Skepticat UK

When the MMR triple vaccine was launched in the UK in 1988, I had no hesitation in making sure both my children got it. I didn’t want them to go through what I’d been through in my own childhood: weeks off school, isolated, miserable and ill in my bedroom. I recovered fully from all the infectious diseases I got. Other children of my generation were left with permanent disabilities. Some died.

In this article I will take a calm and objective look at what the therapy invented 200 years ago by Samuel Hahnemann and known as ‘homeopathy’ is and why it is absolute crap.

I’ve already said elsewhere that I believe some complementary therapies are potentially useful. What about the rest…do they work?

Well, it depends what we mean by ‘work’. I don’t know who originally came up with the well-worn gag but it bears repeating:

It’s common to use the abbreviation ‘CAM’ to refer to complementary and alternative therapies and I shall do the same as an occasional alternative to my preferred descriptions, which include ‘quackery’ and ‘bollocks’, even though I don’t really like an umbrella term that lumps potentially useful complementary therapies in with other so-called therapies that are quackery/bollocks.

The No Sharia: One Law for All campaign was launched at the House of Lords on International Human Rights Day (10 December 2008). I attended the launch and, yesterday, I marked International Women’s Day by joining several hundred protesters at the anti-Sharia demo in Trafalgar Square for a march to Red Lion Square.