Holford Watch: Patrick Holford, nutritionism and bad science

Patrick Holford brings out the lyrical in people. In an overview of his work, Mike Stanton discusses Patrick Holford and his striking similarity to the father of Felix Holt.

Patrick Holford would be proud. He is a great believer in bran. Unfortunately, like Holt’s father, he is also a great believer in pills and elixirs and cures for cancer. In fact Holford thinks he can cure most things including cancer, diabetes, heart disease, alzheimers, arthritis and, of course, autism – hence my interest. And once you are cured he promises to give you beautiful skin and improve your sex life as well!

Patrick Holford raises many intriguing possibilities. Maybe he is a candidate for a contemporary Doctor Knock. Knock: a study in medical cynicism.

French literature has shown an enduring fascination with the social figure of the doctor. In Jules Romains’ amusing play Knock (1922), and in its later film version (1951), the doctor as deceiver returns to centrestage with a flourish. Molière’s seventeenth-century figures were mostly quacks and mountebanks; Knock is something new: he is a health messiah. By enforcing a mental and social hygiene based on fear, Knock brings a small rural population under his sway. Insouciance is banished by artful consciousness-raising. A society mobilises under the banner of medicine. But who is Dr Knock? [My emphasis.]

Anyone who has looked through Patrick Holford’s many websites or taken his health questionnaires might have a shiver of recognition when they read about Knock’s thesis:

Sur les Prétendus états de Santé (On Imaginary States of Health), with an epigraph from Claude Bernard: Les gens bien portants sont des malades qui s’ignorent. Well people are sick people who simply don’t know it—yet.

Of course, there is a pharmacist in the play that Dr Knock has to win round to his ways. Patrick Holford seems to have dispensed with the need for this character by obtaining patents for his own formulations and distributing supplements via his own outlets.

While flattering Mousquet, the only chemist in town, Knock astutely promises to triple his income within a year. Besides, aren’t they partners in the great fight against disease? When Mousquet points out that people have to fall ill first, Knock retorts with a policy statement: “`Fall ill’—that’s an old-fashioned idea! It has been completely overhauled by modern scientific medicine. Health is a word which could just as well be struck from the dictionary. What I see are people variously affected by a various number of diseases of varying virulence. Of course, if you insist on telling them they’re well, they’ll be only too happy to believe you. But you’re leading them on. Your only excuse can be that you already have too many patients to take on new ones.”

Anybody who has read an article by Patrick Holford in which they are recommended to take multiple tests and consider extensive supplementation might see strong resemblances to Doctor Knock. It will be interesting to see what other literary allusions or otherwise Patrick Holford brings out in other bloggers and commentators.