I’ve mentioned the ANH before on this blog after seeing Director Rob Verkerk’s performance at the amusingly mistitled Scientific Research in Homeopathy last year, where he spent a large part of his slot slagging off Ernst, Goldacre, et. A reminder of what I said:

Verkerk, who has a PhD in something to do with agriculture comes across a dreary, whingeing and obnoxious gobshite…He is the Executive Director of the Alliance for Natural Health — whatever that is — and, like many of the presentations at this ‘Scientific Research in Homeopathy’ conference, his had nothing much to do with scientific research but focussed much more on dissing the methodology employed by scientific researchers because it doesn’t suit quack remedies.

The tired old special pleading that the scientific method isn’t suitable for faith-based therapies is one of the ANH’s favourite fallacies, the other one being the soporifically familiar ploy beloved of those with a vested interest in such therapies, which is to cast aspersions and accuse anyone they perceive as threatening their livelihoods as being on Big Pharma’s payroll.

The attack on Professor Williamson

A recent example is the unbelievably nasty and spineless attack launched by the ANH against Professor Elizabeth Williamson, a pharmacist at Reading University. Williamson has written books about herbal medicines, a fact which, at first glance, might seem to make her someone the ANH would want to be nice to. Goodness knows they spend enough time brown-nosing homeopaths and suchlike. But Williamson apparently believes that herbal medicines should be properly regulated in the interests of public protection — a position which, for the bullies of the ANH, makes her fair game.

In a recent newsletter, the ANH accuse the Professor of purposefully misrepresenting the European Union’s Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directive in an attempt to “deliberately mislead the Minister of Health”. The article also hints darkly at a connection to “large phytopharmaceutical companies”.

We urge all our followers to share this story far and wide!

Followers? Do the ANH see themselves as cult leaders or something? I invite readers to read the last comment below the article in question for an example of the kind of followers they attract.

A few days after this attack on her character and integrity, we learn without surprise from a different site that Williamson is more than a little upset about it. Who could blame her?

The ANH response?

We are sorry that Prof Williamson has chosen to take this personally, but she hasn’t been attacked!

It seems that, in the minds of the ANH gang, publicly accusing someone of lying and implying they are corrupt, isn’t attacking them. Are these people for real?

Censoring the truth about supplements

As they have no conscience about suggesting other people are Big Pharma puppets and using this as a means of diverting attention away from the important issues of public health and safety, it came as no surprise to learn from a generally reliable source that,

The ANH is an industry lobby group who work mainly for food supplement companies and spend much of their time lobbying the EU and governments to give such retailers an easy legislative life. They do this, of course, under the banner of ‘health freedom’ and people’s choice to ‘alleviate suffering’ through ‘natural health choices’.

This would explain a spectacularly dishonest review by the ANH of an episode of Channel 4′s Food Hospital programme, which included an item on food supplements. In the second episode of this new series, we heard nutritional physician, Dr Alan Stewart, who has worked as a consultant for “numerous food supplement manufacturers” himself, proclaim:

There is some evidence that vitamin C, high dose, short term, may be of benefit because it may have anti viral properties and give your immune system a boost. We have to differentiate between that and long term regular use of high dosage vitamin C. There is now some evidence that women who were taking high doses of vitamin C — about a gram or more — had a slightly increased risk of breast cancer, so we can’t assume that vitamins are harmless.

A lot of people aren’t eating that well and they’d be better off to not waste money on supplements but to eat a healthier diet…There’s a real mismatch between who buys supplements and who needs them. The people with the worst diets are not the people taking supplements; it’s actually the people with the best diets who are taking supplements. So the use of supplements currently in the UK only lowers the risk of deficiency by about 1 per cent according to national diet and nutritition survey data.

If the ANH are indeed the paid mouthpieces of the food supplement industry, then it isn’t surprising that, in the ANH website’s review of the episode, neither Dr Stewart nor the points he makes are mentioned at all. Instead, it wrongly attributes to the programme’s reporter, Dr Pixie McKenna, a conclusion she did not reach.

The ANH review has Dr McKenna concluding that “people were better off not wasting their money on supplements and should buy more fruit and vegetables instead” and suggests this is, “a little misplaced, to say the least, in light of what was happening in the four cases aired in the same episode”.

This is a blatant misrepresentation of Dr McKenna’s position. In fact, having specifically pointed out that some people, e.g. pregnant women, people who drink and smoke a lot and those who can’t absorb enough vitamins through illness, may benefit from supplements, what Dr McKenna actually said was,

If we’re eating a healthy diet, taking supplements isn’t going to make us extra healthy.

In case anyone skimmed through the quote from Dr Alan Stewart above, I’ll summarise his main point in one sentence:

Most of the food supplement industry’s customers don’t need the supplements they are buying because they are already eating healthy, balanced diets.

Just to reinforce the point, I see that the The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics has updated its review on appropriate use of vitamin supplements. [Who should take vitamin supplements? Medical Letter 53:101—103, 2011] The article concludes:

In healthy people living in developed countries and eating a normal diet, the benefit of taking vitamin supplements is well established only to ensure an adequate intake of folic acid in young women and of vitamins D and B12 in the elderly.

• There is no good reason to take vitamins A, C, or E routinely.
• No one should take high-dose beta-carotene supplements.
• Long-term consumption of any biologically active substance should not be assumed to be free from risk.

(Thanks to the Consumer Health Digest for the information.)

After Dr Stewart’s interview, Dr McKenna did NOT say that people, instead of taking supplements, “should buy more fruit and vegetables”. She simply rephrased Dr Stewart’s point that if you are healthy and eating a good diet, supplements will not add extra benefit, which is the exact opposite of what the food industry — and, apparently, the ANH — want you to believe.

So Dr McKenzie’s comments were not “misplaced…in light of what was happening in the four cases aired in the same episode”. The two cases — the reviewer later revises it down to the two cases in which supplements were actually used — weren’t the typical food supplement customers to whom Dr McKenna’s comments were addressed; they were people with very distressing conditions. If you click here and scroll down, you’ll be able to read their individual stories. Contrary to what the ANH review states, at no point did Dr McKenna suggest cases like these should not take supplements.

The ANH could have used direct quotes from the programme and fairly represented what was shown but they didn’t; instead, while rhapsodising about the programme as “breaking new ground with food as medicine concept”, they censored the excellent advice that most of us don’t need supplements, while misrepresenting Dr McKenna’s view and dismissing her as having a “deeply ingrained distaste of supplements”.

With reassuring predictability, the ANH review of the programme rounds off with this typical bit of ancient quack wisdom:

It’s worth pondering that most of the negative studies associated with use of vitamin and mineral supplements have been undertaken directly or indirectly by Big Pharma.

Just about everything I’ve read from the ANH makes ‘observations’ of this kind. The idea that Big Pharma is threatened by faith-based therapies and food supplements is, of course, one that is very dear to the hearts of those whose personal investment in such therapies has affected their critical thinking skills. This would explain why Verkerk’s gang play on it so much.

A hissy-fit and more censorship

Indeed, I see that the ANH Executive Co-ordinator, Meleni Aldridge, has been “a practitioner of alternative and complementary medicine for 23 years” and has all these letters after her name: BSc Nut Med Cert LTFHE mBANT. She might even be responsible for the Food Hospital review. I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that either these “qualifications” or that dishonest review — if she did indeed write it — are in any way indicative of a lack of integrity on Meleni’s part. But there is a little matter of another misleading review that appeared on the ANH website and this one was under Meleni’s name. It was a review of the play, Alternative, that I blogged about in the summer. Meleni didn’t like the play and I don’t blame her. Who would enjoy sitting through a play that pokes merciless fun at what you stand for? (The play used a homeopath but anyone who promotes pre-science cult therapies would have fitted the bill.) She wrote:

Alternative is, in fact, a collaboration between the husband-and-wife Burton team and the ‘skeptics united’ of the charmless Nightingale Collaboration. This new venture appears to herald a change of tack for them — not content with ruining the lives of natural healthcare practitioners by acting like the most tedious of playground bullies, they are now contaminating the Arts with their particular brand of biased and reductionist thinking.

A response from the Nightingale Collaboration attempting to correct any impression Meleni might have inadvertently given that the NC had contributed either financially or creatively to the production, was never published. This may be an indication that Meleni isn’t as good at taking it as she is at dishing it out. We shall see. Anyway, here is the unpublished comment:

 The Nightingale Collaboration’s support for this production is limited to helping to publicise it, in exchange for publicity for our organisation, in its programme and website. We didn’t help to finance it, if that’s what you are insinuating.

I note with interest your suggestions that preventing those who make money out of alternative therapies from making false claims about them is “ruining their lives” and that we are “playground bullies” for demanding they be held to the same standard of honesty in their marketing as every other advertiser. Indeed, given the high-profile cases of people’s whose lives have been ruined by believing the false claims of alternative practitioners, I’m surprised you don’t share our worthy goal.

Each to their own, as they say. Same goes for the play.

The Alliance for Natural Health people are very well placed to get across the importance of being able to make an informed choice about healthcare and the responsibility of advertisers to be truthful. Claiming that homeopathy, cranial sacral therapy, reflexology, or whatever, can treat long lists of serious conditions is not truthful. I have already given a few examples of lives ruined because people believed in the false claims made by homeopaths. For easy reference, here they are again:

Cameron Ayres, Gloria Thomas, Janeza Podgorsek, Penelope Dingle. And here’s a reminder of the Australian documentary about Penelope Dingle, in which we hear from her sister that, as Penelope lay dying slowly in agony from cancer, she wouldn’t take any painkillers “in case they interfered with the homeopathy”. Strewth!

The ANH apparently supports the right of so-called healthcare practitioners to say pretty much what they like in their advertising and, without a trace of irony, slags off as “bullies” those who are trying to get false claims removed. Do they care at all that people have died horrible deaths thanks to the faith-based therapies they are championing? Evidently not as much as they care about lining their pockets.

ASA

So how does the Verkerk gang approach the matter that there is a regulatory body that is “independent of both the Government and the advertising industry and…recognised by the Government, the courts and other regulators such as the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and Ofcom as the body to deal with complaints about advertising”?

Why, by diverting attention away from the lack of truth and decency in so much quack advertising and questioning ASA staff’s competence, of course.

Dr Verkerk drilled the six ASA representatives over their respective backgrounds and skillsets. Despite somewhat defensive and indirect responses from the ASA, it seemed that none of the relevant staff possessed scientific qualification.

Phooey! It wouldn’t matter a jot to Verkerk if the relevant ASA staff were the most qualified scientists in the world. Let’s remind ourselves of what he has written about Edzard Ernst, MD, PhD, FMedSci, FRCP, FRCPEd,

Scientists like Prof Ernst have become so introspective over their worship of their reductionist methods…

And of Ben Goldacre, who devotes a large part of his life to exposing bad science, he snivelled:

I don’t think he’s a very good doctor or scientist.

The song and dance Verkerk makes over qualifications is a smokescreen. In fairness, I can’t recall seeing on the ANH website a single positive reference to the scientific method as understood by reputable scientists. The ANH doesn’t appear to share the contradictory position taken by so many practitioners, which is to quote any scientific paper they think supports their position while simultaneously arguing that the scientific method is not suitable for CAM. No, the ANH position seems to be pretty consistent and it is that any science that doesn’t give the results they want is ‘reductionist’ and any scientist who uses the scientific method is a bad scientist. If the ASA staff were scientists, I don’t doubt for a moment that they’d still be insulted by Verkerk, but instead of bemoaning their lack of qualification he’d be slagging them off as bad scientists who worship the reductionist method or some such crap.

The fact of the matter is that the relevant ASA staff only need to be experts in the Codes of Advertising Practice, which are underpinned by consumer protection legislation and reflect UK and EU law. Every other industry strives to abide by the regulations, apparently without having the pomposity to question the competence of experienced, professional staff. These include industries which, unlike most quack therapies, do actually have something to do with science. Only quack practitioners and their allies demand special treatment and only particularly dim-witted quacks and their apologists will be impressed by the ANH’s suggestion that agreement to participate in last week’s meeting at the House of Commons was “a slick PR stunt on the part of the ASA”.

Cripes, they really know how to win friends and influence people who matter, don’t they?

From the rest of the ANH report of the meeting, we learn nothing surprising:

The CAM community don’t regard the dissemination of information that relates to their practice as ‘marketing’ in the way interpreted by the ASA.

Oh. So on Planet ‘Natural Health’, printing a pile of leaflets advertising yourself as a homeopath and claiming that homeopathy can treat heart disease and cancer isn’t ‘marketing’, apparently.

And, of course, putting a list of serious conditions on your website and claiming that the therapy that you are selling can help them, is just the ‘dissemination of information’.

The CAM community could never have known in 2008 that the ASA’s remit would be extending in 2011 to all online/digital media… or that they would clamp down using the bully tactics that they have employed in 2011.

Yes, as the CAM community aren’t the brightest sparks at the best of times, I can just about believe it would never occur to them to find out about such tiresome things as the Codes of Advertising Practice, which promotional materials like the leaflet above — found in the waiting area of my local optician — have always been subject to, or that the ASA’s remit would one day be extended to include websites.

But what are these “bully tactics” of which they speak? Coming from a group that urges its followers to help publicise the vicious character assassination of some hapless academic, the ASA must have behaved pretty badly, right? Did they write to them all threatening prosecution or something?

Far from it. Back in March, after being flooded with complaints about homeopathy websites, the ASA wrote a polite and informative letter to the site owners, giving them a generous three months to accomplish what they could have managed in three weeks if they took the requirement to be legal, decent, honest and truthful seriously — or if the ASA had really decided to bully them. A hat tip to those practitioners who had the integrity and common sense to just get on with it and amend or remove their websites; they make the rest look like snivelling infants. “Bully tactics”, my arse.

A large number of homeopathy complaints were, of course, orchestrated by the Nightingale Collaboration (or “the increasingly fascist Nightingale Collaboration” as the ANH would have it). Since then, the NC seems to be getting the credit for just about every complaint made against any website making questionable claims about any dodgy-sounding ‘therapy’.

In fact, the groundswell of opposition to the promotion of quack therapies in recent years is such that the ASA would have got plenty of complaints within the same time frame, with or without the NC. It’s just that, thanks to the NC, they got a lot more than anticipated, to the point where they announced publicly,”

It’s important to note that sending us additional complaints on the same topic is most unlikely to alert us to new issues and it can have the unintended consequence of slowing down our work.

The message from the ASA seems clear enough to anyone with all the parts of their brain working as a team. They take breaches of the CAPs seriously and try to work with advertisers to get them to comply but this can take time. Swamping them with complaints doesn’t make things happen any quicker — a point the NC took on board and, as a result, started doing things differently.

In a nutshell:

1. Thanks to the NC, lots of people made very similar complaints to the ASA;
2. The ASA explained that many complaints on the same issue were unnecessary and can slow them down.
3. The NC co-operated and began submitting fewer complaints.

And I’ll wager this is pretty much what Miles Lockwood told his audience at the meeting.

As the  followers of the ANH probably don’t have all the parts of their brains working as a team, the ANH can get away with giving them this message:

In summary, the main positive coming out of the meeting — clearly intended to ensure a favourable hearing given the audience of a significant number of homeopaths — was that the ASA has apparently severed its connection with the Nightingale Collaboration.

This is hogwash, of course. The ASA hasn’t severed any connection with the Nightingale Collaboration because, outside of the fevered imagination of idiots like the ANH and their followers, there was no connection to sever.

This was the only ‘positive’ the ANH mention in their report of the meeting and, as it is nothing more than empty ANH spin, I am reassured that there were no positives at all from their perspective.

The unpalatable truth for them is that, as long as there are misleading claims being made on websites, complaints about them will be submitted — hopefully in a proportion that the ASA can manage efficiently — and the ASA will do whatever it deems necessary to hold the advertisers of alternative therapies to the same standards as other advertisers.

In the meantime, the ANH will no doubt continue to behave like the schoolyard bullies they are.

My first thought, on hearing that Rhys had received a threat of legal action, was that as many bloggers as possible should re-publish the piece by Rhys that Stephens objected to. As it happens, in the 25 days since Stephens sent his first extraordinary email to Rhys, a whole bunch of other blogs about Burzynski have appeared, not re-publishing Rhys’ piece but telling it their own way. Josephine Jones has a list of them — there were 62 at the last count!

I’ve only read a fraction of them and don’t have anything to add. As it will be obvious to anyone who reads any of Stephens’ missives, I don’t even need to point out that Stephens comes across as an ignoramus, a bully and a nutcase and that in employing him as some sort of minder to threaten anyone who writes the unpalatable truth about him, Stanislaw isn’t doing himself any favours.

A word from Rhys:

So in order to spread the word, I need your help. I would really appreciate it if you could do the following two things:

Tweet about the Burzynski clinic. You could either write your own tweet or you could retweet my suggested tweet: RT @rhysmorgan Patients need to know the whole truth about Burzynski’s cancer treatment claims: http://rhysmorgan.co/2011/08/the-burzynski-clinic/

OR you could retweet this: RT @rhysmorgan Dr Burzynski does not want you to know the whole truth about his cancer treatments, which is why he tried to sue me http://rhysmorgan.co/2011/11/threats-from-the-burzynski-clinic

Add a link to this blog from your website so that it will increase the PageRank for this blog so that when patients search for Burzynski, they discover this blog as well as Dr Burzynski’s propaganda. This way, they can discover the whole truth and determine for themselves whether it’s worth investing in his treatment.

Done.

Hardly original, I know. But kudos to Martin for his entrepreneurial spirit in finding a way to charge £15 for the privilege of reading him repeat what his target audience already believe to be true.

The unique selling point of DMTH is, as one reviewer put it,

It names the players, the committees, the organizations, the networks, the back room people and the front men and women who provide a distraction and tie up resources while the bricks are put in the wall.

OK, the second half of that sentence is gibberish but you get the idea. It names names and Martin’s target readers have bought into his notion that knowing who their enemies are will help them in their endeavours to continue conning us into buying their soothing chit-chat and worthless cult therapies.

Apart from a heavy dose of the tired old ‘science as rival ideology’ line trotted by anyone whose faith in anything from quackery to creationism is undermined by a wealth of scientific evidence, DMTH is a book of many delights. Here’s an early example but similar can found on virtually every page. From page 15:

Those described in the pages of this handbook are often undemocratic, antisocial elements, greedy, culturally ignorant individuals who put their abstract scientific ideology, their own careers and the profits of corporations they defend ahead of the citizen’s needs or health care; many of them are members of disguised pharmaceutical lobby groups. At the centre of this operation, in Britain at least, is Dick Taverne…

It may strike readers that he already sounds more than a little insane. The best is yet to come but first, let me give an illustration of just how thorough Martin’s research was:

Of Zeno, who advertises his blog as  ‘the random thoughts of a skeptical activist’,  Martin writes,

Should read virtual sceptical activist. Why would a scientific Skeptic be proud of writing about random thoughts?

Of Alan Henness, Director of the Nightingale Collaboration, he writes,

Active organising skeptic and humanist campaigns, such as the one concerned with ending religious beliefs.

If you don’t know about the campaign that is “concerned with ending religious beliefs”, that would be because it doesn’t exist outside of Martin’s imagination. More to the point, it seems Martin hasn’t managed to work out that Alan Henness and Zeno are the same person even though this is stated this clearly on Zeno’s blog. Furthermore, even though Zeno has blogged the story extensively, Martin says nothing of Alan’s 500+ complaints about chiropractors, which resulted in hundreds of chiro websites removing the false and misleading claims that used to be on them and which was the inspiration for setting up the Nightingale Collaboration which, by the way, is described by Martin as “a group of maggots”.

There are several similar examples of Martin failing to reveal what his readers might think is worth knowing. All things considered, if Martin’s readers really want to know anything useful about their detractors, they’d probably be better off doing their own research.

Quackademic

I’d wager that the only place Martin J Walker’s body of work on his favourite topic is mentioned in the same sentence as the phrase “academic writing”, is in a book written by Martin himself. Et voila! From the preface of DMTH:

 One of the reasons my work stands out from much academic writing is that, until relatively recently, I was one of the only writers in the field who discussed named individuals.

One might infer that his work is, in fact, rather better than academic writing because he “discusses” named individuals. In DMTH, for example, he discusses Tracey Brown, director of Sense About Science, thus:

 Another amateur magician, she metamorphosed before our very eyes from a revolutionary communist to a close colleague of Dick Taverne, the great PR artist – now there’s a trick and a half!

That was one of the more benign of Martin’s “discussions” of a named individual and I think we can agree that it does indeed stand out from academic writing. In fairness, Martin doesn’t actually discuss people; he just writes stuff about them or, in the case of bloggers, about their blogs. Imagine reading my quackolades column (see lower left) in book form. That’s pretty much what reading DMTH is like.

Other examples of  Martin’s great exposé of quackbusters that stands out from academic writing  include:

Andy Lewis’ Quackometer “brings to mind the old feminist adage, many men are like children but without the wisdom”.

Crispian Jago is a “laddish pharma agent” who “has an imagination by-pass”.

Martin Robbins’ Guardian column is “yet another aspect of the illiberal Guardian and its fascistic war against freedom of choice in health care”.

“So what’s to say about this obsessed and bigoted old bloke Colquhoun — not much”.

And so it goes on and on and on. Usefully, the book does provide the urls of many skeptic blogs and websites and I’m sure there’s a good reason why Martin didn’t just put them all, together with the rest of the content of DMTH, on a website of his own, instead of asking his readers to buy it as a book. A website would have been much cheaper to fund. I mean, it’s not as if he had some reputable publisher who couldn’t wait to pay him for the book.

Ethics

An insight into Martin’s personal code of ethics and why he ­— unlike so many of his targets — has to resort to vanity publishing, is provided by a curious disclaimer included at the end of the preface. Entitled Perhaps an apology, it concedes the possibility that he may be doing someone or other an injustice in what he writes about them. It seems that in Martin’s world, it’s OK to write anything you like about people you don’t know, as long as you acknowledge somewhere that it might not be true.

The disclaimer includes this extraordinary sentence,

 While those I might have maligned, albeit slightly, can draw respite from consideration of the fact that any criticism is accepted only by the consipiracy theorist lunatic fringe. (sic)

Yes, I know it reads like an incomplete sentence but that’s just how Martin writes. Remove the word ‘while’ from the beginning and we are left with a suggestion that whatever he says about people he vilifies, they can console themselves with the knowledge that it is only going to be believed by loonies. Of course, we already know this but what a way to talk about his target readers! He goes on to suggest that the people he attacks will be proud to have been targetted by him. He’s flattering himself a bit there. Given Martin’s lack of status, I imagine most will be indifferent, though if I were Jack of Kent I’d be mortified at Martin’s description of him as a “seemingly honest blogger” when the only other people Martin is nice about are quacks and charlatans.

Here is some more from the preface:

Those described are first ‘quackbusters’ pure and simple i.e. those who attack manufacturers, users and practitioners of alternative medicines, pretending to a knowledge of science when they are actually involved in the tawdry business of enhancing corporate competitiveness.

The term ‘quackbuster’, is a term he is swift to reject, funnily enough. Several paragraphs are spent in consideration of the best epithet for, as he puts it,

the movement or the individuals so intent on untruthfully defending technological advance regardless of adverse reactions and unlooked for consequences.

‘Agents of industrial science’, ‘pharmalackeys’ (sic), ‘pharmamafia’ (sic), ‘enemies of promise’, ‘enemies of self-empowerment’ are all given an airing before he settles on the pithy ‘health corporatists’.

As someone who has never worked in science, health, pharmaceuticals or anything connected and whose only skeptic activity — apart from winding up quacks on this blog — has been to complain about some of the unconscionable claims made to my face by those who profit out of fake medicine, it comes as something of a surprise to find my own name in a chapter entitled Health Corporatists: individuals. It is accompanied by a sentence containing information about me which is irrelevant, innocuous and, as it happens, untrue. As this rather flattering nugget of misinformation can be read in Martin’s book and nowhere else — I certainly hadn’t seen or heard it before — I conclude that it’s one he fabricated himself because, well, he’s got my name and he had to write something.

But who cares? Martin obviously doesn’t know where to find the real dirt about me (phew!) nor about anyone else, judging by the drivel he writes about people I know. As I wouldn’t want anyone else to waste their money, I’d like to announce a special offer to readers:

As what he says about Ben Goldacre is a good illustration of the quality of argument in the book and another reason why it “stands out from much academic writing,” I’ll share some of it here.

Martin tells us that BG, “came from nowhere to take a prestigious columnist’s job at the Guardian” and that, “it was unclear why he had landed the job on the Guardian until it was disclosed by John Stone that he is the son of Oxford professor Michael J Goldacre”.

Apparently they thought it a secret. I wonder if they’ve discovered the much more interesting fact of who is Ben’s mother is. What does it have to do with Ben getting a Guardian column, anyway? This:

1. Michael J Goldacre once co-authored a study of a GlaxoSmithKline product (urabe-strain MMR vaccine).

Interestingly for one who claims  to “reference all [he] can and to be as academically honest as possible” (page xiv), Martin doesn’t give a reference for the study Michael Goldacre did for GSK but it’s easy enough to find and it turns out to be a study whose conclusion is unfavourable about the product and presumably the very opposite of what GSK were hoping for. Strangely, Martin doesn’t mention any of this.

2. Ben Goldacre wrote an article in the Guardian about MMR which went on to win an award sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline.

Note the common words that appear in 1. and 2. above: Goldacre and GlaxoSmithKline.  If you still don’t see how perfectly this explains how Ben got his prestigious column, then you’re probably not a member of the alternative therapy/anti-vax cult. If you were, the mere mention of GSK in the same sentence as each of the Goldacres would be all you needed.

This is typical of the standard of “argument” throughout the book. The only people who might be persuaded of whatever message Martin is giving — which, in this example, seems to be that there is something sinister and big pharma-related about Ben getting a column in a newspaper — are those who will believe anything they like the sound of. That’s how they become quacks in the first place, remember.

Martin also makes the claim that Ben Goldacre accepted payment for the use of his name “to help to sell processed food.” Seriously, it’s on page 79. You may be wondering what kind of evidence is produced to support this outlandish allegation. The answer is none. It is, like so much in this book, something that Martin seems to have pulled out of his arse.

Libel

Which brings me neatly to the only other thing worth highlighting in the book. From the preface, again:

In England particularly, [discussing named individuals] causes many problems. The other side know that they have the funds, experience and lawyers to begin legal actions that can tie up writers, researchers and practitioners for years, while WE are always strapped for cash and most lawyers will run miles, unsuitably dressed, rather than shake my hand.

Don’t bother billing me for a new irony meter. Instead, let’s take a moment to remind ourselves of the libel actions taken by quackbusters against quacks, anti-vaxers, vitamin-pill pushers and suchlike. Um…anyone got a list? Because Martin hasn’t.

OK. Now, how about libel actions taken by those people against quackbusters? Here are a few recent ones that spring to mind:

1. Matthias Rath, vitamin entrepreneur and, in my opinion, probably one of the most evil people alive, sued Ben Goldacre for libel but, after a year, dropped the suit and was ordered to pay costs. Unfortunately, due to the litigation, the chapter on Matthias Rath was omitted from the first edition of Ben’s book but he made it available for free on his website,  so there is no excuse for not reading it and finding out just how evil Rath is.

Given Martin’s spirited support of the food supplement industry’s right to con people into buying supplements that they don’t need on the grounds of allowing “individual freedom of choice in health matters” (page 241), Rath is the kind of person Martin presumably sees as a good guy.

2. The disgraced Andrew Wakefield sued Brian Deer for libel, only to abandon his claim and end up paying Deer compensation. The court report reveals that, having filed a suit against Deer, Wakefield then sought a stay of execution of the suit and, while it was on hold, used it as a way of threatening others with similar action.

Wakefield — the man whose fraudulent paper resulted in anti-MMR hysteria, falling take-up rates and made measles endemic again in the U.K — is, of course, one of Martin J Walker’s heroes. Brian Deer, who earlier this year received a British Press Award  in recognition of his Sunday Times investigation into the Andrew Wakefield MMR-autism fraud, is Martin J Walker’s nemesis.

3. Edited 15.11.11 to draw attention to Andy Lewis’ latest blog post on this very topic. Three threats of legal action from three different quacks in attempt to gag this blogger because he told the truth about them. Shame on you Society of Homeopaths, Joseph Obi and Robert Delgado. You’re no better than crooks.

4. The BCA sued Simon Singh but eventually dropped their case when it became obvious they were going to lose.

Now read this from DMTH page 18:

The corporate science lobby ran a campaign to change the libel laws headed up by Singh. The campaign was started after Singh wrote a deprecating article in the Guardian about chiropractors. This campaign was important to the science lobby because they needed to be free of the constraints of libel law so as to be able to attack in the most outrageous manner anyone who has different beliefs from them.

When I first opened DMTH, I imagined I would be reading the sincerely-held views of someone delusional. Reading the above paragraph disabused me of that notion. Nobody can be that delusional. Brian Deer says Martin is a liar for hire. I agree. From Brian’s article (but do read the whole of it, it’s well worth it):

 The most startling array of particularly nauseating falsehoods were authored by a now-64-year-old failed graphic artist who calls himself “Martin J Walker”. He lives penniless in Spain, but in July 2007 surfaced in London at mammoth hearings, triggered by my investigation, of a GMC “fitness to practise” disciplinary panel. He claims to be some kind of “health activist” and “writer”, but although generally of no consequence, is a relentless peddler of smear and denigration, with a track record of latching onto the vulnerable. These he beguiles, like he’s their new best friend, and then he tries to sell them self-published junk books, or better-still, have them give him money.

“I am 60 next year and I have been and am now, utterly broke and also in debt to various people for relatively large amounts of money,” he explained in a private email not long before he spotted in the Wakefield case what he thought was a financial opportunity. “I am not a writer to whom agents and publishers have ever paid the slightest attention.”

So, Martin J Walker has no reputation as a writer to live up to. His self-published books are funded by donations from people who want to read what he writes, regardless of whether it accurately reflects reality, because it fits in with the standard quack fantasy about anyone who challenges the claims made by quacks, anti-vaxers and vitamin pill pushers. As such, Martin has no power to influence anyone who matters, which is why — in spite of the many malicious falsehoods contained in the book — he’s unlikely to find himself on the receiving end of legal action. My understanding is that for a libel suit to have a chance of success, the libel has to be likely to be damaging. Who’s going to be damaged by anything written in a self-published book by an under-achiever?

Which is why I’m happy to give Martin’s book a bit of publicity. I hope it helps him pay a few bills.

21/02/12:  Just a wee addition. I’ve recently came across someone who genuinely believes Martin’s Cultural Dwarfs and Junk Journalism is a reliable source of information about Ben Goldacre and who claimed Martin is an award-winning journalist. It seems he isn’t the only one who is confusing Martin with his namesake . Martin’s followers please note: in order to distinguish himself from the Martin Walker who really is an award-winning journalist and whose books are published by proper publishers, Martin uses the initial ‘j’ to signify a middle name.

While checking this out, I noticed that Martin’s website has an outdated link to an explanation of why his wiki page has been removed.

Subject fails on virtually all notability criteria on authors or activists: has not had work published in any peer-review, mainstream or credible publications. Vast majority of publications and publishing houses on article’s Bibliography return nothing on Google search. All verifiable output appears to be in the form of self-published pdf files and pamphlets. Mainstream coverage appears to be limited to a couple of brief mentions in a couple of journals and alternative magazines, and even that’s assuming that the inadequate references in the article in question are accurate.

I’m embarrassed for him and for all who quote his as an authoritative source.