Not only did Roger Coghill refuse this basic information, he got extremely stroppy about it. On Comment is Free, which ran for over 380 posts, he constantly refused to give this information, preferring to verbally abuse his critics, such as calling one a "spongiform creature" in the pay of"commercial interest". Since he did not know who the critic was, this is clearly without foundation.

Interestingly, in the comments following Ben Goldacre's blogposts linked to above, he returns to this theme, accusing Ben of reflecting "the ideology of powerful industrial, technological and political vested interests" and of having a "hidden agenda". He gives the impression that he can concieve of no reason other than personal gain for holding an opinion. I cannot imagine why this should be.

He refers to his critics as "all Ben's creatures" and accuses us of making ad hominem attacks. He does not appear to see the irony in him making such an accusation.

Finally, he does show his working here. He begins by assuming the area of the UK to be 30 million hectares (it is actually 24 million). He divides by the number of masts in the country to get an area per mast, treats this as a circle, calculates the radius and halves this to obtain his average.

The first problem with this is that it could only work if people and phone masts were evenly distributed across the country. In fact they tend to cluster in towns and cities.

The second problem is that while this gives a mean, it does not give a distribution curve of distances, thus no standard deviation and thus it is impossible to say whether or not a particular home is significantly nearer a mast.

A third problem is that, as Phayes points out, the average distance by this method would be 2r/3, not r/2.

El Pollo Diablo hammers the final nail into the coffin of Mr Coghill's idea when he uses his methods to calculate that homes in Manchester are about the same distance from masts as are those in Bridgend. Given the population of Manchester, he points out that if Mr Coghill were correct in linking masts to suicides there would have ben 1760 suicides in Manchester over the last 18 months. The UK as a whole over that period had approximately 10,000 suicides, so Manchester - with less than 1% of the population - would have had one sixth of the suicides. Such an enormous cluster would not have escaped anyone's notice if it existed.

It does not, of course, thus demonstrating that Roger Coghill's idea is arrant nonsense.

For a thought-provoking read, the entire book can be viewed at this website using the links opposite, or alternatively download a copy for FREE.

Read Full Article

However, the rights and wrongs of this situation are not the point of this blog posting, but rather the way in which traditional media have blindly supported the cure as a miracle treatment whilst ignoring any evidence to the contrary. The blogging community on the other hand have covered the other side of the coin and analysed the situation using science over ratings.

Proper representation of scientific fact is one of the challenges we often find ourselves faced with in public affairs. Blogs and social media may be the answer to having our clients messages communicated, objectively and supported by factual evidence over sensationalisation.

Despite the amateur nature and lack of control on blog reporting, the blogosphere often proves to be more reliable in many ways. Blog authors have no higher authority telling them what (or what not) to write and many of them have the insight which no journalist could have - some of the bloggers who revealed the Dore case were not only Phd researchers but also had personal experience with dyslexia and autism. Put in contrast, the mainstream media may be trained journalists, but often have no scientific background, and work towards viewing and sales figures.

Hats off to Ben Goldacre of BadScience for highlighting this victory of the blogosphere, and to the science bloggers out there pursuing the truth, based on hard science.

it seems the bloggers win on timeliness, accuracy, relevance, effort, ethics, and stupid names. Gimpyblog broke the news internationally of Dore going bust, following up a comment from a Dore employee. Back in January, he published a detailed analysis of the Dore accounts, flagging up serious concerns about their viability even then. The mainstream media continued to encourage parents to put their money into the "miracle cure". He has also doggedly covered the scientific evidence, and is now blogging on other dyslexia "cures" that have started to circle like vultures, buying the word "Dore" on Google adwords.

Podblack covered the news of Dore going bust in Australia first and was offering practical rights advice to ex-employees and parents from the start.

Brainduck has been covering Dore's research for a year now, and explaining the methodological flaws. She also dismantled the evidence when it was reported "the Dore Clinic has achieved massive successes while working with 1,000 patients suffering from the symptoms of high-functioning autism". This claim was made, not in an academic journal, but in the Leamington Courier.

Jon from the blog Holfordwatch performed an amusing experiment in 2007

If you want to read about the experiment in question, it's blogged in way more detail than anyone else would want to read - right here. By this point in Goldacre's article I was, though, most disappointed that I didn't think to pick a suitably silly name for myself to blog under. Anyway, Goldacre also flags up that I

rang Radio 4's investigative consumer programme You and Yours. You will remember from last week's column that they were puffing the Dore programme after it went bust in Australia. Before the puff was broadcast Jon got through to the You and Yours office to inform them of the problems. They did not find time to mention his tip, but they did manage to read out emails received during the programme. How very interactive.

The Sun have also put out an excellent second piece on Dore's closure today, making clear some of the financial issues involved:

PARENTS who have paid thousands of pounds for a controverial dyslexia treatment are “very unlikely” to get their money back, administrators have admitted.

It has also emerged that rugby ace Kenny Logan - who promoted the Dore Programme - is a director of the company and was paid to plug the treatment.

Dore closed on Wednesday - but many parents did not know of the company’s collapse until they read the news in The Sun...

Parents who have paid up front for courses are being told to go to the company’s website for temporary exercises.

Kenny Logan declined to comment on the fact that he is a director of the company which owns DORE.

I wonder if Logan, Wynford Dore and colleagues are ever going to apologise to the Dore clients who - it appears likely - will get neither a refund of what they paid nor the service that they paid for?

The Spanish Influenza in 1918 was the most devastating influenza pandemic ever and was also called the Purple Death. It took place at the end of the First World War in 1918. The war itself took 9 million deaths. As if this was not enough, the Spanish Flu took a death toll of more than 50 million people all over the world according to modern estimations (*1). It swept across the planet in three waves like a huge tsunami, more deadly than anything known before and comparable to the Black Death of 1348. The second and hardest wave hit during autumn/winter 1918. This was a time when America still had many of the best homeopaths, although the decline had already set in. Boger, Boericke, Dewey and the young Grimmer were among them. So a high standard of homeopathic treatment of this dreaded pandemic was faithfully recorded there. In a meta study, more than 26,000 homeopathic patients were compared with 24,000 patients of the “old school” showing an awesome superiority of the homeopathic treatment. The homeopathic doctors had a consistent mortality rate of 1-3% among their patients, whereas the old school had a death toll of 25-30% of their patients. The homeopathic remedies most frequently used were gels, bry, arn, eup-per and ars. It is to be noted that a very important factor of the homeopathic treatment was the discarding of aspirin, which was standard therapy of the old school. There are some comparative figures of allopathic hospitals suggesting that the avoidance of aspirin alone could have saved millions of lives. High doses of aspirin alleviated pain and fever, but treacherously increased the hemorrhagic tendency of the respiratory tract and thus speeding up the deadly course of the disease. A revealing figure comes from Dr. Pearson of Philadelphia: “The mortality rate in a camp was 25.8%. The lieutenant in charge was persuaded to discontinue aspirin, digitalis and quinine and the mortality dropped speedily to 15% with no medicine what-so-ever. This was in one ward, whereupon it was ordered in other wards and the mortality dropped to 15% with no medicine (*2).” This suggests that the natural death toll of the dreaded disease (lethality) would have been 15% of all infected patients, which is about the same figure one gets by calculation of official census figures (*3). Success of homeopathic treatment (only 1-3% of patients died) is usually compared to 25-30% dying under regular treatment, but actually it should be measured against these 15% as a natural comparator without the specific harmful side-effects of aspirin. Even then, to achieve a mortality rate of about 2% is very convincing and cannot be explained away by “placebo” effects.

According to personal information by Armin Sei, W.A. Dewey published an even more impressive survey in the 1921 "Journal of  the American Institute of Homoeopathy". It is a meta-analysis of 5 contemporary expertises about the homeopathic treatment during the pandemic. It surveys 61,060 influenza patients treated with homeopathy during the years 1918 to 1919, of which 427 died (mortality: 0,7%). W.A. Pearson, dean of Homoeopathic Medical College in Philadelphia, collected 26,795 cases treated by 88 doctors. He estimated a 30% average mortality of patients treated by the “old school”.

You can read the rest of the article here;

http://www.interhomeopathy.org/index.php/journal/entry/hydrocyanicum_acidum_and_the_purple_death_1/

From The Times

May 1, 2008

Roger Daltrey: homoeopathy saved my baby's life

What got him into complementary therapies? He gazes into his palms, then says: “I had a very, very dramatic experience with my son when he was nine months old. He had gastro difficulties, started throwing up, could not keep any food down and turned into skin and bone. At the hospital, they did every test to him, and in the end they just handed him back to me. My wife and I were in bits. My poor baby. The kid was dying. It was terrifying. I thought, there's got to be something. I'd heard of homoeopathy, so I found a local guy in the Yellow Pages and took my boy there. He gave him some powders. Within two weeks he was putting weight on, keeping the food down. The trouble recurred periodically for a couple of years, but he's now 27, a fit and healthy young man.

“The bizarre thing is that I've got a chiropractor friend in LA whose baby landed up in exactly the same state. He thought he was about to lose him. But I recommended homoeopathic remedies, and he recovered too. That's God's honest truth. Now I bet doctors would say, ‘Oh they'd have got better anyway'. But I can't believe that.”

A couple of weeks ago I blogged on the Brain Gym phenomenon, a series of physical exercises that promise to improve learning (not to mention something called "languaging") by manipulating blood flow to the brain and rewiring neural pathways. In Britain, where it is used in many public schools, the programme has come under heavy fire from the press, especially The Guardian (especially that paper's science writer Ben Goldacre) and Newsnight. In the latter, Brain Gym founder Paul Dennison is subjected to severe pwnage by host Jeremy Paxman:

I think I speak for all of us when I say "Ouch." The official site claims that Brain Gym is used in "more than 80 countries," and I have been trying to find information on the extent to which it is applied in Australian classrooms. Thus far I haven't been too successful (which sounds promising). In a 2003 episode of "All In The Mind," Natasha Mitchell interviews two South Australian teachers who use Brain Gym. An organisation called the "Australian Edu-K Faculty" extolled its virtues in a submission to a 2005 national inquiry into the teaching of literacy. (UPDATE:) Canberra College, an upper-secondary school in the ACT, offers Brain Gym courses to its students. I also had a look at the website of the Brain Gym Centre of W.A. ("Where Whole-Brain Solutions Are Reality") and reached the conclusion that if you press your brain buttons too hard and too often, the end product is shitty web-design and a grasp of orthography, grammar and style that can best be described as "sub-ESL":

Brain Gym has been developed especially for the class room setting. It is easy and effective to apply allowing each individual student to achieve at their own learning PACE as nature intended.

These techniques are so user friendly that Brain Gym® is now used in schools in over 100 countries. An Internationally sort after and annually award winning scientificly proven system that powerfully works!

THE BIG PICTURE: Children learning successfully while assisting each other happily and supportively in a positive co-creative environment. Commonly, their self responsibility model is also taken home to help family relationships, stresses and 'aliveness'. Creating healthier and happier families and communities who love to communicate and are excited about life long learning.

Now that you've digested that coleslaw of adverbs and edubabble, it's time for the main course:

TEACHER'S TIPS OF THE WEEK

Challenge: You notice that Johnny is having difficulty sitting still with what appears to be a very uncomfortable and stressful maths task. His concentration is diminished and he begins to distract others quietly working around him.

Solutions: Quietly ask Johnny to go to the back of the room and do a series of Cross Crawl
or say to him: "Johnny, I've notices that you are having difficulty sitting still so I though that you may like to have a run to stretch your legs." Johnny nods with a big smile of relief.
"Would you please take this note to Mr Jones in room 32. He is at the other side of the school. I'd like you to run with large steps to his class room and then do some 'Cross Crawl' and 'Calf Pump' out side our class room if you feel you need too." (You have an arrangement set up with Mr Jones for this purpose).

The next time that Johnny can't focus, (leading to uncontrollable wriggling), instead of 'trying harder' which always results in him becoming more uncomfortable and disruptive, he comes to you requesting if he can deliver a note to Mr Jones. The children tend to really appreciate your support and acknowledgement of his learning difficulty, becomes self managing, happier and more confident with achieving given tasks with greater success.

In other words, instead of dealing with his learning difficulty in the classroom, just send little Johnny outside where he can miss out on even more lesson time and fall further behind. Better still: condition Johnny to ask to be excused from the lesson every time he encounters something challenging. The Brain Gym Centre of W.A. charges $100 for a 6-hour one-day course full of such pearls of wisdom. If in that period of time you find yourself losing focus and becoming prone to bouts of uncontrollable wriggling, just do some Cross Crawl and Calf Pump outside the room if you feel you need to.

(In all seriousness, what kind of sick desperation in the education system has created a market for this nonsense?)

"The Society maintains that the article is in breach of the commission's "code of practise" in that it did not clearly distinguish between comment, conjecture and fact.  The complaint states that it was not clearly defined as an opinion article, with the introduction giving the impression that the piece was a journalistic appraisal of the issues.  It is the Society's view that there are also statements in the article itself which give the impression it is fact rather than opinion.

The complaint also relates to key factual inaccuracies in the piece, notably that homeopaths are "killing people", which the Society has pointed out is a potentially damaging statement without any evidence to back it up."

I have checked the PCC code of conduct and number 1 is:

The pictures I found particularly offensive (not on the internet piece but behind a paywall somewhere if you want to look [update: a portion of one is on David Colquhoun's blog]): they depicted sharp suited, dark-glassed male homoepaths 'loving' their white pills and standing over their poor kneeling patients while they poured them down their throats.  As many UK homeopaths are female and are known to be quite gentle creatures it didn't make sense to me.  And as for the 'facts' in the piece they were mostly 'FLACTS'. I know you are a psychiatrist Ben but you can't just go round making stuff up.

I look forward to hearing the PCC's views on this in due course and will report back.

With their medical industry sponsors growing you can really now say that "Sense about Science"  is really a front for pharmaceutical industry and other groups involved in the development of pharmaceuticals and chemicals such as Universities doing "pharmaceutical research and patenting" and medical publishing giants.
Again, it is not surprising that the organization would bash at alternative medicine and homeopathy. Anyone involved with this "sponsored" organization has a lot of funding to lose  if they don't toe the party line and make their masters happy.

The shrill shrieking of their "sponsored" mouth pieces and followers gets louder and louder- suggesting drugs, MRI radiation, anything chemical, genetically modified are good for you and suggesting that homeopathy is evil  and any 'alternatives and those against genetic modification are evil.  A profit driven religion of science. And of course there are news reporters that are happy to also get in on the shrill shrieking. Just where the drug companies want it and plant it.

So here we have the source of what and how you may hear about homeopathy. Well, remember the previous post. This pharmaceutical industry is about billions of dollars, marketing and not necessarily about your health.  Your right to alternatives gives you the ability to make sensible decisions about your health and put it all in perspective. These intelligent decisions are yours to make and not the pharmaceutical companies and their paid mouthpieces.

Just look at some of the money bags that "fund" the biased Sense about Science spokespeople: 

ABPI, the Association for Clinical Biochemistry, AstraZeneca plc, the Biochemical Society, BAMA, British Toxicology Society, Blackwell Publishing, BP plc, British Institute of Radiology, British Pharmacological Society, Elsevier, EPSRC, Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, Garfield Weston Foundation, GE Healthcare, Health and Science Communication Trust, Institute of Food Research, Institute of Physics, Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, Institution of Chemical Engineers, John Innes Centre, John Innes Foundation, Medical Research Council, Motor Neurone Disease Association, Multiple Sclerosis Society, NESTA, New Scientist, Oxford University Press, Parkinson’s Disease Society, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, PHG Foundation, Physiological Society, Research Councils UK, Royal Academy of Engineering, Royal Astronomical Society, Royal College of Pathologists, Royal College of Radiologists, Royal Meteorological Society, Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, Royal Society of Chemistry, St John’s College Research Centre, Science Careers.org, Society for Applied Microbiology, Society for Endocrinology, Society for General Microbiology, The Times, University of Dundee, University of Edinburgh, University of Glasgow, University of St Andrews, University of Stirling, University of West Scotland.

 

Remember many of these Universities get direct funding and profit sharing from their pharmaceutical research.

You gotta hand it to them, the drug companies know how to sell the goods. But what  an ugly business and downright nasty way for drug companies to get their "science" forward. Unfortunately it is not always in the best interest of your health. Explore alternatives like homeopathy, its your right and you'll be happy you did. And remember, when you hear from these people bashing homeopathy keep in mind who their sponsors are.

Amy Lansky urges people to keep telling their stories .
If you receive the Society of Homeopaths newsletter, you would have read the quarterly column called "Letter from America" written by Amy Lansky.  She is a board member for the National Center for Homeopathy in the USA and also the author of Impossible Cure: The Promise of Homeopathy which is popular in America and has been translated into German, Greek and soon Arabic.

In a letter to homeopaths recently, Amy wrote:

One thing that has contributed to the success of my book are the stories in it -- the story of how my son was cured of autism, along with dozens of other first-person homeopathic cure stories from people all over the world.  Stories make the world go round.  And it is stories that can help save homeopathy -- because people will not allow something that can really help them to be taken away.  Very few people are moved by studies;  but nearly everyone is affected by someone's personal experience. That's what this campaign is all about.
 
I'm sure most of you are aware of the attacks on homeopathy going on in the UK. These attacks are starting to be felt here in the US as well.  All American homeopaths are acutely aware of how homeopathy was nearly destroyed at the beginning of the 20th century due to a concerted campaign by the allopathic machine.
 
All I can say is -- NOW is the time to act to protect your right to practice homeopathy and the right of your patients to receive homeopathic treatment.  It is NOT a time for head-in-the-sand mentality.

However, your right to practice, your access to remedies, and your patients' rights to health freedom may soon become jeopardized as well.  Just consider the growing efforts to harmonize practices and access to remedies with the EU and GTO rulings.  And let's not forget the mounting effort of the medical-industrial complex to paint homeopathy as not only bogus but even dangerous.

Amy urges homeopaths and patients alike to speak up for homeopathy and to show support for Homeopathy Worked for Me.

These are just a few excerpts to see the whole thing link here:

Combined wealth of top 5 pharmaceutical companies outweighs GNP of sub-Saharan Africa.: Corporate Watch shows the public just how much wealth big pharmaceutical companies have, even on a global scale. Their report references The Guardian, which found that "the combined worth of the world’s top five drug companies is twice the combined GNP of all sub-Saharan Africa and their influence on the rules of world trade is many times stronger because they can bring their wealth to bear directly on the levers of western power."

 

Ernesto Bertarelli makes Forbes' billionaires list: Just as Americans are questioning the record profits and salaries of booming oil companies when they're forced to accept rising prices at the pump, people may wonder about Ernesto Bertarelli's billionaire status. Bertarelli is the CEO of the pharmaceutical company Serono, and Forbes reports that his net worth in 2002 reached $8.4 billion. That was enough to place him as the 31st richest person in the world.

 

Academics help pharmaceutical companies conduct research: A new trend in the R&D sector of the pharmaceutical industry features research-based partnerships between academic centers and drug companies. Marcia Angell explains the collaboration by writing that these companies "now ring the major academic research institutions and often carry out the initial phases of drug development, hoping for lucrative deals with big drug companies that can market the new drugs. Usually both academic researchers and their institutions own equity in the biotechnology companies they are involved with," and everyone can "cash in on the public investment in research." As academic centers play a more significant role in the success of the drug companies, they are more likely to take on the "entrepreneur" spirit and make profits from patents, royalties and stocks, which can mark up the prices for everyday consumers. 

[Unfortunately these research institutes have become the spawning ground for more and more profit driven drugs. Some are later proven to be seriously problematic and dangerous to the health of millions such as Vioxx and cholesterol lowering drugs more recently.

And the spawners who are threatened then attack homeopathy and homeopaths while remaining passive about their so called "science" based medicine problems. Take note Gimpy, Ben Goldacre and David Colququon and others]

 

Some drug companies are taking advantage of underdeveloped countries to perform clinical trials: Wired.com reports that India is becoming a more attractive place for drug companies to run clinical trials and test out new drugs. The article explains, "more and more drug companies are conducting clinical trials in developing countries where government oversight is more lax and research can be done for a fraction of the cost." Controversy is starting to build over the trend, however, as one expert explains. Sean Philpott, managing editor of The American Journal of Bioethics, reveals to Wired.com that such practices may be unfair, as "individuals who participate in Indian clinical trials usually won't be educated. Offering $100 [as payment for their participation] may be undue enticement; they may not even realize that they are being coerced."

 

 

If you look carefully their qualifications include the ability to make 1+million dollar per year income from promoting and prescribing and selling drugs (oncologists can actually sell drugs in the United States and in other countries). I'm sure Vioxx was one of those.

They have a lot to lose if inexpensive medical solutions like homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic succeed.