: *MUST
READ!* from MARTIN WALKER - ARTICLES ON ATTACK ON ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE
To: Zeus
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2006.
Subject: 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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