An investigation into the appropriateness of pseudosciences such as homeopathy and other alternative therapies being taught as science subjects in universities.

It is natural that there should be a market for courses to train therapists, or to study these subjects from a sociological perspective. However there is good evidence that these courses are being taught in a way that is plainly inconsistent with the basic tenets of good scholarship: endorsing the selective cherry picking of evidence to suit a case, selectively brushing over inadequate methodologies in studies rather than discussing them critically, misrepresenting the findings of existing research, teaching wholly outlandish ideas as scientific fact, and so on. There are also good grounds for concern about the background of many of those teaching.

Attempts to investigate this outside of parliament have met a brick wall as the universities involved have refused to disclose teaching materials, exam papers, and so on. Where these have been leaked the contents have been extremely alarming. I have also been contacted by individuals who have signed up for these university degrees – paying for them – and are extremely disappointed to find that instead of being taught about the science behind the alternative therapy, they are instead being taught a string of unevidenced claims by therapists whose practice is based on faith.

The issue is timely as public pressure is mounting following a series of leaks of exam and teaching materials which have been publicised in the media by myself and others. There are hearings being held in some universities, but generally in secret and there is little evidence of movement.

A hearing would bring these issues out into the open, and allow the evidence for these worrying and prevalent new academic practices to be discussed publicly so that a balanced view can be reached on the standards and principles behind these courses.

As witnesses I would suggest myself and Professor David Colquhoun of UCL, experts in evidence based medicine and basic scholarship (I can recommend), university heads and heads of department for the instutions where these courses are taught, individual tutors, and individual students, whose contacts I can give you, with their permission.

Many thanks,

Ben

I have just started reading “Bad Science” and I am extremely amused by its content. I think it is a fascinating read and should be a prescribed text for any aspiring scientists and the whole population, who have had a lack of exposure to scientific literacy.

I think all universities need a regulatory process that insures the main points wanted in science students and teachers are enforced. For example: posing to the United Nations that all school, in every country, implement scientific literacy as a goal for their graduating pupils. This would also entail universities and colleges cooperation in instructing prospective teaching staff, on how to use the syllabus, and develop their students in this form; because as it has been seen in Australia, where scientific literacy has been the goal of NSW syllabus for the whole 9 years of its instatement, teachers are still found that don’t know how to use the syllabus and who completely ignore the crucial aspects of it and insist on making their students learn the top 20 elements off by heart.

If you have reached thus far into my post then I congratulate and thankyou for taking the time to read my comments. I would like to end with one last point:

When I graduate and become a teacher, if I cannot teach my students anything I at least want them walking out of my class room being scientifically literate so they can contribute to society, actively get involved in discussions in a scientifically correct manner, and not be bamboozled by bad science.

how many people could we get to agree:) – to a declaration of bill of rights – of the human thought – creationist revolutionary to hard line straight as a darwin die progression hard – diversity?

- Correlation + cause
- Forming correct/incorrect conclusions from data (e.g. ice cream sales rise in the summer + cases of hay-fever rise in the summer = ice cream causes hay fever?)
- Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (science and ethics of)
- Planning experiments (understanding how control variables and sample size are important)
- Epidemiological studies (understanding that data are more reliable from a study with: more people, mixed race, mixed sex, wide age range etc)
- “Real difference” (a horrible term – but the idea is recognising that if two sets of data have values that overlap there is not a ‘real difference’ between them
- Placebo effect (blind and double blind trials)
- Vaccinations, vaccine policy, herd immunity (covering the science of vaccines but also the moral, social and financial issues of compulsory vaccination)

All students also do a “Case Study” which makes up 20% of their GCSE. They have to research a topic and weigh up evidence and arguments on both sides before discussing their own conclusion. We encourage them to chose one of the following in Biology:
Is the MMR vaccine safe?
Is there an obesity gene?
Is the British Government right to allow stem cell research?
Is pre-implantation genetic diagnosis ethical?
Is the new cervical cancer vaccination value for money?
Should smoking related lifestyle diseases be treated on the NHS?
Creation or evolution?

Students get marks for showing understanding of the science, finding evidence for both points of view, referencing where they found the information and commenting of how trustworthy each piece of evidence is (i.e. increased confidence if found in peer-reviewed journal) and deciding on their opinion based on all the evidence that they have found.

I hope you agree that all this is beginning to move things in the right direction. Words like “reliable, trustworthy, valid, accurate and precise” are becoming more and more prevalent in the syllabus content and in the exams too.

All is not lost.

It is common practice for NHS senior consultants to receive large payments from Pharmaceutical companies. Not just for directly promoting some product but by recommending treatment protocols which lead to a requirement for a product that is unnecessary, damaging to the patient’s health, career and family life and would not exist if they received the actual healthcare they needed. This is not as straightforward as simply saying “Everyone must take Statins no matter how bad the side effects or the fact it will probably only add a couple of months to your lifespan”, it’s also a case of withholding simple cheap cost effective treatment for well know diseases because they make way more money treating the symptoms than they do the cause. The fact that lives are ruined and it costs the NHS huge amounts of money that then can’t be used to treat other people bothers no one.

Simple, very cost effective treatments that people have used for decades are increasingly being withheld for no good medical reason and on no concrete evidence to the great harm of many hundreds of thousands of people and the only reason anyone can figure out is that by treating the symptoms instead of the cause a lot more drugs are sold.

Pharmaceutical companies pay for conferences, often somewhere sunny with good golf courses, pay money directly to consultants for “advice”, pay for research studies that tend to be skewed to the results they want and famously gloss over “adverse effects”, they have a huge influence over medical schools and the business in general. Senior consultants make huge amounts of money. Huge. This does not come from the NHS.

Treatment protocols are decided by self appointed “experts” who do not produce any actual evidence or work from unbiased studies but have the backing of many long standing networks that are basically old boys clubs who play the game. Many of them have fingers in so many pies it’s a wonder they have enough fingers. Editorships of influential journals (so they can dictate what is published, very important) seats on dozens of committees, various lectureships.

Medical training is also dictated by these same bodies. There is no independent body, uninfluenced by these institutions who are influenced by commercial gain, who can verify or arbitrate or protect patient care.

Any doctor brave enough to dissent on behalf of his patients is risking his entire career.

Metadata analysis, which can be angled to prove any point you want, feature heavily. Actual proper unbiased research is rarely available and any research that proves a counterpoint is completely ignored. In some instances you get senior policy making doctors doing a complete 180 turn on their own recommendations (which are really diktats which less powerful doctors dare not ignore) so that 10 years ago they were recommending sensible well researched treatments and diagnostic procedures and now they are far higher up the professional tree, they are demanding the complete opposite in the teeth of all the evidence and ignoring the justifiable protests of the patients affected.
What happened in between to change their minds is not explained.

In parts of America a law was passed that every doctor and every Pharmaceutical company had to declare money from any source. They are still having a hard time enforcing it but at least they are trying.
Drug reps have come out and said publicly that it was their job to target consultants in useful positions and offer them money and professional advancement, another key incentive for many, to promote the treatment protocols the company wanted to use to sell more drugs.

It is going to be very hard at this stage to rectify such a well entrenched and corrupt system but all our lives and our families health depends on the extent of the problem being recognised and dealt with. That’s you and your family too if you ever get ill.

All senior doctors and medical researchers should be banned by law from taking any personal payment or any form of professional advancement from pharmaceutical companies, their representatives or anyone other than their hospitals and private patients.

MP’s have to declare their interests to prevent exactly this sort of thing. Doctors are at least as powerful in their way and they are completely unregulated by any independent body. You cannot count the GMC, the BMA, the RCP or any of that lot because they are up to their eyes in it. They enforce the status quo.

Payment from the pharmaceutical industry to Universities should be preferably banned or at the very least properly overseen and situations such as the Actinel rent a researcher scandal at Sheffield: A should not be allowed to happen at all, and B if they do, should be dealt with heavily and with firings of the entire senior staff instead of ignored as it was that time simply because the UK has no form of enforcement that deals with this sort of corruption.

Simply propose a law to outlaw the payment of any moneys from any source other than their day job to doctors involved in the formulation of treatment protocols on the grounds that it undermines impartiality and lays them open to a charge of a risk of undue influence.
Then wait to see who starts kicking up a fuss and what their excuses are. If they are not getting money to influence them they why would they make a fuss?

This is a very serious problem that is kind of known about but everyone ignores unless they personally fall foul of it.

Please investigate as a matter of priority. Or as I say, just pass a law banning all doctors but most especially senior consultants and professors from taking any sort of payment or advancement from drug companies on pain of being struck off. Easy. If there is no problem then why should they complain? They got into medicine to help people didn’t they?
Not make money.

1) Foreign students bring in a lot of money.

2) Studying in the UK might lead to positive feelings about it among future movers and shakers in other countries.

3) At the undergraduate level, bringing in people who are enthusiastic enough to travel around the world for their studies tends to provide a boost to the overall mood of sessions etc., in my experience.

4) At the graduate level there’s even more to offer, since getting in the best and brightest of the world helps with research output and fosters future collaboration with research institutions.

5) What real terrorist threat is posed by a typical student, especially a graduate student, anyway? There are much easier ways to get into the country which don’t require going through a university application on top of a visa application.

I don’t know if this comes under the committee’s remit, but if they could be persuaded to quietly lobby for, fast-tracking student visa applications in general and graduate visa applications in particular, this could surely only be a good thing.

“The remit of the Committee mirrors that of the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills. Hence degrees (not A levels and GCSEs); and also scrutiny of the Government Office for Science.”

For conventional medicine, they have to be subjected to multi-million pound clinical trials, over several years, and must be demonstrably safe and effective before being allowed near the general public.

For Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Treatment, you can get your certification from OfQuack for £45 and the cost of an insurance policy.

(Insert obligatory link to my Number 10 petition here: petitons.number10.gov.uk/CNHCsafety.)

Also, I think that those who are carrying out research should be encouraged to improve their communication skills – to explain their research in simple terms, to try and help it be interpreted in the correct way. I know there is a lot of intentional interpretation from journalists and the media, but researchers could do with using more ‘plain English’ summaries to explain their work. Perhaps communication skills could be something that is taught at universities, for those that want to disseminate their work more widely.

As one attending such a wooniversity on such a course I can say I am universally challenged by the woeful lack of science and the promulgation of pseudoscience, non-science and even antiscience. If you want any lecture notes Ben for evidence just shout!

I am fighting from within but it is a lonely battle.

I agree with Ben that evidence-based medicine is not that difficult to
understand as people perhaps think. I believe that most people are capable
of understanding complicated things if you know how to explain. Also, the
ethical question of freedom of speech etc. put aside for a moment, silencing
quacks would just reinforce the conspiracy theories (“You see, they ARE
being paid by BigPharma”).

On the other hand, it is a very long process and calj is right, people do
often say, “Homeopathy must work if there are homeopathic hospitals”. As far
as they are concerned, they are getting conflicting messages.

Do you know, Ben, what percentage of the population live their life thinking
that that “flu and cold remedies” are something special that really work on
their symptoms? You tell them it is the same paracetamol that they take for
their headaches plus some decongestant stuff, and they will have the shock
of the week. Maybe you spend your life among highly educated people, but
most people don’t tend to have degrees or, sadly, even basic literacy
skills, and they trust us, the educated ones to make some of their
decisions for them. Yes, we shouldn’t write them off because then they will
stay that way!, so you keep up your work.
But what are we going to do in the meantime?, just allow them not to
vaccinate their children, or not to give them their asthma medicine because
their quack has told them it has “chemicals” in it? While for us it is just
annoying, the fact that people will die of illnesses they shouldn’t is a
TRAGEDY, and the line has to be drawn somewhere.

I’ll echo Andy Graham here and admit that very little of this was apparent to me during my Science B.Sc. or even in the early years of my Ph.D.

It’s a nice idea, but the majority of the population will simply never have an understanding of the scientific method. Nor will they bother to read science books or blogs. It needn’t and shouldn’t place them at a disadvantage when it comes to their health.

evidence based medicine, the story of how we know what we know, is interesting and beautiful, and easy to understand, and a crucial life skill. there’s nothing complicated about the stuff on this site, there’s nothing complicated about the stuff in the book, and what’s more, i slightly suspect – although i wouldn’t necessarily recommend trying it, and i’m not using it to big-up the book, but as an illustration of how easy these things are – that the book would get you a pass on most undergraduate medical epidemiology courses.

you cannot regulate or legislate for foolish utterances by bigots, fantasists and bores, free speech is far too important for that. these are battles that must be won in culture, but more than that, there is pleasure in doing so. let the mainstream media spread nonsense, this is a time of autonomous publishing, where blogs, the NHS Choices website (which is okay, you know, especially Behind the Headlines), and more can act as parallel sources of both information and intellectual nourishment.

god that got a bit stirring, my mate john’s arrived, better go

great suggestions btw

It isn’t the responsibility of the individual to understand how or why a drug has been passed as safe and effective. All he needs to know is that it IS safe and effective. With conventional medicine he can be fairly sure that this is the case. However, because quackery is both unregulated and promoted widely, the patient who makes the assumption that “homeopathy wouldn’t be legal if it didn’t work” is at a real disadvantage.

There will always be people who will fall for quackery and MMR scaremongering. Education can only go so far, and where it stops we need legislation.