badscienceblogs

Errors: In which Dr Briffa relies on the Daily Mail as a source, and the Daily Mail itself relies on a book.

Dr John Briffa has a blog. His latest post is about fluoridation. I think I agree with Dr Briffa on some points: for one thing, it seems to me that the benefits of fluoridation are often overstated; there is also the issue of informed consent. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of “mass medication” where those [...]

“I always thought that Dr John Briffa was like a more grown-up version of Patrick Holford… now he’s blown it.” If these words seem familiar, perhaps it’s because you’ve read them before.
The last time I wrote those words, I was looking at a blog post of Briffa’s where he was scaremongering about the MMR vaccine causing [...]

Old news, I know - but it is one of Briffa’s hobby horses (not to mention Cybertiger, for those JABS aficionados reading this) and I happened upon an internet forum discussion that was linking to Briffa’s blog. His blog post contained this gem:
Another problem is that there is some evidence that even when patients bring [...]

 
 
 
John Briffa is a doctor who writes diet books and formulates pills for food supplement companies. Briffa has recently blogged about arnica, which doesn’t seem to make sense. He makes his living from nutritionism, not homeopathy - so why support homeopathy by praising a study into arnica?
Well, possibly because it suits his image to praise [...]

JDC reports that he “always thought that Dr John Briffa was like a more grown-up version of Patrick Holford” - and until recently I had rather agreed with him. However, Briffa has now taken up some worrying positions on vaccines and autism. Along with Dr Crippen, “I am worried about Dr John Briffa.” [...]

Dr Briffa has updated his blog again. He says:
there are common (but lacking in substance) tactics that are used to discredit and refute my assertion that we don’t know if MMR causes autism or not.
Here, I think, are the main ones:
1. Claim that I should provide the evidence that MMR can cause autism (even when [...]

 
 
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 [...]

 
 
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 [...]

I’ve just been pointed to a fantastically bad article about statistical significance on the blog of one Dr John Briffa, former natural health columnist for the Daily Mail, no less. He says:
This tells us, supposedly, whether there’s some real effect or change going on, or it’s merely something that’s most likely to be due to [...]

Part 2:
The men in grey suits… are actually on the case
As discussed in my last post, the Altmed scare about “cancer-causing chlorination byproducts” in your tap water contains by implication the idea that The Man (the Govt, the regulators, the public health people, the water industry, take your pick) don’t care about you, and cynically [...]

One of the staples of the Alt Health world is to convince people that all sorts of rather commonplace things are, in fact, bad for you.
The scariest is if something “increase your risk of cancer”. Although heart disease kills more people, cancer tops the list of the diseases people are most scared of, and [...]

http://www.drbriffa.com/blog/2007/10/01/new-review-proclaims-aspartame-to-be-safe-but-is-it/
Dr Briffa gives his personal opinion on aspartame:
“The companies that make it and ‘expert panels’ conclude it is safe. Yet, anecdotal reports on the web and elsewhere about that claim aspartame has the capacity to damage human health and cause symptoms that range from headaches and seizures and multiple-sclerosis type symptoms and depression.”
Anecdotal reports on [...]