'All placebo-controlled trials failed to demonstrate efficacy. It is concluded that the most reliable clinical trials do not show any differences between flower remedies and placebos'.

If you use one alternative product, there's a good chance you will use others too. You're not just buying a product, you're buying a whole way of thinking based on magic and faith.

Something that works by placebo, if at all, is a kind of gateway drug to heavier dependency and self-diagnosis of possibly serious conditions. You're more likely to ignore evidence and rely on anecdote (my gran's neighbour took it and felt lots better) not just in this area but in others too.

And that's if it works. Remember the get-out clause 'may help'?

A couple of weeks ago, a full-page advert for the Kit appeared in the Saturday Guardian magazine because the prime market for all things 'alternative' is middle class women.

But who knows, you may be the one person in the history of the universe who proves the entire body of scientific knowledge wrong. If you are the miraculous exception, you may well find yourself stuck full of probes, every bodily fluid and tissue dissected, analysed and written up in scientific journals. Bits of you will end up in specimen jars. A gene mutation may be named after you. Are you feeling lucky?

But, in the end, it's up to you. It's your life, your body and your money.

Right For All The Wrong Reasons

Nursing Times has an article by Fiona Mantle warning of the dual dangers of consumer magazines giving advice on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and of self-diagnosis. But all is not as it seems.

Mantle looked at 15 UK consumer magazines for one month and found 150 articles on CAM. She accepts that this is a small study but 150 articles in one random month are at least an indicator of the state of play. The British public spends £1.6bn a year on CAM so why would magazines not want in? That's a lot of potential advertising revenue and no one ever lost money by giving the public what they want. Mantle says that the majority of CAM articles are by contributors 'whose key remit appears to be new product placement'.

Of these articles, '131 remedies were proposed by contributors with no medical qualifications'; 95 were on ingested herbal remedies, 25 on nutritional supplements, 10 on homeopathic remedies and 20 on essential oils.

Occasionally, she says, there are warnings to consult doctors, but not always. Even worse, of the five contributors who were medical doctors, not one of them highlighted any potential herb/drug interaction 'with two prescribing liquorice without any reference to existing cardio pathology, diabetes or hypertension'.

Mantle is particularly concerned about a self-help leg massage feature for 'heavy legs' that 'failed to offer any contraindications in relation to varicose veins, previous or suspected DVT or localised dermatological conditions'.

So far, so good.

The World Medical Association states that individuals have primary responsibility for using OTC products, but if they choose to self-medicate, they should be able to:

• Recognise the symptoms they are treating


• Determine that their condition is suitable for self-medication


• Choose a suitable product


• Follow the directions for use

That's quite a leap of faith to take in your own abilities and a lot of trust to place in a magazine article - not to say dangerous, stupid, gullible, desperate (add your own adjectives...). Mantle is quite right to caution against it.

But.

There's a bit of a twist in the tale.

Amazon describes her: 'Fiona has been a nurse health visitor and teacher for over 30 years and started the first CAM introductory course for nurses in 1999. Since then she has taught in a number of universities, written exclusively on CAM in the nursing press, contributing chapters to a variety of books and has spoken at national and international conferences. She holds the Diploma in Applied Hypnosis from University College London and has qualifications in reflexology, homeopathy and is a Registered Bach Practitioner.'

Reflexology, homeopathy and Bach Flower remedies. Ah. OK.

In other articles for Nursing Times, she has described reflexology as 'a fascinating system that maps and treats human organs through pressure points on the feet, face, ears, hand and back' and homeopathy 'has a wide range of applications for both acute and chronic conditions'. She has written A-Z of Complementary and Alternative Medicine: A guide for health professionals: A Practical Handbook, an article about CAM in the treatment of post natal depression (PND) and much else.

While she is cautious in her tone - aware of interactions, for example - there is no doubt for her that CAM works.

Her good advice against self-diagnosis or treatment and her objections to magazines advising readers on products begins to look more like a call for the public to see 'proper' CAM practitioners. Does she belong to the Prince Charles camp, supporting regulation to save the public from 'bogus' CAM therapists?

It would be interesting to know what she thinks about the recent cross-party inquiry into the NHS spending money on homeopathy, which concluded that it is an unethical and dubious use of public money. A spokesman for Boots said: "I have no evidence to suggest that [homeopathic remedies] are efficacious. It's about consumer choice and a large number of our customers think they work." Mantle would no doubt object to these remedies being sold over the counter to poeple who read about them in a mag - but not to them being dished out on the NHS.

She promotes the use of many kinds of CAM by the NHS. That's the NHS which is already struggling to pay for treatments that are proven to work and for enough properly trained staff. This is part of a letter she wrote to The Journal of Holistic Nursing:

This looks like a good example of out-quacking the quacks. It's a bit like a medium saying that yes, a lot of people who say they are psychic really aren't, but I am. She's not saying - don't read these magazines and don't self-treat with CAM because there is little or no evidence that most of it works any better than a placebo.

She's saying - don't trust them, trust me.

Surprisingly enough, I don't.

Magic Magnets

A woman in Java is selling headscarves with magnets sewn into them to cure various ailments including headaches and tiredness.

Herawati Widodo got the idea when she read that magnetic devices could reduce pain and improve blood flow, apparently. She said: "We created this magnetic hijab for Ramadan last year. We wanted to create a headcover that is not only a nice accessory but also a healthy option. We have 21 models of headcovers and produce more than 2000 pieces a month". Scarves cost between $6 and $15.

There's a handy testimonial to go with the story: "I suffer from migraine headaches and it has stopped since I wore this," said Ari Istiani, buying her fourth magnetic scarf.

Magnetic therapy has been around since at least the 18th century when Anton Mesmer, a Viennese physician, got the idea that there is magnetic fluid flowing through everything. He claimed that he could unblock the flow with his magnets. After a while, he found that his patients felt better even without the magnets and decided to use his own 'animal magnetism' instead. But the idea of therapeutic magnets stuck around.

Today there are many claims made for magnets, from helping broken bones heal faster to making wine taste better. Pain relief is one of the biggest sellers. Products include magnetic bracelets, bands, insoles, back braces, mattresses - and now headscarves. Many professional athletes are very keen on them (magnets, not headscarves).

Annual sales are estimated at $300m (£171m) in the US and more than a billion dollars globally. So it's not just a negligible niche market for the gullible few.

The story has been widely covered in the South East Asian press, with a lot of women commenting on the story online, asking where they can get one. Scarves can be bought online (minimum order a dozen). I can't be absolutely sure this is the same company as all the news coverage replicates the original Reuters story and none links to Widodo's company.

However, this ad is as good as any for looking at magnetic headscarves. The claim is that it's 3,500 gauss neodymium magnetic under the jilbab can maintain the positive and negative ionic balance like yin and yang. This ionic balance can suppress the headache problem. The English may be flawed but it's good enough to include the get-out-of-jail-free card 'can'.

There are many many websites advocating magnetic therapy - mostly selling something - with a range of 'theories' about why they work (that they do is a given). These often involve helping the blood circulate. Vague sciencey words like 'ionic' are mixed with proper science terms like 'gauss' and touchy feely New Age terms like 'yin and yang' as in the advert above.

The evidence they cite is pretty much all just anecdotes of the 'it worked for me' variety. In other words, I used a magnet and I felt better. The woman with a migraine in the news story is a prime example of this. (Note that she is buying her fourth scarf - this is news in the sense of free advertising.)

I don't know much about magnets so I asked someone who does. He said that a 3,5000 gauss neodymium magnet would be very powerful - to the point that credit cards should be kept away from it. But would it cure anything?

There has been little scientific testing and the tests that have been done have not found any demonstrable benefit. There is a BMJ report to that effect which you can read with follow-up comments if you have a subscription or here if you don't.

Why wouldn't it work?

Blood is not ferro-magnetic. In other words, yes there is iron in blood but it does not respond to magnets, not even really really powerful ones.

To get technical, a therapeutic effect is unrealistc because any magnetic effect is entirely overwhelmed by the thermal motion, not to mention haemodynamic forces in flowing blood. Incidentally, there is only about 3 or 4g of iron in the body anyway, and not all of that in the blood.

So what is happening?

Two things.

Firstly, our old friend the placebo effect. Pain is particularly susceptible to placebo.

Secondly, just because A happens and then B happens does not mean that A caused B. That's called post hoc reasoning and it's behind a lot of superstitions and 'alternative' remedies. A lot of complaints get better on their own. Headaches and tiredness, for example.

Actually, a third thing too - good old fashioned marketing that can turn crap into Christmas.

Finally, some little experiments.

1. Put some blood next to a magnet. Does it jump up like iron filings do in those experiments you did at school?

2. Walk into the kitchen. Do you feel an irresistible urge to join the fridge magnets?

3. Get in an MRI machine. Do you explode?

4. Do you find yourself inexplicably attracted towards the North Pole (magnetic North, of course)?

Perhaps someone could enlighten me why the women of South East Asia would particularly need magnetic headscarves during Ramadan.