Good news in the Simon Singh case
The British journalist Simon Singh received excellent news yesterday when an appeals court ruled that he was not necessarily committing libel by describing chiropractic care as “bogus.” Singh’s should have been a completely uncontroversial observation, given the gaping distance between the (minimal-to-nonexistent) scientific evidence in favor of chiropractic efficacy and the elaborate claims made by chiropractors (e.g., most diseases are preventable and treatable via spinal “adjustments” that relieve mysterious vertebral “subluxations” and restore the body’s “innate intelligence.”)
Now, it must be a great disappointment for chiropractors to be reminded that their practice — like everything else in the goofy solar system of “alternative medicine” — is complete garbage. The perversity of British libel law, however, enabled the British Chiropractic Association to bring suit against Singh, claiming that he’d recklessly damaged the reputation of a profession that tries to make a virtue of pseudoscience. (Anyone familiar with the Lipstadt-Irving case will know how this all works.) The suit placed the burden of proof on Singh himself to demonstrate that the BCA was being “conspicuously dishonest” by promoting chiropractic woo as the solution to infant colic, asthma, breastfeeding problems, and an array of other disorders that chiropractic techniques do not actually help. An earlier ruling held that Singh was attempting to make a factual statement not simply about chiropractic treatment but about the motives of BCA officials; demonstrating that chiropractic theory and practice is a sham wouldn’t be difficult, of course, but proving the dishonesty (as opposed to the simple idiocy) of the BCA would have been a steeper hill to climb. Moreover, the professional and financial expense of the suit (which has already cost Singh 200,000 pounds while forcing him to suspend his career) would have had predictable and stifling consequences for other journalists who might feel compelled to call out sham science in print. Fortunately, the latest ruling overturns that previous holding and asserts that Singh’s remarks should indeed be considered “fair comment” — that is, informed opinion — a judgment that gives his statements greater legal protection and, barring any unforeseen twists, will likely mean the death of the case.
As an entertaining footnote to all this, the publicity over the Singh has caused some unanticipated difficulty for British chiropractors; when science bloggers realized that government regulations prohibited chiropractors from making the sorts of claims being made by the BCA in its complaint against Singh, they began looking closely at chiropractic advertisements and websites throughout the UK. As of a month ago, roughly a quarter of the nation’s chiropractors were under investigation for making garden-variety — that is to say, bogus — statements about the health benefits of chiropractic treatment.
Singh’s book Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial is just awesome and should be read by everyone who thinks alternative medicine works (and by those who don’t as well). It has a coauthor whose name eludes me at at the moment. He a medical doctor and not a journalist and I wonder why he wasn’t sued. Maybe the BCA just went for who they thought had less money to defend? Anyway, Read the book!
It was Edzard Ernst, a former homeopath who had the good sense to realize the error of his ways…
Mr. Noon, you have a gift-the uncanny ability to repel with your prose. Your arguments may even have a degree of validity, but you paint with such a broad brush, that it’s difficult to see them. When I was eighteen, I thought I was being uncompromising, now I see that I was just being an asshole.
Good luck in your endeavours,
Alan Tomlinson
Glad I could help you work through some of those nagging personal issues, Alan.
Plane tickets to England STAT!
See, sometimes people are being uncompromising when they say things that give concern trolls the vapors; that even includes the occasional 18-year-old. Don’t let the door hitcha you-know-where, &c.
I didn’t know they gave chiropractic degrees to 18 year-olds.
OMG, davenoon – do we have to go through this song and dance again?
While I can’t speak for the whole “solar system” of alternative medicine, there are a great many herbal treatments that have been found to be effective through double blind clinical trials and – as I had this same conversation with you just a couple months ago – you know it. You make yourself out to be a jackass by making trivially false but stunningly broad claims like this.
“great many herbal treatments that have been found to be effective through double blind clinical trials”
Then those are no longer ‘alternative’, but are science-based medicine.
Alternative treatments are just that: alternatives to actually being treated for whatever ails you.
Ah – it was tautology all along! Nothing like a clever semantic trick to render an argument unassailable.
Naturally if you define “alternative medicine” to mean ineffective medicine than it’s perfectly valid to say that it’s all garbage. Also perfectly meaningless. So – congrats!
Twit. Since alternative medicine’s effectiveness is unproved and/or untested, the semantic trick is all yours (notice how I omitted the word ‘clever’). Are you a sales rep for Monster© Cables?
Ass. Saying “alternative medicine’s effectiveness is unproved and/or untested” isn’t an argument or even a claim. It’s a tautology based on an facile, idiosyncratic, and ‘clever’ definition.
Leaving the invective aside, the difference between conventional medicine and other forms (alternative, anecdotal, chiropractic, mystical) is that conventional, by definition, embraces all treatments proven to work and convincingly argued to be ethical – and rejects treatments not yet proven to work or later proven not to work after all.
This may seem like a common-sense position, but it’s not one shared by any of the “alternative” medicines, none of which apply any such standard of proof. That isn’t ad hominem, it’s simple fact.
Now, some treatments given as “alternative” medicine may indeed be effective, and it may be that more testing should be done to identify effective treatments from the world of “alternative medicine” (though institutional attempts to do this have been rather a boondoggle). And the limited patentability of folk remedies may limit the private funding available for testing their effectiveness.
But none of this changes the fact that Hanspeter was being perfectly correct, and it’s not just a semantic point.
I’m skeptical, to say the least, of your proposed definitions. Do you have any authoritative source that uses a similar definition?
I certainly accept the proposition that treatments not shown to be effective are “garbage.” I’m more resistant to the notion that traditional treatments that have been part of “alternative medicine” for centuries suddenly become “conventional” as soon as their effectiveness is demonstrated.
“Stunningly broad” because it only applies to roughly 95% of what’s labeled as “alternative medicine” rather than 100%?
And, of course, until we do those clinical trials, we don’t know which 95%.
But without doing clinical trials, we can safely assume that the number is 95% and not something more reasonable.
Yes. If you say “all” when the facts only support “some” you’ve made an over-broad claim.
Well, to get all pedantic on your pedanticism, is that “stunningly” broad if you’re only off by 5%?
In your case, I suppose it isn’t so stunning since you’re in the habit of making over-broad statements without any regard to the facts.
Like I said, I haven’t reviewed the state of the science on the whole solar system. And I know for damn sure you haven’t.
You said that all alternative medicine was garbage. This is not the case – there’s a large body of research supporting a great many alternative medicine treatments.
If I made a trivially false, over-broad statement in print I might not be stunned, but I’d certainly be embarrassed.
I guess you should then be very embarrassed, or maybe concern trolling goes with the job description.
Certainly not a “great many” when the comparison class is the great sea of woo pushed under the rubric “alternative medicine”. Almost all of it–in fact, I’d guess 95% is low–is crap.
My, that *is* a meticulous and through take down. I’ll have to re-think everything now!
You misread my disdain for concern. davenoon regularly makes needlessly broad and thoroughly false claims. It’s tiresome.
You made a trivially false error in assuming I was the author of this blog entry. I hope you’re suitably embarrassed.
Correction – a trivially false assumption.
The one thing I miss from js-kit is the ability to delete and fix comments.
Indeed I am. And, unlike Mr. Noon, I’ll retract – I misread your tagline. I apologize.
Chiropratic seems to work, up to a point, for certain kinds of back problems. The more expensive claims for it, however, are nonsense.
Right. About the best we can say for it is that it may help resolve some lower back pain faster than doing nothing, but that’s about it.
And I meant to say, “expansive” rather than “expensive”, but the latter works, too.
The problem here isn’t British libel laws, it’s the judge that sits for all libel and privacy cases who takes regular kickings from the higher courts. Perhaps it is time for him to be handed a Webley!
200,000 quid, not 200,000 dollars
At least for me, the sidebar to the right of this article hosts an advertisement “Find a Chiropractor.”
Yeah, good old Google ads. In fairness, they don’t specify what you’re meant to do with one once you find one.
It’s interesting to compare the history of American osteopathy with that of chiropractic; they started out with similar roots, but the former evolved into something very similar to regular medicine (albeit with more of an emphasis on what’s generally known as wellness), and the latter went clear off into woo-woo land.
My childhood doctor was a D.O., and the kinds of treatments that he prescribed/used (of the ones I can remember) weren’t any different that the kind of treatment I get from the M.D.s and N.P.s that I see now.
As I said the last time alternative medicine came up for a kicking on LGM, my GP is an osteopath, and I’m delighted with her. As far as I can tell, at this point in America a D.O. is basically “M.D. with a minor in hippie”. I think this is not the case in Europe and elsewhere, where osteopaths may retain more of a chiropractic woo flavor.
I teach osteopathic students. Osteopathy has available to it a number of manipulative treatments (and some research literature backing them up), but unfortunately the profession has veered sharply away from research into manipulative techniques, preferring to hew to the line the DO is simply another way to spell MD. Chiropractic is a debasement of osteopathy; the father of chiropractic in the US was an osteopathy-school washout, who (cleverly enough) decided to concentrate on marketing. Chiropractors are actually trained in marketing their practices (we poor dumb MDs just study medicine). They also have a great lobby (at least in California), and have a monopoly on being able to bill for manipulative treatments (i.e., no such billing available to osteopaths or massage therapists).
It’s a shame, because there are some genuinely useful manipulative practices with no woo involved–but we’ll never get to develop them fully, because the osteopathic community won’t push, and the chiropractic community is well-organized.
Alas, there was no Reply button to JMcW’s last witty comment:
“My, that *is* a meticulous and through take down. I’ll have to re-think everything now!
…..
You misread my disdain for concern. davenoon regularly makes needlessly broad and thoroughly false claims. It’s tiresome.”‘
Oooh..,faux sarcasm . Good one. But if you actually think I doubt you believe the stuff you claim here. Someone’s paying you, right? You can tell us, we’re all friends here.
And no Jules I do not misread your concern. It’s the same concern that lets homeopaths and others kill people while claiming to cure them. You know, like “We had to destroy the village to save it.” And it’s money. These quacks and charlatans make a whole stinking pile of money. They’re near as bad as politicians.
Also your comment about Mr. Noon strikes me as off color. Who besides your esteemed and perfect self thinks his claims are needless? I certainly don’t think so, and it appears many others don’t. And “thoroughly false”? Boy if he said that you’d be screaming about logic and proof and all all the other stuff missing in that comment. Is he 100% false or merely 95%? That seems important to you. If it’s tiresome? Well as the good doctor of homeopatthy or whatever would say, if it hurts, don’t do it. So maybe if you found a forum of true believers you wouldn’t get so tired, eh?
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