The evidence? They link to those sites from the Links page of their own website.

Of course, Alex Jones’ lot have pounced on it like an endorsement from the Queen or something.

Is this a cause for concern? Well, no. Muse, like many other bands, have a reputation for being eccentrics. The page is pretty well hidden and not immediately accessible from their front page. Also, it doesn’t exactly jump out at you, the links are merely entitled “Red Pill” (a reference to a scene from the Matrix). In my opinion, it’s nothing to worry about so far, but let’s see what Muse do next.

I’m most looking forward to the visit of Eugenie C Scott. In case you need telling, she is the Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) over in the States, the author of this fantastic introduction to the evolution/creationism “controversy”, and she has been at the forefront of the science versus religion battle for decades. She is an excellent speaker, and many videos of her talks are available on youtube.

Also announced are Jon Ronson, the man behind “The Men Who Stare At Goats” (and not responsible for the propagation of the dreadful song “Valerie”), science documentary maker Jim Al-Khalili, psychology Professor Bruce Hood, and “Science of Scams” co-host Kat Akingbade. The event will be compared by George Hrab.

The QED conference (which I’m already nicknaming “Smugfest”) will run from February 5th-6th at the Manchester Ramada Piccadilly. Tickets are only £99, or just £75 for students. Less than half the price of TAM London tickets, and no comic books in sight!

I’m so excited by this, if I wasn’t at work I’d be doing a little leprechaun dance!

Special thanks to the people who took me out for a curry afterwards. Cheers!

I’ll put some pics up when I get them.

How many loonies can you spot? I’m pretty sure David Icke is in there (if you are going to sample someone talking about lizard men, it’s got to be David Icke) along with Alex Jones (he mentions infowar), but if you can fill me in on the rest, please let me know in the comments!

Big props to Gavin for cutting out most of my “ummms” and “errrs”!

If you’ve got any comments on the show, please leave them on the Just Skeptics website, the GM Skeptics website, or on this very blogpost.

The show can be listened to here, and is available on iTunes. Just search for “Just Skeptics”.

By the way, if any Adam and Joe fans recognize my sign off, you know what to do!

The response is being discussed in the media, and last night our own Michael Marshall from the Merseyside Skeptics Society and 10:23 campaign appeared on BBC Radio 5Live (1:48 in). He was joined by presenter Tony Livesey, and not one, but two homeopaths: Dr Brian Kaplan, a medical doctor and fellow of the Faculty of Homeopathy, and Mary English, a “qualified homeopath”.

Brian Kaplan came across as rabid, massively overplaying the government’s decision on homeopathy. Mary English seemed nice and polite, but as expected she only bought anecdotal evidence to the table. The debate felt unbalanced, even for the BBC’s standards, and seemed like an ambush, although Marsh did well to keep a level head and put across his points calmly and succinctly. To be fair, the first two callers made good points about the studies of the efficaciousness of homeopathy. However, support for homeopathy was taken from a couple of callers, who again could only come up with anecdotal evidence.

Which brings me to my first issue: why don’t the BBC train their presenters in the basics of critical thinking? For example, you do not counter systematic studies and randomized double-blinded controlled trials with a couple of personal anecdotes! The presenter, Tony Livesey, actually said “That wasn’t an anecdote, that really happened!” when Marsh pointed out that a caller’s story about his daughter’s experience with homeopathy was an anecdote. Is it unreasonable to expect a BBC presenter to know what an anecdote is? He also seemed impressed by authority, noting that Brian Kaplan is a medical doctor, and accepting that Mary English had trained in homeopathy for five years. In my opinion, the qualifications of the debater are irrelevant, bullshit is still bullshit. If you ever hear me saying anything like “Trust me, I’ve got a PhD”, then please shoot me.

My second point is to do with the BBC’s obsession with ‘balance’. Now, balance is fine if you are discussing something subjective like an art exhibition or Mel Gibson’s latest crap film, but when discussing scientific issues, things are different.  Science should be recognized and discussed by people who have at least a modicum of scientific understanding, not pseudoscientists with vested interests. If the BBC were discussing the rights and wrongs of murder, would they have the Prime Minister squaring up to Peter Sutcliffe? Would you see the head of the NSPCC discussing the merits of child abuse with a catholic priest? I think not. Sort it out BBC!

Tony Livesey: well meaning, but could do with a little scientific training

The MSS are a highly socialable, friendly bunch, and I was lucky enough to sit right next to David Aaronovich before his talk, where he was kind enough to share a few anecdotes with us over a beer. When the event itself started, MSS President Mike Hall gave Mr Aaronovich a warm humorous welcome, although he seamed more concerned about the welfare of David’s brother Ben Aaronovich, a scriptwriter for Dr Who!

David’s talk was engaging and passionate, as he effortlessly explored the conspiracy theories in his book Voodoo Histories, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the death of Princess Diana, and of course 9/11. Each one was skillfully demolished in turn, and it was a joy to hear his thoughts on the mindset of people who cling to such ludicrous beliefs such as “9/11 truth”. I could have listened for hours, but sadly due to time constraints host of InKredulous Andy Wilson had the unenviable job of cutting him off!

Copies of Voodoo Histories were available at a discount (bargain!) during the interval. I bought a copy, and David was kind enough to sign mine “To Dr Tom!”. Fortunately, someone was around to capture the meeting on camera.

Myself and David Aaronovich (photo from Andy Wilson)

The second half was a Q and A, although each question seemed like a valid excuse to hear more of David’s entertaining thoughts on conspiracy theories. I asked a question on the irreversible mindsets of conspiracy theorists and skeptics, but before I was handed the microphone Mike Hall was kind enough to congratulate me on my PhD graduation! I was touched! Dr Who?

To conclude the evening, and in keeping with the jovial atmosphere, Mike Hall got David to sign one of his brother Ben’s Dr Who books, which was a lovely little moment. After much more chatting and a few drinks, the night was over, everyone I met went home very chuffed. It felt like another step forward for the skeptic cause on Merseyside.

Forthcoming talks look very promising, with August seeing MSS President Mike Hall giving a talk on God, before Dr Evan Harris turns up in September. These events (and the skeptic socials in Dr Duncan’s) are always great fun, and it feels like there is a real skeptic community in Liverpool now. If you see me there, be sure to say hello!

David Aaronovitch signs Mike Hall's Dr Who book (photo from Andy Wilson)

That, and the diploma mill she went to corresponded with has announced it will shut down. Happy days.

Plenty of people have written excellent blogs about this:

• Ben Goldacre (obviously)
• BoingBoing
• David Naylor
• Tom Chivers in the Telegraph
• zenbuffy.com

Brian Cox and Joachim Loew: seperated at birth? Er, no.

I’ve a heard a few times on Twitter that the manager of the German football team, Joachim Loew, looks a bit like Professor Brian Cox, particle physicist and documentary maker extraordinaire. I’ve wedged them together for the hell of it.

Surprisingly, I found getting two pictures of these men making the same expression to be almost as difficult as squaring the circle. Brian Cox is nearly always grinning from ear to ear like a cheeky schoolboy, whilst Joachim Loew invariably has the stern face of the stereotypically professional efficient German.

Maybe Loew will have a smile on his face come Sunday?

The article itself is a story from Katie Fraser, and it details her symptoms following a trip to the Soloman Islands.  She claims she took anti-malarial drugs everyday, and also used a mosquito net and repellent spray, yet still caught malaria. The take-home message appears to be “don’t bother with antimalarials, they didn’t work for me”, but it’s also got a whiff of “don’t trust doctors” about it, as she was misdiagnosed as having flu three times.

People tend to be curious about diseases when a celebrity catches them, so why on earth have the BBC deemed it necessary to publish and promote an unfortunate, individual scare story? The article does NOT stress the importance of antimalarials when traveling abroad, and in my opinion publishing it is dangerous. Any neutral could come away thinking “antimalarials don’t work, so why bother?”.

If you feel like I do and want to complain to the BBC, you can do so here. You’ll need the full URL of the article, which is http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/10522909.stm. Thanks.

The article in question is on natural male contraception. One recommendation is to eat papaya seeds, which apparently affects the infertility of rats and rabbits. I’ve no idea if a study has been done on humans, but it seems like a breeze compared to the other option: dangle your testicles in 116 °F (46°C) water (just below the pain threshold, supposedly) for 45 minutes a day every day for 21 days. This should keep you sperm-free for 6 months.

Now, I’ve got so many questions. Firstly, where is the evidence that this works? Did someone carry out experiments to determine the optimal time and temperature, or did Kim Evans (the author) just make it up for a laugh?

Second, what exactly is the technique involved? Can you boil the kettle, fill a teacup with hot water, wait until it cools to the right temperature, then squat over it naked whilst holding your old chap out of the way? How do you maintain the temperature of the water? With an industrial waterbath? Also, what are you supposed to do for 45 minutes? Listen to music? Read a book? Hope the dog doesn’t wander in?

Third, how would this be introduced into a relationship? I can picture the scene: a girlfriend is cuddling with her boyfriend on the sofa, she’s surfing the net. “Look what I’ve found on naturalnews.com darling!”.

Insane. What’s wrong with condoms or the pill?

Dear Sir / Madam,

I am interested in building my own repository of homeopathic medication for my own personal use. I believe 100 of your homeopathic products will cover every known ailment.

As your homeopathic products are £4.99 each, 100 products would cost £500 (rounded up). However, I wish to pay for these products homeopathically. Therefore, I wish to pay with a 2C version of £500, which is 5 pence. According to the law of infinitesimals, 5 pence is far stronger than the original £500 pounds. In addition to this, I will succuss my cheque book against a leather Bible.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

Thankfully, Merseyside Skeptic’s Society co-founder Michael Marshall was bought in towards the end of the discussion to give the skeptic’s point of view. In the limited time available, I thought Marsh did very well, especially to introduce the “secondary placebo” effect to explain the effect of homeopathy on dogs.

From a personal perspective, I thought it was good to hear my own email broadcast. (I’m such a media whore wannabe). I gave three reasons why people may feel better after taking homeopathy:

1. They were going to get better anyway.
2. They were experiencing the placebo effect (or a secondary placebo effect in the case of dogs).
3. If they were taking homeopathy as a ‘complementary’ medicine, the conventional medicine may have been working.

There is also one aspect of the homeopathy argument that really bugs me: homeopathy supporters claim that the estimated £10 million per year the NHS spends on homeopathy “isn’t that much”. Well, if that’s the case, could I have £10 million from the NHS budget every year? If it’s not that much…

The whole BBC Radio Leeds Liz Green program is available here (homeopathy discussed towards the end of the show, Michael Marshall’s appearance and my email from about 1 hour 30 minutes onwards).

Now that the dust has settled on this new parliament, David Tredinnick is back to his old tricks in a big way. Not content with EDM 908, he has tabled an additional four (yes, four) EDMs. Each one offers a smidgen of support to homeopathy:

EDM 284 expresses concern about the British Medical Association’s recent motions concerning homeopathy. EDM 285 welcomes the publication of a paper in the Journal of Oncology, which appears to show that some cancer cells can be killed by homeopathic preparations (which of course, isn’t the case). EDM 286 similarly welcomes a Brazilian study on homeopathic antidepressants, while EDM 287 welcomes yet another study, this time from South Africa on homeopathic insomnia treatments.

Of course, each EDM from David Tredinnick contains factual inaccuracies and references to poorly controlled studies. To point these errors out, step forward Dr Julian Huppert MP of the Liberal Democrats  (who else?). Julian has tabled an amendment for each of Tredinnick’s EDMs, correcting each of David Tredinnick’s mistakes.

So now we have another tool for quickly judging the scientific competency of our MPs. With EDM 908 it was simple: if they signed it, they were an idiot. Now, if your MP signs EDMs 284-287 in their original forms then they are an idiot, but if they sign the amended forms then they are showing some respect for science and evidence based policy.

I would advise you to write to your MP to ask them to sign EDM 284A1-287A1. They can be found and contacted via the site www.theyworkforyou.com, and the Merseyside Skeptic Society have written a template to make things a little easier. Hopefully together we can put a stop to David Tredinnick’s quackery nonsense.

Recently I found that Michael Marshall (aka ‘Marsh’) of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, host of the Righteous Indignation and Skeptics With A K podcasts, has a history with Joe Power. When Marsh challenged Joe Power to the James Randi million dollar challenge, Power went on the offensive, comparing all skeptics to paedophiles.

Well, it seems that Joe Power is now making frivolous complaints to the police about Marsh, based on so-called “threats” on the MSS Facebook group.  In response, Marsh has written a very nice history of Joe Power, including his shameful involvements in the cases of Madeline McCann and Shannon Mathews. Enjoy.

So, imagine my surprise when I heard of a peer-reviewed paper supporting acupuncture appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience. The paper, entitled “Adenosine A1 receptors mediate local anti-nociceptive effects of acupuncture”, is the work of Nanna Goldman, Maiken Nedergaard et al, and it comes out of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester. At first glance, it would appear to be a cohesive piece of literature that supports the practice of acupuncture. But does it stand up to closer inspection?

Well, no. As others have already pointed out, the methodology does not support the conclusion. In this study, the authors follow the levels of adenosine nucleotides (ATP, ADP and AMP) after acupuncture is applied to mice. They find the levels peak after 30 minutes, returning to pre-acupuncture levels after about 90 minutes (see Figure 1 of the paper). What can be drawn from this? We can certainly say that this is evidence that acupuncture leads to an increase in adenosine nucleotides, but is this a mechanism for acupuncture, or is this just what happens when a mouse has a needle stuck in it’s leg?

This is my main problem with this study: a lack of controls. The authors appear to induce pain with acupuncture, rather than use acupuncture as a method for treating pain. This first experiment should have been repeated with a non-acupuncture method of causing pain, or they should have put the needle somewhere other than the ‘Zusanli point’, supposedly the most effective acupuncture point on the body.

So, in my mind the authors have not established a mechanism for acupunture, they have merely shown what happens in terms of adenosine levels when acupuncture is applied to a mouse. Their summary of the evidence for the efficacy for acupuncture is also rather worrying. They don’t cite any actual studies, but use the positions of various organisations to justify acupuncture. According to the authors, the tax status of the treatment (recognised by the IRS) is “most telling”.

Let’s look at the bigger picture. What do we know about the authors? To be honest, I expected hundreds of adverts for acupuncture clinics to pop up from a quick Google search of the authors. That didn’t happen, but I did notice something fairly unusual: the two most important contributors, Maiken Nedergaard and Nanna Goldman (the first and last contributers are always the most important) are mother and daughter. Although it’s not uncommon for parents and their children to be involved in academia together, my suspicions were raised. I then learned that Maiken Nedergaard and her husband Steven Goldman’s eldest child was 19 in 2009. This means that Nanna Goldman is at most 20 years old, which is very young to be publishing in a Nature journal. Added to this, Steven Goldman is currently Chairman of the Department of Neurology at the University of Rochester, and he works together with his wife as co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine, also at the University of Rochester.

So, this paper is the work of a 20-year old researcher, with her mother as a supervisor, and her father as joint head of department. Now, I really don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I would love to know who the anonymous reviewers for this paper were. Time will tell on this, but I really don’t think this supports acupuncture at all.

It promises to be a skeptical extravaganza not to be missed! I shall be there, if you recognise me (unlikely, but you never know), please say hello, I won’t bite! I may try and promote the blog in some way, but I’m much more interested in learning what others have to say and having a good time.

I trust that tickets are selling fast, you can get that at tamlondon.org. A ticket for the two days is just over two hundred pounds, but I understand concessions are available for students and the unemployed.

Stop press: I’ve just been informed that Graham Linehan has been added to the bill. He is one of the writers of Father Ted, and is a comedy hero of mine. If they just added Chris Morris to the bill it would be perfect!

http://www.feedyourself.co.uk/wakefield.html

Many are deliriously happy about this decision, but why? I believe this case shows a doctor drunk on power and greed, and the further you dig the uglier it gets.

Let’s be clear on this: Wakefield has not been punished just for suggesting a link between MMR and autism. His crimes are numerous:

1. He was paid money from the Legal Aid Board (taxpayers money) to investigate a link between MMR and autism. He did not declare this conflict of interest to the Lancet when he wrote the 1998 paper.
2. He patented a measles vaccine (referred to as Transfer Factor), which could only succeed if MMR was deemed to be dangerous. Again, he did not declare this to the Lancet. If that wasn’t bad enough, the father of one of the children in the Lancet study was the Managing Director of the company that made Transfer Factor.
3. He infamously paid children for blood samples at a birthday party, and joked about it in a presentation. This is the origin of the phrase ‘callous disregard’, a phrase used by the GMC to describe Wakefield’s attitude to the pain and sufering he caused to the children at the party.
4. He published an extremely shoddy piece of research (the 1998 Lancet paper) knowing full well it would cause panic about the MMR vaccine.
5. Worst of all, he conducted invasive procedures on vulnerable children without the consent of an ethics committee. This is by far the most serious charge, and (I hate to invoke Godwin’s law here) puts him on a par with the doctors who experimented on children in Nazi concentration camps. The procedures included colonoscopies (inserting a camera into the rectum, which caused bowel perforations in one of the children), barium meals (exposing the children to unnecessary levels of radiation) and lumbar punctures (inserting a long needle into a patients spine to collect cerebrospinal fluid).

His striking off will come as no surprise, as he hasn’t practiced in the UK for many years. So, what will Wakefield do next? His only supporters are the lunatics in the antivax community, and sadly they have quite a lot of money. I hate to promote it, but he has written a book about the whole affair. It’s called “Callous Disregard”, and features a forward by everyone’s favourite Playboy playmate and all-round loudmouth Jenny McCarthy.

Wakefield’s chances of getting a job in a respectable medical establishment are practically zero, and his shot reputation has had an unexpected benefit for anyone who wants to vent their spleen: you can say pretty much anything about him. He tried to sue Brian Deer, the journalist who exposed him, before later admitting defeat and paying Deer compensation. Future articles on him should be interesting.

In conclusion, I’m hoping his appeal is short-lived, and this sorry episode is finally put to bed. Sadly, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of him.

Twat