badscienceblogs

You’ve probably heard by now that Tony Blair wants to unite all religions. The man’s Messianic attitude is getting seriously out of hand.
In case it has escaped his attention, different religions believe radically different things. Consequently each believes the others to be totally wrong. How atre you going to get the likes of Becky Fischer, [...]

If I could be in London next week for David Kirby’s PR visit these are some of the questions I would like to ask him. You may care to add your own.
Your book, Evidence of Harm, explores the premise that a 150 per cent increase in the mercury burden in US vaccines (from 75 to [...]

Dore in Administration
First and most importantly Dore UK, similar to the situation in Australia, have now declared that is ‘as the Company will be in Administration there are no funds available to reimburse clients.’, a position confirmed by their Administrators. The Citizens Advice Bureau offer free advice which may be of use to clients [...]

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday May 31 2008
You will remember last week we were talking about the £2,000 Dore “miracle cure” for dyslexia, invented by paint entrepreneur Wynford Dore. It had been pushed unrelentingly in the media, despite multiple Ofcom and ITC judgements, and through personal endorsement by Kenny Logan, who, it turned out, was paid for [...]

A quick post to note some more of the unfolding coverage of Dore UK’s closures. Ben Goldacre uses his Guardian bad science column to point out that, when analysing the coverage of Dore:

it seems the bloggers win on timeliness, accuracy, relevance, effort, ethics, and stupid names. Gimpyblog broke the news internationally of Dore [...]

Dore have now released an Administrator’s letter to their customers (PDF). According to the Administrators:
due to the Companies’ financial position refunds are not possible…Whilst it is early in the Administration process, it appears very unlikely that there will be funds available to settle any claim you may have.
Dore’s own FAQ (PDF) makes clear that
As [...]

 
 
Someone named Lex commented on Dr Briffa’s statistical significance post and made this remark: “when it comes to homeopathy and food supplements they always do include the placebo effect- they would run a mile from a double-blind trial” and Briffa responded with this:
I entirely understand the need of some people to perform randomised, placebo controlled [...]

The other day I posted about Dr John Briffa’s rant against p-values. He has since then posted some responses, in the form of several comments under the original post and a whole new rant. Er, I mean, blog entry, of course. Not “rant”!
His thesis remains much the same: no matter what anyone does, since science [...]

 
Dr John Briffa is involved in an interesting discussion on his blog. In a response to a comment I made that included a link to MMR - The Facts he wrote “In the link you supplied under ‘How do we know that MMR is safe?’, we are informed that…” and went on to paste several [...]

Viktor Schauberger had some peculiar ideas. One of them was that have got it all wrong with the propeller: birds and fish don’t have them so this, “supposed propulsive device is unnaturally constructed and therefore out of place.” What had Viktor missed?

 
 
I always thought that Dr John Briffa was like a more grown-up version of Patrick Holford. He was just a doctor writing diet books and a magazine column - as far as I knew, he was not employed by supplement companies, recommended no inappropriate allergy tests and generally sounded fairly sensible. He’s blown it now though.
Now, I’ve got a sneaking [...]

Visiting Professor Patrick Holford of Teesside University strongly disagrees with the new NICE guidelines for the primary and secondary prevention of heart disease through lipid management because he seems to believe that this implies the monotherapeutic approach of statins. As per usual, he favours niacin for cholesterol management. In an interesting plot twist, he seems not to have noticed that the NICE guideliness looked at the evidence for nicotinic acid and found it unimpressive.
Holford complains that no-one is interested in niacin because there is less profit in it than statins. Where necessary, NICE recommends a generic statin that would cost around 4p a day. Holford’s NoBlush Niacin is around 50p a day.

The Sun, Times and Independent have just published articles on Dore UK going into administration: it’s great to see this getting into the mainstream media. The Sun’s the Times‘ articles are excellent - so we’ll look at those first. Then we’ll take a brief look at why the Independent’s article is so poor.
The [...]

Rather depressingly, the anti-vaccinationists, those Never-say-die Energizer Bunny types of the Alt Reality fraternity, are back for another round.
As a lot of Bad Science-aware people will already know, American surgeon-blogger Orac, of Respectful Insolence blog fame - and bete noire of the vaccines-cause-autism lobby - has been writing about the imminent UK arrival (well, [...]

Lord Hodgson, who is sponsoring David Kirby’s speaking engagement at the Palace of Westminster, has made good use of his position in the House of Lords to question government ministers on vaccine safety. He is particularly interested in thiomersal/thimerosal and has even enquired after its use in cosmetics.
On December 16, 2002
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts [...]

Just a quick post - to note that Prof Patrick Holford of Teesside University has a pretty terrible article on hayfever on the Natural Products website. At a quick glance, a couple of things stand out. Holford says he

had Sonia take an IgG food intolerance test…which found that she was allergic to [...]

Finally, two weeks after the company started to crumble the main stream media are beginning to cover the story. The Guardian have a slightly out of date story covering some of the events and quotes from disgruntled clients. The Guardian story also carries a quote from Wynford Dore, taken from the Dore website, [...]

Early in the film “Jesus Camp” , we hear the words “We must not keep silent in this time of decision”. One of the few views expressed that I agreed with.
In “Useful Idiot” I commented on the Dispatches programme that showed how British fundementalists were pulling Nadine Dorries’ strings over the abortion amendment. That programme [...]

Wynford Dore has now issued a response to those affected by Dore’s financial problems (oddly, posted on Dore’s forum, instead of on their homepage). While Dore’s UK’s homepage continues to refer to Dore being “put into the hands of advisors”, Dore’s statement refers to “Administrators”. However, this leaves a number of serious [...]

Dore US have collapsed with staff commenting on their forums.  I urge all customers to cancel any cheques they have written or direct debits paid directly to Dore as reports suggest that Dore will continue to take money after the collapse.  If you are paying through a third party then contact them immediately to find [...]