badscienceblogs

This is the Proclaimers cameo that I want to see.

The day after “Science degrees without the Science” appeared Nature, the University of Westminster issued a statement. In my view, their statement provides the strongest grounds so far to believe that the BSc is inappropriate.

A piece in Nature about degrees in complementary medicine (CAM), stirred up a lot of publicity. No vice chancellor was willing to appear to defend the policy of 16 universities that give “BSc” degrees in CAM. The most remarkable outcome (so far) was that during a TV interview, Dr Peter Fisher, clinical director if the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, appeared to agree with me.

The media reports on the alleged advantages of drinking purple grape juice were uniformly misleading. The study by Alan Crozier did not measure health benefits but was a chemical analysis. Its interpretation in terms of health were arguably over-optimistic.

A TV company funded a rather uninformative study of omega-3 fish oil by Prof Basant Puri if Imperial College and the Hammersmith Hospital. The media reports on the study were totally misleading It was not revealed that Prof Puri is named as ‘inventor’ on a paten for the fish oil formulation, as discovered by Ben Goldacre: http://www.badscience.net/?p=385.

The British Medical Journal published a “head to head” debate on whether or not CAM should be referred to NICE for critical evaluation. And a hypothesis about why this hasn’t happened -little green men.

A report on the excellent Channel 4 TV documentary, in the Dispatches series: “Charles: The Meddling Prince”. And a bit more on how Clarence House tries to silence its critics..

Two interesting papers this month. One shows popular anti-oxidant “supplements”, beta carotene, and vitamins A and D, far from making you live longer, have the opposite effect. Another shows that garlic does not lower cholesterol. And some publicity for Dan Hurley’s book, Natural Causes. An update looks at the activities of the supplements industry spokesperson. Dr Ann Walker, who seems sometimes to forget to declare her interests.