medical ethics
Proponents of alternative medicine regularly stress the notion that their treatments are either risk-free or much safer than conventional medicine. This assumption may be excellent for marketing bogus treatments, however, it neglects that even a relatively harmless therapy can become dangerous, if it is ineffective. Here is yet again a tragic reminder of this undeniable fact.
Japanese doctors reported the case of 2-year-old girl who died of precursor B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), the most common cancer in children.
She had no remarkable medical history. She was transferred to a hospital because of respiratory distress and died 4 hours after arrival. Two weeks before her death, she had developed a fever of 39 degrees C, which subsided after the administration of a naturopathic herbal remedy. One week before death, she developed jaundice, and her condition worsened on the day of death.
Laboratory test results on admission to hospital showed a markedly elevated white blood cell count. Accordingly, the cause of death was suspected to be acute leukaemia. Forensic autopsy revealed the cause of death to be precursor B-cell ALL.
With the current advancements in medical technology, the 5-year survival rate of children with ALL is nearly 90%. However, in this case, the child’s parents had opted for naturopathy instead of evidence-based medicine. They had not taken her to a hospital for a medical check-up or immunisation since she was an infant. If the child had received routine medical care, she would have a more than 60% chance of being alive 5 years after diagnosis of ALL.
The authors of this case-report concluded that the parents should be accused of medical neglect regardless of their motives.
Such cases are tragic and infuriating in equal measure. There is no way of knowing how often this sort of thing happens; we rely entirely on anecdotes because systematic research is hardly feasible.
While anecdotes of this nature have their obvious limitations, they are nevertheless important. They can serve as poignant reminders that alternative remedies might be relatively harmless, but this does not necessarily apply to all alternative practitioners. Moreover, they should make us redouble our efforts to inform the public responsibly about the all too often trivialized risks of alternative medicine.
When I come across a study with the aim to “examine the effectiveness of acupuncture to relieve symptoms commonly observed in patients in a hospice program” my hopes are high. When I then see that its authors are from the ‘New England School of Acupuncture’, the ‘All Care Hospice and the ‘Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, my hopes for a good piece of science are even higher. So, let’s see what this new paper has to offer.
A total of 26 patients participated in this acupuncture ‘trial’, receiving a course of weekly treatments that ranged from 1 to 14 weeks. The average number of treatments was five. The Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale (ESAS) was used to assess the severity of pain, tiredness, nausea, depression, anxiety, drowsiness, appetite, well-being, and dyspnoea. A two-tailed, paired t test was applied to the data to compare symptom scores pre- versus post-acupuncture treatment. Patients enrolled in All Care Hospice’s home care program were given the option to receive acupuncture to supplement usual care offered by the hospice team. Treatment was provided by licensed acupuncturists in the patient’s place of residence.
The results indicated that 7 out of 9 symptoms were significantly improved with acupuncture, the exceptions being drowsiness and appetite. Although the ESAS scale demonstrated a reduction in symptom severity post-treatment for both drowsiness and appetite, this reduction was not found to be significant.
At tis stage, I have lost most of my hopes for good science. This is not a ‘trial’ but a glorified case-series. There is no way that the stated aim can be pursued with this type of methodology. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that the observed outcome can be attributed to acupuncture; the additional attention given to these patients is but one of several factors that are quite sufficient to explain their symptomatic improvements.
This is yet another disappointment then from the plethora of ‘research’ into alternative medicine that, on closer inspection, turns out to be little more than thinly disguised promotion of quackery. These days, I can bear such disappointments quite well – after all, I had many years to get used to them. What I find more difficult to endure is the anger that overcomes me when I read the authors’ conclusion: Acupuncture was found to be effective for the reduction and relief of symptoms that commonly affect patient QOL. Acupuncture effectively reduced symptoms of pain, tiredness, nausea, depression, anxiety, and shortness of breath, and enhanced feelings of well-being. More research is required to assess the long-term benefits and symptom reduction of acupuncture in a palliative care setting.
This is not disappointing; in my view, this is scientific misconduct by
- the authors,
- the institutions employing the authors,
- the ethics committee that has passed the ‘research’,
- the sponsors of the ‘research’,
- the peer-reviewers of the paper,
- the journal and its editors responsible for publishing this paper.
The fact that this sort of thing happens virtually every day in the realm of alternative medicine does not render this case less scandalous, it merely makes it more upsetting.
Sanevax is a US organisation that claims to promote only Safe, Affordable, Necessary & Effective vaccines and vaccination practices through education and information. We believe in science-based medicine. Our primary goal is to provide the information necessary for you to make informed decisions regarding your health and well-being. We also provide referrals to helpful resources for those unfortunate enough to have experienced vaccine-related injuries. Recently they seem to have become active in the UK as well; even in my rural neck of the woods, I found a poster that claimed the following:
The side effects experienced by some girls [following HPV vaccination] have been severe and long lasting and include:
- persistent headaches
- persistent sore throat
- ME
- problems with eyes and vision
- muscle aches
- muscle weaknesses/twitches
- numbness of limbs
- pins and needles/tingling
- joint pains
- chest pains
- breathing problems
- racing heart or palpitations
- sensitive to light or noise
- cold hands and feet
- abdominal pain
- skin problems and rashes
- memory impairment
- concentration problems
- difficulty multi-tasking
- difficulty taking in information
- dizziness
- fainting
- postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome
- seizures
- persistent nausea and vomiting
- acid reflux
- new allergies
- menstrual problems/ changes to menstrual cycle
- difficulty regulating body temperature
- excessive sweating
- frequent urination
- insomnia or change of body clock
- autoimmune diseases, e. g. autoimmune encephalitis. Raynaud’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, thyroid.
Scary? Yes, I think so – I am always afraid of people who write about health and think that THYROID is a side effect!
Elsewhere the connection to alternative medicine becomes more obvious and the mission of Sanevax gets a little clearer. However, the claims are similar:
The most common side effects of HPV vaccines are pain, swelling, itching, bruising and redness at the injection site, headache, fever, nausea, dizziness, vomiting and fainting.
The following side effects are less common, but more dangerous:
*Difficulty breathing, shortness of breath or wheezing (bronco spasm)
*Hives and/or rash
*Swollen glands (neck, armpit, or groin)
*Joint, leg, or chest pain
*Unusual tiredness, weakness, lethargy, brain fog, or confusion
*Chills
*Generally feeling unwell
*Aching muscles and/or muscle weakness
*Difficulty keeping food down, vomiting or stomach ache
*Seizures
*Shortness of breath
*Chest pain
*Bad stomach pain
*Skin infection
*Bleeding or bruising more easily than normal
This list is by no means comprehensive; it is taken directly from HPV patient Product Information inserts. Many young girls from around the world have experienced many more severe events after HPV vaccination. For the health and safety of the children in your care, please be alert to any changes in your student’s health and behavior post-vaccination.
Should a student experience any of the less common side effect symptoms even months after vaccination, please alert their parents to the possibility that the student may be exhibiting a vaccine reaction, so they can consult their physician for proper medical care.
Now I am not just scared, I am positively alarmed. This makes the HPV vaccine look like something to be avoided at all cost. In this state of alarm, I do a quick search for published evidence. My findings make me concerned again – this time not about the vaccination but about Sanevax. The Sanevax text is in stark contradiction to the published information on this issue. The most recent article I could find stated that serious adverse events such as adverse pregnancy outcomes, autoimmune diseases (including Guillain-Barre Syndrome and multiple sclerosis), anaphylaxis, venous thromboembolism, and stroke, were extensively studied, and no increase in the incidence of these events was found compared with background rates.
This makes me wonder, who is trying to mislead us here? Are we duped into ignorance by scientists bought by BIG PHARMA, or should we perhaps re-name ‘Sanevax’ into INSANE ANTI-VAX?
I think I know the answer, but I would like to hear your views.
For ‘my’ journal FACT, I review all the new articles that have emerged on the subject of alternative medicine on a monthly basis. Here are a few impressions and concerns that this activity have generated:
- The number of papers on alternative medicine has increased beyond belief: between the year 2000 and 2010, there was a slow, linear increase from 335 to 610 Medline-listed articles; thereafter, the numbers exploded to 1189 (2011), 1674 (2012) and 2236 (2013).
- This fast growing and highly lucrative ‘market’ has been cornered mainly by one journal: ‘EVIDENCE BASED COMPLEMENTARY AND ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE’ (EBCAM), a journal that I mentioned several times before (see here, for instance). In 2010, EBCAM published 76 papers, while these figures increased to 546, 880 and 1327 during the following three years.
- Undeniably, this is big business, as authors have to pay tidy sums each time they get published in EBCAM.
- The peer-review system of EBCAM is farcical: potential authors who send their submissions to EBCAM are invited to suggest their preferred reviewers who subsequently are almost invariably appointed to do the job. It goes without saying that such a system is prone to all sorts of serious failures; in fact, this is not peer-review at all, in my opinion, it is an unethical sham.
- As a result, most (I estimate around 80%) of the articles that currently get published on alternative medicine are useless rubbish. They tend to be either pre-clinical investigations which never get followed up and are thus meaningless, or surveys of no relevance whatsoever, or pilot studies that never are succeeded by more definitive trials, or non-systematic reviews that are wide open to bias and can only mislead the reader.
- Nowadays, very few articles on alternative medicine are good enough to get published in mainstream journals of high standing.
The consequences of these fairly recent developments are serious:
- Conventional scientists and clinicians must get the impression that there is little research activity in alternative medicine (while, in fact, there is lots) and that the little research that does emerge is of poor quality.
- Consequently alternative medicine will be deemed by those who are not directly involved in it as trivial, and the alternative medicine journals will be ignored or even become their laughing stock.
- At the same time, the field of alternative medicine and its proponents (the only ones who might actually be reading the plethora of rubbish published in alternative medicine journals) will get more and more convinced that their field is supported by an ever- abundance of peer-reviewed, robust science.
- Gradually, they will become less and less aware of the standards and requirements that need to be met for evidence to be called reliable (provided they ever had such knowledge in the first place).
- They might thus get increasingly frustrated by the lack of acceptance of their ‘advances’ by proper scientists – an attitude which, from their perspective, must seem unfair, biased and hostile.
- In the end, conventional and alternative medicine, rather than learning from each other, will move further and further apart.
- Substantial amounts of money will continue to be wasted for research into alternative medicine that, whenever assessed critically, turns out to be too poor to advance healthcare in any meaningful way.
- The ones who medicine should be all about, namely the patients who need our help and rely on the progress of research, are not well served by these developments.
In essence this suggests, I think, that alternative medicine is ill-advised and short-sighted to settle for standards that are so clearly below those generally deemed acceptable in medicine. Similarly, conventional medicine does a serious disfavour to progress and to us all, if it ignores or tolerates this process.
I am not at all sure how to reverse this trend. In the long-term, it would require a change of attitude that obviously is far from easy to bring about. In the short-term, it might help, I think, to de-list journals from Medline that are in such obvious conflict with publication ethics.
In the realm of alternative medicine, we encounter many therapeutic claims that beggar belief. This is true for most modalities but perhaps for none more than chiropractic. Many chiropractors still adhere to Palmer’s gospel of the ‘inate’, ‘subluxation’ etc. and thus they believe that their ‘adjustments’ are a cure all. Readers of this blog will know all that, of course, but even they might be surprised by the notion that a chiropractic adjustment improves the voice of a choir singer.
This, however, is precisely the ‘hypothesis’ that was recently submitted to an RCT. To be precise, the study investigated the effect of spinal manipulative therapy (SMT) on the singing voice of male individuals.
Twenty-nine subjects were selected among male members of a local choir. Participants were randomly assigned to two groups: (A) a single session of chiropractic SMT and (B) a single session of non-therapeutic transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS). Recordings of the singing voice of each participant were taken immediately before and after the procedures. After a 14-day wash-out period, procedures were switched between groups: participants who underwent SMT on the first occasion were now subjected to TENS and vice versa. Recordings were assessed via perceptual audio and acoustic evaluations. The same recording segment of each participant was selected. Perceptual audio evaluation was performed by a specialist panel (SP). Recordings of each participant were randomly presented thus making the SP blind to intervention type and recording session (before/after intervention). Recordings compiled in a randomized order were also subjected to acoustic evaluation.
No differences in the quality of the singing on perceptual audio evaluation were observed between TENS and SMT.
The authors concluded that no differences in the quality of the singing voice of asymptomatic male singers were observed on perceptual audio evaluation or acoustic evaluation after a single spinal manipulative intervention of the thoracic and cervical spine.
Laughable? Yes!
There is nevertheless an important point to be made here, I feel: some claims are just too silly to waste resources on. Or, to put it in more scientific terms, hypotheses require much more than a vague notion or hunch.
To set up, conduct and eventually publish an RCT as above requires expertise, commitment, time and money. All of this is entirely wasted, if the prior probability of a relevant result approaches zero. In the realm of alternative medicine, this is depressingly often the case. In the final analysis, this suggests that all too often research in this area achieves nothing other than giving science a bad name.
‘Doctor’ Don Harte is former medical student who prematurely left medical school and currently works as a chiropractor in California. He, has served on the Boards of the World Chiropractic Association and the Council on Chiropractic Practice. He has published extensively; on his website, he offers a list of his articles:
- July 16, 2015: “CA SB277: Marin Chiropractor Says Power Structure Bigoted Against Boy in Wheelchair, vs. Leukemia Boy”
- July 1, 2015: “SB277: Marin Chiropractor Charges California with Chemical Child Molestation”
- June 15, 2015: Press release: “Dr. Don Harte warns about the Failure of Big Pharma and Growing Opioid Addiction Crises”
- May, 2015: “The Biological, Economic and Political Case Against Vaccination” in North Bay Biz magazine
- May 15, 2015: “Dr. Don Harte Calls Draconian SB277 Vaccination Initiative Sacramento’s Syringe of Shame”
- April 21, 2015: “End of a Made-up Measles Crisis”
- February 12, 2015: “It’s a childhood disease, not a tragedy” Letter to the Editor in the Pacific Sun, about the measles hysteria.
- January 27, 2015: “California Straight Chiropractor Fights Disney Measles Mania”
- March 5, 2015: “You cannot have vaccination that works, yet doesn’t work” Letter to the Editor in the Pacific Sun. “The grotesque level of bigotry, backed up by the lack of any comprehension of immunology, toxicology and the vitalistic paradigm of Chiropractic, is astounding.”
- April, 2009: “Seize the Time” in The Chiropractic Journal. The future of Chiropractic, as Medicine is breaking down, and bankrupting the country.
- April, 2009: “Refusal to Vaccinate Puts Kids At Risk”Dr. Harte quoted, “Vaccination is based on the medical fallacy that our bodies are stupid.”
- Spring, 2008: “The Future of Chiropractic” Journal of the California Chiropractic Association. For chiropractors, my view on the future of Chiropractic.
- November, 2007: “Is There a Vaccine That Protects Against ‘Non-Science?’”Marin Independent Journal. Discussion of Guardisil, the HPV vaccine, the flu vaccine, and the general foolishness of vaccination, the lack of science and efficacy, etc.
- May, 2005: ”Generations of Unbridled Power” The Chiropractic Journal. In a publication for chiropractors, I am standing up against the harassment and debasement of the chiropractic profession, specifically by the California Board of Chiropractic Examiners.
- October, 2004: “Time for regime Change in Attitude about Medicine” San Francisco Chronicle. The very popular anti-inflammatory medication, Vioxx, was just pulled off the market, at the same time as a massive contamination of flu vaccine.
- January, 2004: “Alternative to the Sting of a Failed Flu Vaccine” San Francisco Chronicle. Discusses the absurdity and the dangers of the annual flu vaccine ritual. The heroic role of Chiropractic in the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918.
- May, 2003: “Where is the Danger in Chiropractic?” San Francisco Chronicle. Responding to another baseless attack upon Chiropractic by medical bigots, noting the extreme risks of Medicine, and the extreme safety of Chiropractic.
- January, 2002: “To X-Ray or Not to X-Ray” The Chiropractic Journal. An article to chiropractors about how essential X-ray is to the practice of Chiropractic. Sadly, very few chiropractors X-ray these days.
- May, 2000: “By Giving Our Kids Certain Drugs, We’re Playing Russian Roulette With Their Lives” Marin Independent Journal. Ritalin and anti-depressants for children, the Columbine massacre, the role of Chiropractic in children’s health.
- December, 1999: “It’s a Myth that Children Need Vaccines” Marin Independent Journal.
- July, 1999: “Too Little Drugs, Too Many Organs” Marin Independent Journal. Does the medical paradigm really make sense? Is it logical?.
- November, 1979: “Interferon and Beyond” OMNI Magazine “Forum,” (Response to a cover story, “Cancer Cure at a Billion Dollars a Pound.”
His website also reveals that Harte views chiropractic as a ‘cure all’ and believes that the “Vertebral Subluxation Complex (VSC) is THE most serious threat to your health and well-being.”
Harte is not impressed with conventional medicine: “Virtually everyone has lost loved ones to medical mistakes and indifference. I, myself, count my father, my favorite uncle and two cousins amongst this unnecessary medical death toll. Though people concoct all kinds of charges against Chiropractic, nobody knows of any deaths from Chiropractic, because there just aren’t any. You might want to read the article that I wrote on this subject in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Where is the Danger in Chiropractic.”
In particular, Harte is no friend of immunisation. Here are some of the things he has been quoted as saying recently about the subject:
- He charged the media with “an evil bigotry” in relation to vaccination.
- He said that “The mass media refuses to acknowledge the existence of vaccine-injured children. This is quite a trick, since we are talking millions of children.”
- He explained that “their whole con game relies on fear, trying to convince you that you and your children have nothing inside to protect them from all those evil germs. That you need their HOLY WATER, the vaccines, or you will die.” Once again, Harte charged the California Governor and the legislature “as Destroyers of the family, as Enemies of liberty, as CHEMICAL CHILD MOLESTERS.”
- He claimed that “His (Mr J Coleman’s) son, Otto, who was paralyzed by a vaccine reaction, was there, in his wheelchair; as were other vaccine-damaged children. Some participants held up photos of their children who had died from vaccines.” And he said, “There were no photos of these children, nor any mention of them in news accounts. Establishment media refuses to put a human face on the suffering caused by vaccinations. I don’t know whether to call them ‘chicken’ or ‘evil.’”
- Harte also stated that “The claim that non-vaccinated children are a threat to Rhett has ZERO scientific basis. First of all, less-vaccinated and non-vaccinated kids tend to be healthier. And more specifically, children recently vaccinated with live virus vaccines will shed viruses, and thus, be contagious, for up to 28 days.”
- “Here we have a case,” explained Harte, “of one boy held up as a potential victim of unvaccinated or less-vaccinated children, who has had, in reality, no harm done by those children. The millions of children who have endured great harm, up to and including paralysis and death, are ignored. This is not science, nor is it reputable news reporting nor reputable public policy. It is naked propaganda, paid for by Big Pharma.”
It seems that Harte is an altogether dangerous person.
Of course, chiropractors will (yet again) claim that Harte does in no way stand for chiropractic as a whole and that chiropractors are just as appalled by such dangerous anti-vaccination propaganda as we are. They will say he is just ‘a rotten apple’ within a mostly laudable profession.
But is that true? What have the professional bodies of chiropractic done against him and his hazardous views? Have they excluded or reprimanded him, or requested that he seeks treatment for what seems to be rampant paranoia?
The answer, I am afraid, is NO! What they did do instead was to name him, in 2006, as “Chiropractor of the Year” – an honour bestowed on him by the World Chiropractic Alliance.
NATURAL NEWS announced the death of Nicholas Gonzalez with the following words:
It is with great sadness that we report the death of health freedom advocate and individualized nutrition specialist Dr. Nick Gonzalez, who on the eve of July 21 died from an alleged heart attack. Dr. Gonzalez’ contributions to anticancer nutrition protocols and an array of other nutritional therapies have been invaluable, and we would like to honor this pioneering natural healer by recognizing his benevolent legacy…
In contrast to the conventional cancer treatment model, Dr. Gonzalez’s approach was always about helping individuals heal through individualized care. Along with fellow colleague Dr. Linda Isaacs, Dr. Gonzalez helped build a repository of dietary protocols to help patients overcome their specific conditions through advanced nutritional therapies. His methodology centered around detoxification, supplementation with healing foods and nutrients, and specialized enzyme therapy…
Dr. Gonzalez was always a strong adherent to sound science, and he was never in it for the money. His humble, cogent approach to helping people heal naturally without drugs or surgery is a legacy worth remembering and passing on, and we’re thankful to have gotten to know this honorable man during his time on this earth…
This sounds as though Gonzalez was some kind of medical genius and scientific pioneer. Most cancer experts would disagree very sharply with this. Here is what Louise Lubetkin wrote on this blog about him, and I very much encourage you to read her whole post.
Those who recognize and appreciate a fine example of pseudoscientific baloney when they see one know that there is no richer seam, no more inexhaustible source, than the bustling, huckster-infested street carnival that is alternative medicine. There one can find intellectual swindlers in abundance, all offering outrageously implausible claims with the utmost earnestness and sincerity. But the supreme prize, the Fabergé egg found buried among the bric-a-brac, surely belongs to that most convincing of illusionists, the physician reborn as an ardent advocate of alternative medicine…
So what are we to make of Gonzalez? Is he a cynical fraud or does he genuinely believe that coffee enemas, skin brushing and massive doses of supplements are capable of holding back the tsunami of cancer?
At the end of the day it hardly matters: either way, he’s a dangerous man.
Personally, I believe much more in the text of Louise Lubetkin. How about you?
Chiropractors are back pain specialists, they say. They do not pretend to treat non-spinal conditions, they claim.
If such notions were true, why are so many of them still misleading the public? Why do many chiropractors pretend to be primary care physicians who can take care of most illnesses regardless of any connection with the spine? Why do they continue to happily promote bogus treatments? Why do chiropractors, for instance, claim they can treat gastrointestinal diseases?
This recent narrative review of the literature, for example, was aimed at summarising studies describing the management of disorders of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract using ‘chiropractic therapy’ broadly defined here as spinal manipulation therapy, mobilizations, soft tissue therapy, modalities and stretches.
Twenty-one articles were found through searching the published literature to meet the authors’ inclusion criteria. The retrieved articles included case reports to clinical trials to review articles. The majority of articles chronicling patient experiences under chiropractic care reported that they experienced mild to moderate improvements in GI symptoms. No adverse effects were reported.
From this, the authors concluded that chiropractic care can be considered as an adjunctive therapy for patients with various GI conditions providing there are no co-morbidities.
I think, we would need to look for a long time to find an article with conclusions that are more ridiculous, false and unethical than these.
The old adage applies: rubbish in, rubbish out. If we include unreliable reports such as anecdotes, our finding will be unreliable as well. If we do not make this mistake and conduct a proper systematic review, we will arrive at very different conclusions. My own systematic review, for instance, of controlled clinical trials drew the following conclusion: There is no supportive evidence that chiropractic is an effective treatment for gastrointestinal disorders.
That probably says it all. I only want to add a short question: SHOULD THIS LATEST CHIROPRACTIC ATTEMPT TO MISLEAD THE PUBLIC BE CONSIDERED ‘SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT’ OR ‘FRAUD’?
The last time I had contact with Dr Fisher was when he fired me from the editorial board of his journal ‘Homeopathy’. He did that by sending me the following letter:
Dear Professor Ernst,
This is to inform you that you have been removed from the Editorial Board of Homeopathy. The reason for this is the statement you published on your blog on Holocaust Memorial Day 2013 in which you smeared homeopathy and other forms of complementary medicine with a ‘guilt by association’ argument, associating them with the Nazis.
I should declare a personal interest….[Fisher goes on to tell a story which is personal and which I therefore omit]… I mention this only because it highlights the absurdity of guilt by association arguments.
Sincerely
Peter Fisher Editor-in-Chief, Homeopathy
I did not expect to have any more dealings with him after this rather unpleasant encounter. But, as it turns out, I recently did have a further encounter.
When the BMJ invited me to write a debate article about the question whether homeopathy should continue to be available on the NHS, I accepted (with some reservations, I hasten to add). At the time, I did not know who would do the ‘other side’ of this debate. It turned out to be Peter Fisher, and our two articles have just been published.
As one would expect from a good journal, the articles were both peer reviewed. One of the peer-reviewers of my piece was most scathing of it essentially claiming that it was entirely worthless. Feeling that this was a bit harsh and very impolite, I was keen to see who this reviewer had been; it was none other than Andrew Vickers. This is remarkable because Vickers had not only published several homeopathic papers with Fisher, but also had been in the employment of the ‘Royal London Homeopathic Hospital’ under Fisher. To the best of my knowledge, his conflicts of interested had not been disclosed. I did point that out to the BMJ, but they seemed to think nothing of it.
Anyway, I was pleased to eventually (the whole procedure took many months) see the articles published, but at the same time somewhat irritated by Fisher’s piece. It contained plenty of misleading information that the peer-reviewers obviously had failed to correct. Here is a small sample from Fishers piece:
… recent overviews have had more favourable conclusions, including a health technology assessment commissioned by the Swiss federal government that concluded that homeopathy is “probably” effective for upper respiratory tract infections and allergies.
Readers interested in the clinical evidence can access the CORE-HOM database of clinical research in homeopathy free of charge (www.carstens-stiftung.de/core-hom). It includes 1117 clinical trials of homeopathy, of which about 300 are randomised controlled trials.
In the podcast that accompanies the articles Fisher insists that, on this database, there are well over 300 RCT, and I had to admit that this was new to me. Keen to learn more, I registered with the database and had a look. What I found startled me. True, the database does claim that almost 500 RCTs are available, but just a very superficial scrutiny of these studies reveals that
- some are not truly randomised,
- some are not even clinical trials,
- the list includes dual publications, re-analyses of already published studies as well as aborted trials,
- many have never been peer-reviewed,
- many are not double-blind,
- many are not placebo controlled,
- the majority are of poor methodological quality.
As to the other thing mentioned in the above excerpt from Fisher’s article, the famous ‘health technology assessment commissioned by the Swiss federal government’, I can refer my readers to a blog post by J W Nienhuys which probably says it all, if not, there is plenty more criticism of this report available on the Internet.
My conclusion from all this?
THE QUEEN’S HOMEOPATH USES ARGUMENTS THAT SEEM JUST AS BOGUS AS HOMEOPATHY ITSELF.
I will state my position up front: THERE IS NO CHILDHOOD CONDITION FOR WHICH CHIROPRACTIC SPINAL MANIPULATION GENERATES MORE GOOD THAN HARM. What is more, I have published evidence (published here, here, here, and here, for instance) to support this statement. If you disagree with it, this is the place and time to do so – and please don’t forget to cite the evidence that supports your statements.
Given that there is very little reliable evidence in this area, I find it surprising that so many chiropractors continue to treat kids. Not true! I hear some chiropractors shout, we do not often treat children. Who is correct? Clearly, we need data to answer this question.
The objective of a new paper was to investigate characteristics of clinical chiropractic practice, including the age of pediatric patients, the number of reports of negative side effects (NSEs), the opinions of doctors of chiropractic on treatment options by patient age groups, the conditions seen and the number of treatment sessions delivered by conditions and by patient age.
An Internet cross-sectional survey was conducted in 20 European countries with 4109 chiropractors invited to reply. The 19 national associations belonging to the European Chiropractic Union and the Danish Chiropractic Association were asked to participate. Respondents were asked to self-report characteristics of their practices.
Of the 956 (23.3%) participating chiropractors, 921 reported 19821 pediatric patients per month. Children represented 8.1% of chiropractors’ total patient load over the last year. A total of 557 (534 mild, 23 moderate, and 0 severe) negative (adverse) side effects were reported for an estimated incidence of 0.23%. On the given treatment statements, chiropractors reported varying agreement and disagreement rates based on patient age. The 8309 answers on conditions were grouped into skeletal (57.0%), neurologic (23.7%), gastrointestinal (12.4%), infection (3.5%), genitourinary (1.5%), immune (1.4%), and miscellaneous conditions (0.5%). The number of treatment sessions delivered varied according to the condition and the patient age.
The authors of this survey concluded that this study showed that European chiropractors are active in the care of pediatric patients. Reported conditions were mainly skeletal and neurologic complaints. In this survey, no severe NSEs were reported, and mild NSEs were infrequent.
In my view, a more appropriate conclusion might be that MANY EUROPEAN CHIROPRACTORS ARE ACTIVE IN QUACKERY.
