Ofquack, the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (CNHC), launched its website today. This organisation is supposed to regulate all the practitioners of woo who have their own governing bodies, here in the UK.

Because I’m interested in these things, I took a look at the site, and there are a couple of things to note. On the welcome page is the grand introductory paragraph telling us the function of Ofquack -

“The CNHC was established in April 2008. It heralds a completely new approach to the regulation of complementary therapies in the UK. It builds on the excellent work already undertaken by many of the professional bodies within complementary and natural heath care. Upholding the highest professional standards, the creation of the CNHC will provide a boost to consumer confidence and public trust which will in turn benefit all practitioners. Significantly, the roles of the professional associations and the regulatory body are now separated in order to give increased clarity of function.”

Thats all very well and good, but unfortunatly, up until now, Ofquack have carefully avoided any discussion or comment on whether these woo therapies actually do any good. Now they have published a mission statement, I am looking forward to future developments.

Mission

CNHC’s mission is to support the use of complementary and natural therapies as a uniquely positive, safe and effective experience.

On the “Contact Us” page of the site is an email address, so I have sent them the following message -

Peter Mitchell
Administrator
CNHC

Subject : Congratulations on the Launch of CNHC

Peter,

Congratulations on the launch of your website which I have read with great interest.

I particularly like the Mission Statement, where it states that the CNHC will be supporting the effectiveness of CAM and ALT-Med practitioners.

I wondered if you could tell me how CNHC will know if one of the regulated therapies has any effectiveness at all?

I look forward to your response.

Best Wishes for the future

Andysnat
Sedgefield
Durham

I wonder if he will respond?

On the Badscience Blog, Ben Goldacre may well have started a trend this week, and it has since been copied on a couple of other blogs, giving a rather neat and pleasing balance to some idiocy. Ben posted a video of a homeopath, explaining how homeopathy works. Featuring a woman I have called Dr. Dippy. She mangles all of science in an astonishingly deceitful manner as far as I can see. Perhaps she just had no idea what she was talking about. Dr. Dippy may have caught on that Ben has been having some fun at her expense, because the video is no longer available, but careful searching has provided an alternative, which you can see on youtube. It isn’t about homeopathy, but it is Dr. Dippy.

My video clip is from a homeopath in Leeds, explaining how a doctor just removes a bulb in the dashboard, and a homeopath actually cures. Still doesn’t really say how though.

A bit silly I think, so in the spirit of the game, here is my Feynman Chaser.

I do like Feynman. There is plenty of other stuff to mix a different chaser with. Perhaps we’ll see a few more popping up around teh interwebs.

P.Z. Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He went to the movies the other day with his family and a friend, to an advance screening of the creationist propaganda movie, “Expelled.”

The film has a claim to fame in that it is narrated by Ben Stein, who you may know as the shrink in the film The Mask, and the makers did many of its interviews for the film under false pretences.

P.Z. must have been on a blacklist of people not allowed to see the film, as he was asked to leave the theatre and its premises by a policeman. So he did, and blogged about it straight away, from the mall where the theatre was.

His family and guest got in of course, and his guest was none other than -

Richard Dawkins

There are currently over 750 comments on the blog post. Wonderful.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a charlatan ex doctor who had been struck off by the GMC, threatening to claim millions of pounds in damages from Netcetera, for hosting The Quackometer. The Quackometer had written some truths about Dr Joseph Chikelue Obi and he made some groundless threats, and you can read all about it in my earlier post, Quackometer Under Fire.

On Monday, the writer of the Quackometer, known as Le Canard Noir (LCN), was given about twenty minutes notice by the Spineless Tosspots called Netcetera that they would be pulling the plug on the Quackometer, and other pages by the writer. All because a real life genuine quack and charlatan threatened to sue the spineless tosspots.

LCN received the following email from David Boswell, of Netcetera -

Thanks for your comments. We do not wish to be in a position where we could be taken to court, and incur the loss of time and expense that would involve. Consequently Netcetera have decided to suspend the Quackometer website, with reference to our Acceptable Usage Policy, the first part of which is quoted below. The full policy can be found on our website www.netcetera.im/SiteInfo/AUP/

“Acceptable Usage Policy

This policy is subject to change, without alternate notice, so please check regularly for updates. This policy is in addition, and considered part of Netcetera’s Terms and Conditions.
Netcetera will be the sole arbiter as to what constitutes a violation of this provision.

1) Web Hosting
1.1) Netcetera reserves the right to suspend or cancel a customer’s access to any or all services provided by Netcetera, where Netcetera decides that the account has been inappropriately used. Netcetera reserves the right to refuse service and /or access to its servers to anyone.”

We will prevent public access to the site as of noon today 18th February 2008. You will be able to access the content to be able to transfer it to another host if you so wish.

We will hold the content available to you for 30 days, and then we will remove it from our servers.

Regards

Lessons to be learned from this?

Don’t use Netcetera as your host if you can avoid it. Some companies enforce their “we’ll take your site off the internet if a total schmuck frightens us” policy.

Other people commenting about this include Rupert Goodwins at ZDnet , Gimpy , jdc , coracle , shpalman , Holford Watch , Apathy Sketchpad , Letting Off Steam , The James Randi Educational Foundation Forum (long one that), BPSDB.org , Dr. Aust and finally (at the moment) Dr.T .

You already know not to trust Dr. Obi, right?

One of the things seen often on the forums used by CLLers around the world, is a discussion on vitamins. Vitamin A, B, C, folic acid, ascorbic acid; if it has a name, you can be certain that somewhere a CLLer is taking it or investigating it, or knows somebody who’s uncles best mate’s third cousin has a friend who’s mum had her blindness cured by eating carrots.

I suppose that all this is understandable to a degree. After all, we have an incurable illness, and like other cancer victims, we have no real certainty about what our future may hold. Medicine offers us a great deal of hope, but no certainties, and many of us turn away from reality and invest their trust and hope in unproven remedies, quackery, lining the pockets of the unscrupulous in the process.

One of the most astonishing of the well known quack cures is the Gerson Method. Involving consuming up to 20lbs of juiced organic vegetables per day, plus three balanced vegetarian meals. Central to the method, is the coffee enema. This ‘essential’ component is part of the whole detox regime that the method is all about. It seems that this detox is supposed, by using all those organic, contamination free vitamin and enzyme rich veggy juices, to cleanse your cancer away.

Gerson web sites have some surprising things. Videos, containing the promise that they can cure your cancer, and nastily, warnings that chemotherapy and Gerson don’t mix. Something they don’t have is evidence of the wonderful cures that following the Gerson Method brings. They are in the UK too

I have just two more negative things to say about Gerson. Firstly, it is well known that detox diets only work for the shyster flogging the book, and there is no demonstrable detox effect at all.

There are some positive aspects to the Gerson Method though, and yes, you are reading this, this is real, nobody is twisting my arm up behind my back. I’m convinced that if you follow the diet, ditch all the junk, the pies, the burgers, the processed stodge, the fizzy pop, the alcohol, the additives and you drink the coffee, it would be a huge improvement on the average western diet.

Vitamins. That is where I started. It is well known that cancer patients take many more supplements than the average person. It is also well known that there is virtually no evidence that taking vitamins does you any good at all. This point was made in a very good article in the New York Times this week. (Via Badscience) Many vitamin supplements have been shown to increase cancer risk. When I see yet another CLL patient announce his/her regime of vitamins and supplements on a forum somewhere, I often want to scream at them to spend the money on fruit and veg instead.

The second negative thing about Gerson?

Coffee is for drinking, not squirting up your bottom.

You may or may not be aware of a website called The Quackometer. It is great fun because the writer (Le Canard Noir) has a wonderful time at the expense of, well, Quacks. The sort of quacks that suggest coffee enemas will cure your cancer, or that eating lots of wheatgrass will add chlorophyll to your blood and oxygenate it, which has to be a good thing, doesn’t it?

In 2006, the black duck wrote about Dr Joseph Chikelue Obi, who was drummed out of the GMC for being an obvious charlatan and rather nasty piece of work. He had been working at South Tyneside Hospital, not too far away from me. Here are some examples of what my local press had to say about him.

A couple of days ago, Netcetera, web host of the Quackometer, told the Duck that he should remove a couple of posts as their spineless response to this email message -

Dear Sirs,

Re Defamation

We advise Professor Dr Obi and the Royal College of Alternative Medicine. We are informed that you host the Quackometer`s website (copy evidence enclosed).

Our clients hereby give you formal notice that they are determined to sue you directly for the highly defamatory contents contained on the website should you fail to immediately shut down the website and delete all of the defamatory material relating to the Royal College of Alternative Medicine, Professor Dr Obi and our clients` lawfully registered Trademarks.

In case the defamation continues beyond 12 noon on Monday the 21st of January 2008, we are instructed to hold you fully liable to the tune of £1 Million (One Million Pounds) per day, together with additional punitive damages relating to the many months during which the defamatory material had and has been globally accessible via your server.

Kindly note that Google has already blocked the highly defamatory material from appearing on its search engines in the Republic of Ireland, and is currently in the process of extending the ban to other countries.

Please find enclosed photocopies of the two RCAM Trademarks and a copy letter of Good Standing from the Company Registration Office in Ireland, as well as copies of these highly defamatory articles.

Please provide an undertaking that no further reference concerning Professor Dr Obi and/or the Royal College of Alternative Medicine is going to appear anywhere within the Quackometer`s website.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully,

Tanja Suessenbach

LLB, LLM

A nasty little threat I’m sure you agree. Now, what is Tanja complaining about? For starters, this -

Right Royal College of Pompous Quackery - Dublin

Thursday, September 28, 2006

I had to share this with you. Following on from my recent Quack Word ‘Doctor’ blog, I came across the Royal College of Alternative Medicine (RCAM) , a Dublin based - well, I’m not sure quite what it is…

What caught my eye was just the shameless aggrandisement of the site. It is quite hilarious, if not a little repetitive at times. Calling yourself ‘Doctor’ is somewhat pompous when all you have done is paid for some international postage. However, the man behind RCAM has absolutely no shame and titles himself as the:

Distinguished Provost of RCAM (Royal College of Alternative Medicine) Professor Joseph Chikelue Obi FRCAM(Dublin) FRIPH(UK) FACAM(USA) MICR(UK)

Wow! Probably, just Joe to his mates. Naturally, when you Google the qualification FRCAM(Dublin), there is only person who appears to revel in this achievement. I’ll leave the rest as an excercise for the reader.

The distinguished provost looks like he is just another pseudoscientific nutritionist, his spin being “Nutritional Immunomodulation”. This is obviously a lot more clever than Patrick Holfords mere ‘Optimum Nutrition’, but having only one ‘omnipill’ is probably a poorer commercial decision that Patrick’s vast range of supplements.

Obviously, Professor Obi has had a few problems with what probably amount to bewildering comments about his site as the legal threats and press releases concerning his ‘ethical’ responses to criticisms cover more space than anything else. ‘Ethical’ is a favourite word on the site.

The most recent press release states,

7th September 2006 : The Distinguished RCAM Provost , Professor Joseph Chikelue Obi FRCAM(Dublin) FRIPH(UK) FACAM(USA) MICR(UK) has formally accepted appointment as Chief Professorial Examiner for the Doctor of Science (DSc) programme in Evidence Based , Alternative Medicine (EBAM) of a highly respected International University in one of the British Commonwealth Protectorates.This new qualification is primarily aimed at Medical Graduates , Physicians, Surgeons, Pharmacists, Dentists , Osteopaths , Chiropractors , Opticians , Wellness Consultants , Herbalists , Acupuncturists , Naturopaths , Healers, Podiatrists , Chiropodists , Scientists , Healers ,Therapists, Homeopaths , Chinese Medicine Practitioners and Nurses wishing to ethically upgrade their current Qualifications in Alternative Medicine over an exceedingly intensive 12 - 36 month period of study.

British Commonwealth Protectorates? Could that be Dublin?

I really have no idea what this organisation is all about. But it looks like it could be getting quite big soon…

RCAM currently has International Vacancies for One Million (1,000,000) ‘Foundation Fellows’ (’Movers and Shakers’) ; who will independently play a highly pivotal role in diligently mentoring (and regulating) it’s future Global Membership.So if you really think that you seriously have what it takes to become a ‘Leader’ in Alternative Medicine , then (perhaps) RCAM may definitely be exactly what the Doctor ordered for you.

One million. That’s a lot of quacks! And they are just to mentor (and regulate) the wider quack membership! This man has ambition.

The Big J really hates real doctors. This is his most recent press release…

RCAM would like to warmly commend the various Chieftans of the National Health Service of the United Kingdom for ethically and appropriately ignoring utterly misguided calls (from a rather amusing Group of thirteen Clinical Yestermen) to compel Hard-Working (and Tax-Paying) British Citizens to additionally pay for Life Enhancing Alternative Medicine Interventions out of their very own pockets - rather than get such treatments free via the NHS. RCAM would like to also categorically state that such exceedingly flawed ‘G-13′ demands that the National Health Service of the United Kingdom expediently abandon Alternative Medicine altogether (in total favour of Conventional Medicine) be diplomatically treated with the very utmost contempt which such unguarded verbal flippance duly deserves ; as none of these 13 ‘Eminent UK Scientists’ behind such calls has professionally attained Globally Acceptable Fellowship Qualifications in Alternative Medicine and as such cannot be deemed competent enough to make such sweeping ‘Shilly-Shally’ statements about the noble independent specialty of Alternative Medicine.

RCAM therefore publicly advises the General Public to lawfully go about their normal Wellness-Seeking Behaviour as usual - without any unwarranted prejudice or fear resulting from such highly self-serving, morally unethical , abjectly crude , totally unprofessional, utterly unstatesmanly, morbidly barbaric, wantonly uncivilized, profanely undemocratic and unspeakably sacrilegious perpetual affronts on the therapeutically formidable institution of Alternative Medicine.

Now, I do not have ‘Globally Acceptable Fellowship Qualifications’ in Santa Clause Studies to know he does not exist. But hey. I must be a morbidly barbaric and profanely undemocratic, unethical duck.

So, struggling around the acres of pomposity I find one place where Prof Joe might be making some money. You can call him to seek his wisdom, after pre-booking an hour’s slot (and handing over your credit card) for a mere 300 Euros. Alternatively, you can pay by the minute on the contact line for a trifling $10 per minute.

Its going to cost you $20 just for Joe to say Hello and to read out his numerous titles, qualifications and names. Not bad ‘ethical’ work.

And this -

Ethical Quackery, the Monarchy and Kate Moss

Thursday, October 12, 2006
No, this is not about our Defender of Quackery, our Quack-in-Chief His Royal Quackiness, Prince Charles, but about the Distinguished Provost of the Royal College of Alternative Medicine, Professor Joseph Chikelue Obi. And yes, it is just a rather lame story written solely to get a picture of Kate on my blog.

I’ve written a rather lazy blog on the distinguished professor before that was just a bit of a gawp at his quacktastic website and what looks like a health phone-line scam.

Well, I’ve done a little more digging with Google and it has revealed a few quack gems. It has been pretty hard work, since Google returns some 6,000 pages, the vast majority just appears to be Prof Obi’s self-promotion. However, if you persist in digging a few interesting facts turn up.

 

So, what has the little black duck found out about the “most Controversial Retired Physician and ‘A-List’ Medical Celebrity, Dr Joseph Chikelue Obi”?

Here we go…

1. The Irish Independent reports that his college does not exist at the Dublin address given on the web site. There’s a surprise! It’s just a front.

2. The Independent goes on. “In January 2003, he was suspended by for serious professional misconduct at South Tyneside District Hospital. Among the allegations made were that he failed to attend to patients, wrote strange notes about colleagues and at one point gave a dating agency phone number to a psychiatric patient.”

3. He was being investigated by the police for taking thousands of pounds of a 58 year old woman to in order to cure a long standing illness.

4. The GMC strike Dr Obi off their register for “serious professional misconduct”. So much for him being retired.

5. On another tack, Dr Obi has been involved in a little cyber-squatting. This looks as if it took place while he was a doctor - always after a few quid!

6. Since then, now self-titled Prof Obi, a few new avenues have been opened, including trying to entice Kate Moss away to one of his ’safe-houses’ in Ireland. Hat’s off!

He is quoted as saying:

“Under the European Convention on Human Rights, Miss Moss still has fundamental rights, just like anyone else out there, and as far as I am concerned, she is not guilty of anything until an Ethical Jury says so.”

(I mentioned before that ‘ethical’ was one of his favourite words.)

7. Prof Obi has been developing a Penis Enlarger (watch out Kate) that his own Royal College has now endorsed.

8. At least one person (out of the targeted million) has paid Prof Obi the fees for his college to accredit them. Dr Michael Keet (8 Canards) of the Central London College of Reflexology handed over ‘hundreds’. Do we feel sorry for out-quacked quacks? I guess we ought to.

9. For those of you wanting to see behind the grand titles and see the real human being, Joseph lists his interests as Comedy in London, Whole Food Nutrition and Christian Music. On this ‘Meetup’ site, he describes himself as “Just a very ordinary guy . . .”. That’s nice.

10. His name appears very often on the blog Abolish The General Medical Council (GMC), often reporting something he has got up to. The blog describes itself as:

An ethical blog for those who publicly feel that the General Medical Council (GMC) should be Statutorily Abolished in favour of a Medical Licensing Commission (MLC) to solely register and revalidate Doctors who practise Conventional Medicine in the UK. The Blog also recommends that the GMC/MLC hands all disciplinary functions over to an Independent Clinical Tribunal (ICT) in keeping with the EU Convention on Human Rights ; to avoid (both) Institutional Bias and Multiple Jeopardy.

Oooh. There is that word ‘ethical’ again. And ‘European Human Rights’. No name is given for the blog author but the avatar is a portrait of the queen. Another apparent obsession of Prof Obi - royalty. Could the author be none other than the Professor himself, a little agrieved for his ticking off? I hope you all click through to the blog. Maybe we will show up in his stats and whoever the writer is can get in contact and confirm one way or another.

I rather hope it is, as the final thing I turned up would just be fantastic…

11. Is the Distinguished Provost of the Royal College of Alternative Medicine, Professor Obi now selling ethical ring-tones? I do hope so.

Watch out Crazy Frog! Here comes the Crazy Provost…

If you look at the Quackometer now, you will see that both posts have been removed. This is a great shame, as the Prof deserves to be exposed. This sort of thing has happened before to the Quackometer when Homeopaths decided to threaten Netcetera, rather than discuss their complaints with the Duck. The result was that well over one hundred copies of the anti homeopathy post were posted around teh Interweb.

Guess what. I bet before the end of the week there may well be more than fifty copies of the original Duck posts scattered around teh webs. That would be fun.

I came across an interesting site today, that amused me for, well, at least five minutes. Called Flickr Fight, the simple idea is to type in two search terms, and the site goes off to Flickr and returns with the numbers of pics tagged with your search terms. The one with the most, wins, obviously. You also get to see some odd pictures associated with some of the tags.

I tried it with Football and Tiddleywinks, and came up with an interesting result; Tiddleywinks had four pics, and football over a million. The problem with that search was there were no football photos in the results page - just a lot of Americans wearing armour, helmets and using a ball of the wrong shape.

Then I tried Clinton and Obama, and chalk and cheese. On the recent searches section of the page, I noticed a rather obvious search, Victoria Beckham and Gary Haliwell and the result was very odd. So odd in fact that I looked more carefully at the search terms, and realised that Gary Haliwell works at a chip shop in Darlington, and Geri Halliwell used to be a Turkish TV Presenter.

Pooi Geri still loses in a fair fight though.

That Spicy search has been on the recent searches section of that page all day. Either somebody is having a little laugh at our expense, or a lot of people are going to be very confused.

The American Society of Heamatology recently had their annual conference. The top experts present were interviewed on various topics, and here are four brief excerpts on Bendamustine.

The first is Keating, looking very relaxed.

Secondly, here is Kipps.

O’Brien, who looks a lot younger than I expected.

Lastly, the old man, Rai. Such a softly spoken man.

These comments were obviously recorded before “Treanda” recieved approval by the FDA very recently. The FDA gave its approval on the basis of recently published clinical trials, comparing Bendamustine with Chlorambucil. Rai seems to be the only one who acknowledges that this “New” drug is in fact decades old. You can read Chaya’s interpretation of the trial results here. I would have liked the unseen interviewer to ask the following question,

“Why do you think that the dosage parameters for the Chlorambucil arm of these trials were far lower than accepted dosage levels for firstline treatment?”

(Chaya notes that - in both clinical trials they managed to test against a less than effective dosage of chlorambucil.)

It is also interesting to note that a few weeks ago, Treanda was approved by the FDA. Cephalon (who sell Treanda in the US) shares soared, and four senior directors of the company made a fortune selling some of their stock.

Big Pharma. Sheesh.

Not that I read the Readers Digest except when in doctors waiting rooms, but I was reading this article in, well, the Readers Digest today, and I thought it was worth sharing with CLLers. It consists of 23 tips to help prevent colds and flu, and they all seem pretty sensible, without much woo content, and they can’t do us any harm. Fact is, it seems like a good idea to read through this lot, and see how your own behaviour can be modified to fit.

I particularly likes the toothbrush tip, reproduced here -

Run your toothbrush through the microwave on high for 10 seconds to kill germs that can cause colds and other illnesses. You think it gets your teeth clean — and it does. But once you’re done brushing, your toothbrush is a breeding ground for germs. Sterilize it in the microwave before you use it…………

You may think I’m being a bit paranoid, but any CLLer could be considered to be immune compromised, and it would be silly to be complacent. I would add that this sort of thing has not taken over my life, but I wash my hands a little more often than I used to. I do take more care brushing my teeth, I get a flu shot, and try to get some herd immunity too by getting the family immunised too. As a CLLer in the UK, our immediate families also qualify for a flu shot, no matter their age.

Be careful if you have an electric toothbrush however, and just microwave the toothbrush bit, and not the electrics. You’d think that would be obvious wouldn’t you. I bet the Readers Digest get complaints from the intellectually challenged.

Instead of a separate blog post dedicated to the index of posts by Prof Hamblin on CLL, on his blog Mutations of Mortality, I have now given over a whole page to the Professor. You can find it by clicking on “Hamblin On CLL” in the navigation area at the top of this page, just underneath the words “A Lymphomaniac Blogs.”

I have added three more posts to this list today, written by the Prof earlier this month.

Other recent changes include the addition of a miniblog on the right of the page, which is just a series of links to sites that interest me.  I hope they interest you as well.  As I add sites to the list, old ones will fall off the bottom, so there will always be something new to see.