MARTIN WALKER - ATTACK ON ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE 23/5/06

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*MUST READ!* from MARTIN WALKER - ATTACK ON ALTERNATIVE

MEDICINE 23/5/06

Sat, 27 May 2006 00:03:32 +0100

 

 

 

 

 

Thursday, May 25, 2006.

 

Re: ARTICLES ON ATTACK ON ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE 23/5/06

 

From MARTIN WALKER -

Author of Brave New World of Zero Risk and Dirty Medicine: Science,

big business and the assault on natural health care

 

Every time there is an attack on alternative medicine people write

similar letters in response, defending these therapies but always,

there is a lack of analysis, historical or otherwise. This means that

although the number of replies and combative responses is growing and

we are 'learning' in that sense, no one seems to be describing the

supporters of orthodox medicine in their context and drawing attention

to conflict of interest and vested interest. Consequently it always

looks as if these critics are serious people with important things to

say, rather than shallow half wits guided entirely by vested interest.

 

Dr Michael Baum was a founder member of the Campaign Against Health

Fraud (now called HealthWatch

http://www.healthwatch-uk.org/committee.html ). HealthWatch, which is

linked to important US lobby groups CSICOP (Committee for the

Scientific Investigation into Claims of the Paranormal) and ACSH

(American Council on Science and Health) has been responsible for a

whole serious of attacks on alternative health, CAM and especially

homeopathy.

 

Other signatories to the Times letter also have links with

HealthWatch, most particularly Ernst who over the last decade has

campaigned consistently against alternative medicine (and can most

accurately be described as the only Professor of alternative medicine

in Britain who argues the case for pharmaceutical medicine). Ernst

spoke at the 15th Annual meeting of CSICOP held in London where he

delivered a quite childish but supposedly humorous deconstruction of

alternative medicine to the assembled twenty odd anoraks in the

audience. At that meeting amongst his own people, Ernst made no

attempt to be even vaguely academic or supportive of alternatives.

 

Within the last two years, HealthWatch has been taken over - it has

been floundering for years - by the new industry-backed lobby groups,

The Science and Media Centre and Sense About Science (SAS), these

groups are backed with bundles of money from the Association of

British Pharmaceutical Industries (ABPI) as well as individual drug

manufacturing companies. They are linked to some of the most avid

de-regulating 'libertarian' US lobby groups.

 

The founder of the Campaign Against Health Fraud (HealthWatch)

Caroline Richmond, has been writing for these lobby groups over the

last couple of years and providing information for Mike Fitzpatrick

who is both a member of SAS and makes journalistic contributions to

Spiked, the online news vehicle of the ex-Revolutionary Communist

Party members who are now deeply embedded in the pro-science Lobby Groups.

 

It was the above organisations working out of the Royal Society, which

send a letter to the Times with a list of signatories protesting about

critics of GM crops. In this case however, environmental organisations

and journalists like George Monbiot (the Guardian newspaper) organised

with considerable effect against them. Why, oh why, can't supporters

of alternative medicine do the same! Apart from my two books, Dirty

Medicine and Zero Risk, no one has come forward to organise web sites

with an ongoing critique of these industry-backed lobbyists.

 

One last point, Prince Charles is to be congratulated for his

continuing and committed support for alternative medicine but if I was

him I would certainly get frustrated at the lack of serious support.

In the early 1980s, it was Charles who opened and became a patron of

the Britsol Cancer Help Centre. In 1990, the Centre was wrecked by a

bogus scientific paper published in the Lancet, which claimed that

women with breast cancer who attended the Centre died more quickly and

in greater number than those who had orthodox treatment. The

unfortunate response to this attack, was again, constant picky

academic arguments about whether or not the paper's writers had got

their statistical analysis correct.

 

What there should have been was a full blooded political assault on

HealthWatch and its associates, the writers of the paper and the

connivance of the Lancet in its publication. Fiteen years later

alternative medicine is coming under increasing attack from industrial

vested interests but we are unfortunately responding in the same

piecemeal manner. It's time that supporters of CAM and alternative

medicine, really did get their political act together. While

environmentalists, greens, anti-corporate critics and pharmaceutical

company critics, have all formed political fact gathering

organisations and write consistently about the corporate lobbies which

are managing skewed news, the practitioners of homeopathy and other

valuable therapies, appear utterly unable to organise against the

threat they are facing.

 

Anyone who wants to read in greater depth about any of the above,

should obtain copies of my books Dirty Medicine and Brave New World of

Zero Risk and perhaps visit the websites:

 

www.zero-risk.org and www.slingshotpublications.com

 

If we don't make ourselves aware of the history of these attacks we

will never be able to combat them and they will gradually incur

increasing damage.

 

Regards, Martin Walker.

 

 

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