"How to spot a quack"

[bindeweede]

How to spot a quack



The Oxford English Dictionary defines a quack as someone who is an "impostor in medicine".
Spotting quackery is easy once you know the signs. A quack will:

• Treat only chronic conditions such as fatigue, backache and food intolerance. Practitioners avoid competing with mainstream doctors, so you won't find Chinese herbs or reflexology being used to treat a broken leg or heart attack.

• Use disclaimers. It protects them from legal action when their methods fail.

• Tell you that you may get worse before you get better. Mainstream medicine rarely causes the primary symptoms to worsen.

• Claim there is a cure for your condition, but your doctor won't tell you because it will undermine their authority.

• Say that the roots of the treatment lie in "ancient wisdom". But this doesn't mean it works.

• Have a "success rate" of around 80 per cent. It's not too high a figure to be thoroughly unbelievable, yet high enough for the needy to find irresistible. But you won't find details of who the people are in that 80 per cent - they don't even have to exist.

• Be keen to stress your individuality. He will tell you that even if a remedy is useless for others, it might still work for you.

Taken from an article, itself an extract from Rose Shapiro's new book -

Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All, by Rose Shapiro, published by Harvill Secker on February 7

Sorry, but it's from the Mail . http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/healthmain.html?in_article_id=509670&in_page_id=1774&ico=Homepage&icl=TabModule&icc=picbox&ct=5

[Matt]

The way to spot a medical charletan is to ask them a direct question. Usually snake oil salesmen will give an evasive answer. Thus the ahem canard...

If it ducks like a quack...

[SkepticReport]

Bob Park's Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science (http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/signs.html) is a classic.

Bob is a classic.

[JJM]

The way to spot a medical charletan is to ask them a direct question. Usually snake oil salesmen will give an evasive answer. Thus the ahem canard...

If it ducks like a quack...I will steal this.

[Matt]

I will steal this.

Can't blame you, I did.

[bindeweede]

Taken from an article, itself an extract from Rose Shapiro's new book -

Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All, by Rose Shapiro, published by Harvill Secker on February 7

Sorry, but it's from the Mail . http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/healthmain.html?in_article_id=509670&in_page_id=1774&ico=Homepage&icl=TabModule&icc=picbox&ct=5


Earlier today I finished reading “Suckers – How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All”, by Rose Shapiro. I found it very interesting, as a layman, - clearly written and with very good references.

I was surprised right at the beginning where she said there are as many as 1000 alternative therapies. That there are nearly 50,000 alternative practitioners, outnumbering GPs, did not surprise me. But then it takes several years and a lot of money to train a GP, whereas anyone can go on a couple of weekend courses, read a book, then call themselves a “Hypnotherapist”, offer to treat people with hypnotherapy, and even teach it. But as someone on another forum says, “A hypnotherapist does not need qualifications,……….. ……..It’s the profession of hynotherapy that’s at fault here.


Another thing that surprised me is the amount of money the NHS is spending on alternative therapies - £20M on the refurbishment of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, £900,000 to Prince Charles’ Foundation for Integrated Health, £80,000 a year for spiritual healers at University College Hospital Cancer/Haematology Unit, £200,000 to a private company in Northern Ireland “to pilot services integrating complementary medicine into existing primary care services." There are other examples.

I was also surprised at the number of Government-funded UK academic institutions (49) offering Bachelor of Science degrees in CAM – for example Aromatherapy at Anglia Ruskin University, and Ayurvedic Medicine at Middlesex.

In the last paragraph to the Preface Ms Shapiro writes,

“This is a subject about which I feel very strongly. What I have learned during my research and writing of this book has only increased my sense of outrage and dismay at the widespread acceptance of alternative medicine and the growing status accorded to it.”