badscienceblogs

Here, Patrick Holford responds to a study that found “antioxidants suppressed DNA damage at low concentrations, but potentiated such damage at higher concentrations”. Holford told the Irish Independent that he “isn’t convinced” by the Cedars-Sinai study: “We don’t have the full study available yet and I think it’s significant that it is a cell study, [...]

This post recounts a complicated story that started in January 2009, but has recently come to what looks like a happy ending.  The story involves over a year’s writing of letters and meetings, but for those not interested in the details, I’ll start with a synopsis.
Synopsis of the synopsis
In January 2009, a course in "integrated [...]

BBC Radio Oxford broadcast an infomercial for Patrick Holford’s books and his commercial diet programme. They did not invite any experts to discuss his diet or claims, question whether the ‘free diet trial’ involved purchasing supplements or blood tests, nor ask for detail of the ’science’ that he claims supports his advice.

There seems to be a perception among some that the alternative medicine industry is somehow warm and cuddly in comparison to everyone’s favourite baddie, ‘Big Pharma’. I’m sorry to say that ‘Big Altie’ is every bit as bad as Big Pharma. These are not charities - they are businesses like any other. Their responsibilities are to their shareholders, not to the public.
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There has been much talk this year of legal chill: Big Pharma suing Nancy Olivieri (note the reference to a confidentiality clause) and Peter Wilmshurst; Trafigura with their injunctions and superinjunctions; and the BCA suing Simon Singh.

Whether we’re talking about oil companies, pharmaceutical firms, or the alternative medicine industry, these organisations are not slow to use the law to protect their interests. I know of one firm operating in the sphere of alternative medicine that requires employees to sign a remarkably wide-ranging confidentiality agreement.

Employees are forbidden from divulging:

Any information known to [them] from any source regarding [name of firm redacted] now or in the future or for a period of 10 (ten) years after [their] leaving the company.

They are also specifically forbidden from mentioning details regarding particular areas of the business and from divulging “verbal information of any nature known to [them].”

They must also “agree to indemnify the company, its shareholders, staff and asociated consultants for any losses which occur as a direct or indirect result of [their] actions.”

While there may be good reasons for a company to require employees to agree to a confidentiality clause, something this wide-ranging must be a disincentive to ‘whistle-blowing’ of any kind. While I am not aware of anybody being sued for breaching this confidentiality agreement, I note that it is possible that a similar situation to that of Nancy Olivieri may occur.

From the article I linked to earlier:

Olivieri is a haematologist at the University of Toronto who became prominent in 1996 when, during a drug trial of deferiprone she was conducting, she spoke out, saying that she thought it was harming patients. Apotex invoked a confidentiality clause in their agreement with Olivieri threatening to sue her if she published any results or even told patients the drug they were taking could be harmful.

In Olivieri’s case, the University of Toronto refused to intervene, while Peter Wilmhurst has not been supported by either his employer or the Medical Defence Union. It is a sad state of affairs when someone can be sued for speaking out and they are left to face the consequences alone, so the charity HealthWatch should be congratulated for their support of Wilmhurst (having set up a fund to aid his defence).

I believe that my comparison between Big Altie and Big Pharma is a reasonable one, but also one that is rather apt. After all, there are many links between the two industries.

Patrick Holford, media nutritionist, “managed to sell his Health Products for Life business to Biocare (owned by Neutrahealth, who [are] 30% owned by Elder Pharmaceuticals) for £464,000.” According to the NeutraHealth website, their Chief Executive was previously at Galpharm, “the UK’s biggest supplier of non-prescription [OTC] medicine.” Meanwhile, Equazen (perhaps best known for the Durham trial-that-wasn’t-a-trial) are, as Ben Goldacre reminds us, owned by the £1.6bn pharmaceutical company Galenica.

As Dr Goldacre also notes in the above article:

… despite the rather desperate anti-establishment swagger of the $60bn food supplement pill industry, time and again we see that they use the exact same tricks as the $600bn pharmaceutical industry.

I suspect that use of subgroup analyses is just the tip of the iceberg and that Dr Goldacre might be surprised to find out exactly what tricks certain sectors of the alternative medicine industry are prepared to use. But if confidentiality agreements are widely used (and adhered to) then how will he, or any of us, ever find out?

It seems very reasonable to suggest that taxpayers have an interest in knowing what is taught in universities.  The recent Pittilo report suggested that degrees should be mandatory in Acupuncture, Herbal Medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine. So it seems natural to ask to see what is actually taught in these degrees, so one can judge whether [...]

In July 2008 I wrote an editorial in the New Zealand Medical Journal (NZMJ), at the request of its editor.
The title was  Dr Who? deception by chiropractors.  It was not very flattering and it resulted in a letter from lawyers representing the New Zealand Chiropractic Association.  Luckily the editor of the NZMJ, Frank [...]

I was interested to see Holford blogging about Pocobelli et al’s recent article on “Use of supplements of multivitamins, vitamin C, and vitamin E in relation to mortality”. Holford reports the study as finding that “Multivitamin use cuts heart disease risk”. However, I have a number of concerns about Holford’s interpretation of this study:

This is [...]

Holford over-extrapolates the evidence from a systematic review and meta-analysis to support his own, inconsistently-expressed views on nuts and seeds; neglects to mention appropriate caveats; is currently premature in promoting squalene as a “cancer preventive”; makes inappropriate comparisons of the ORAC values of substances that have very different water percentages (let’s overlook the issue of the relevance of ORACs for now); and perpetuates the familiar, embarrassing nutritionism assertion concerning the awesome nutrient power of nuts and seeds.

Patrick Holford persists in exaggerating the number of premature deaths from cardiovascular disease by approx. 500%. He also claims that doctors are uninterested in diet and lifestyle interventions. We discuss his errors in some detail.

[BPSDB] I don’t want to spend too much time picking apart Lionel R. Milgrom’s¹ reading of Sir Michael Rawlins’s speech in his J. Alt. Complement. Med. editorial which has very little to do with Otto Weingärtner’s² recent defence of the attempts of Shang et al. and Maddox et al. to teach homeopaths about doing experiments properly^3,4 instead of craply.^5,6 Holfordwatch have already taken apart Patrick Holford’s attempt at quote mining it, and Badly Shaved Monkey introduced the subject at JREF and badscience.net, and I’ve tried to explain how the DBRCT is just the most reliable way of working out if your intervention is actually doing anything or not, to minimize the errors and converge on the right answer in the way which Weingärtner² describes (and it wouldn’t be necessary to be scrabbling about in the statistical noise if homeopathy worked as well as some of these people claim it does). More recently (I admit it’s taken me a while to get around to finishing this post), David Colquhoun has highlighted the criticism which the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) have drawn, whose jobs it is to make sure that medicines work and are worth using, over recommendations related to quackery. The NICE guidelines related to lower back pain are especially important in the light of the British Chiropractic Association’s attempts to sue Simon Singh, but what’s most relevant to this post is the possible illegality of a label on a bottle of “Arnica 30C” pills which says “a homoeopathic medicinal product used within the homoeopathic tradition for the symptomatic relief of sprains, muscular aches, and bruising or swelling after contusions” when (a) the pills contain no Arnica, what with it having been diluted by a factor of 10⁶⁰, and (b) there is no evidence that these pills will do anything at all; in fact there is positive evidence that homeopathic Arnica pills do nothing.⁷

It’s also true what Milgrom says about science being “more in hock to powerful interest groups” such as the French homeopathy company Boiron, who were paying two of the co-authors on the discredited⁴ Nature paper from the Benveniste group.⁵ Except he said “science” when he meant “quackery” (and see also “Homeopaths in sacka with Big Quacka”).

What remains is the erroneous⁸ belief that Lüdtke and Rutten and Rutten and Stolper^9,10 have discredited Shang et al.³ when in fact Rutten and Stolper¹⁰ merely make a bunch of obvious⁸ false statements about Shang et al.³ while Lüdtke and Rutten⁹ (having been published in a proper journal rather than the Faculty of Homeopathy’s house fansheet)don’t say much at all; both of them confirm that rubbish trials make homeopathy look more likely. Milgrom writes that

Randomness of experimental reproducibility, however, is not the sole preserve of homeopathy. This phenomenon is exhibited during studies of parapsychology and psi phemomena, and Weingärtner’s arguments are general enough include these. Indeed, it is just conceivable such arguments might be usefully applied to other areas (e.g., the known reduction in effect sizes obtained from RCTs on drugs, compared to effect sizes obtained in real-life practice,¹¹ or tackling another important area of science where random reproducibility exists [i.e., in systems close to chaos]).¹²

Listen, Lionel: we know that if we’re doing a noisy experiment with a weak effect, that we need to do it well and repeat it many times to build up good statistics and see if the effect is really there. That’s all this means. Bernoulli knew it and Shang et al. knew it. There’s no magical new insight here. We’ve already seen that the effects of homeopathy disappear into the noise as the experiments are done better.³ You can’t just take the badly-done studies with positive effects as proof that homeopathy works and dismiss the negative ones as flawed or subject to (completely unphysical) “non-local” effects. Science would be impossible in a world as you see it. Clearly, science is possible otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this post and you wouldn’t be able to read it, and this is objectively true despite whatever post-modern harbles-du-jour¹³ you subscribe too, so give up.

The other editorial related to this article,² from Alex Hankey,¹⁴ will be next.

.pdf of Sir Michael Rawlins’s presentation

(and see also Fusion is a dish best served cold).

1.  L. R. Milgrom, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 15, 205 (2009).
2.  O. Weingärtner, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 15, 287 (2009).
3.  A. Shang, K. Huwiler-Müntener, L. Nartey, P. Jüni, S. Dörig, et al., The Lancet 366, 726 (2005).
4.  J. Maddox, J. Randi, and W. W. Stewart, Nature 334, 287 (1988).
5.  E. Davenas, F. Beauvais, J. Amara, M. Oberbaum, B. Robinzon, A. Miadonna, et al., Nature 333, 816 (1988).
6.  P. B. Hill, J. Hoare, P. Lau-Gillard, J. Rybnicek, and R. T. Mathie, Vet. Record 164, 364 (2009).
7.  E. Ernst, and M. H. Pittler, Arch. Surg. 133, 1187 (1998).
8.  P. Wilson, Homeopathy 98, 127 (2009).
9.  R. Lüdtke, and A. L. B. Rutten, J. Clin. Epidemiol. 61, 1197 (2008).
10.  A. L. B. Rutten, and C. F. Stolper, Homeopathy 97, 169 (2008).
11.  M. C. Michel, and M. Goepel, Eur. Urol. 38, 40 (2000).
12.  N. Hall, and ed, The New Scientist Guide to Chaos (Penguin, 1992).
13.  A. Sokal, and J. Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (Economist Books, 2003).
14.  A. Hankey, J. Alt. Comp. Med. 15, 203 (2009).

This document was translated from L^AT_EX by
H^EV^EA.

The Prince of Wales’ Foundation for Integrated Health (FiH) is a propaganda organisation that aims to persuade people, and politicians, that the Prince’s somewhat bizarre views about alternative medicine should form the basis of government health policy.
His attempts are often successful, but they are regarded by many people as being clearly unconstitutional.

The FiH’s [...]

Patrick Holford has broken his (unaccountable) silence about pandemic fears around Mexico City flu (aka, swine flu). Take vitamin C. Jab more vitamin C into your veins. Black elderberry makes it harder for viruses to enter your cells. Roll up.

Patrick Holford cites the wrong study in a discussion of antioxidants and asthma which gives rise to the suspicion that he has not read the correct paper. However, he rapidly moves to eulogising the advantages of York Test and supplements for controlling asthma although there is no trial or case-series to support such optimism.

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford is Head of Science and Education at Biocare so he has a substantial and understandable interest in selling supplements. Creating a large-scale market for supplements depends upon several factors. The factors include convincing people that:

they have clinical or ’sub-clinical’ vitamin or mineral deficiencies
the food that is commonly available and forms [...]

Patrick Holford quote-mines Sir Michael Rawlins nuanced speech about RCTs and evidence-based medicine to suit his own agenda and ignores Rawlins challenge to develop better methodologies for evaluating evidence.

Patrick Holford criticises some weight loss supplements that he does not market. Oddly, he criticises them for a lack of evidence that is commensurate with the lack of evidence for some of the weight loss supplements that he does recommend.

Patrick Holford claims that recent research proposes a mechanism that explains the alleged appetite-curbing effects of a low glycaemic load diet. In a disturbing pattern, he seems to overlook that the paper in question evaluates the impact of a single meal and the researchers report on glycaemic index rather than load. All this and many other issues are overlooked in the promotion of books, seminars and diet clubs and supplements to support Holford’s Low GL Diet.

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford gives the News of the World the benefit of his insight into homocysteine but makes some suprisingly basic errors. Especially surprising as this is such a recurrent theme in Holford’s entrepreneurial scheme for selling diagnostic tests, nutritionista consultations and ‘corrective’ supplements. It’s time for Holford’s wisdom on homocysteine to be retired to ‘apocrypha’ in his Optimum Nutrition Bible.

Patrick Holford claims that food intolerance is linked to resistant weight loss. He continues to advise people to purchase YorkTest’s IgG blood test to diagnose food intolerance although many associations of immunologists and clinical allergists have reported that the test has no clinical support or relevance. He also advises that people should take the supplements that he recommends that are made by the company for which he works.

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford is still ignoring the sore thumb issue of Dr Andrew Wakefield and the findings of fraud and deliberate manipulation in association with his research. Holford is advising people to take his advice, buy his books and supplements and undergo unevidenced interventions such as chelation for unproven heavy metal toxicity.

In June 2007 Patrick Holford contacted his mailing list to ask them to sign a petition in support of Andrew Wakefield. In February 2009, there is a new petition to support Wakefield. Holford has yet to redact his products and recommendations that rely upon Wakefield’s research so will he ask his followers to sign this new petition? We provide an annotated version of the petition.

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford is still failing to reconsider his recommendations for the ‘treatment’ of autism despite the thorough examination of Andrew Wakefield’s research and related work and the conclusion that it is fatally flawed both by error and through deliberate manipulation.

Several of Patrick Holford’s entrepreneurial products for autism have their theoretical justification in Andrew Wakefield’s work. With the recent explicit findings from the Autism Omnibus, it is clear that Wakefield’s research can not be relied upon (referred to in terms of “fraud” and “manipulation). It is past time for Holford to update his readers and subscribers who depend upon him for up-to-date research and advice.

Patrick Holford’s recommends that his readers and subscribers should watch Zeitgeist Addendum. He then extracts from its disingenuous and manipulative nonsense to re-serve his own agenda that people should eschew medicine and empower themselves by purchasing his books, health club subscriptions and pills. It’s a free world and people choose their ‘enslavement’ but it is an interesting use of paranoia as a marketing tool.

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford has started a blog - the sort of blog where you aren’t allowed to comment. He is now publishing more nonsense, this time, his support for the notion of SIDs as a misdiagnosis for death from vaccine injury.

Sue Arnold has published a disappointingly credulous review of Patrick Holford and David Miller’s How to Quit without Feeling S**t in the Guardian. The Guardian. And it’s not April 1.

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford is Head of Science and Education at Biocare so, presumably, they believe that he enhances their reputation and scientific credibility despite his recent egregious claim that “conventional medicine doesn’t have a very good track record“. However, he and his crack team of IONistas have been making some remarkable errors lately [...]

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford announces that “conventional medicine, doesn’t have a very good track record”. You might think that you need some strong evidence to match the strength of that claim but it doesn’t seem as if Holford thinks so. Oddly enough, he uses these claims to justify his recommendation that you should purchase his services, services that don’t seem to represent value for money, judging by the inaccuracies contained in his writings.

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford of Teesside University has a subscription 100%health service. Subscribers pay for information that will transform their life and health. Daily Record carries an item from a recent newsletter: it is riddled with the obvious and also some remarkable errors - e.g., the nutritional composition of chicken breast. When UK universities pay for accreditation of their catering facilities by such experts, precisely what are they spending their money on?

Can you get 23 portions of fruit and veg in a single glass of juice: Patrick Holford Ponders, Briefly, Before Suggesting a Product where you can consume an astonishing number at a high cost, without any variety and without any evidence of efficacy.