Holford Watch: Patrick Holford, nutritionism and bad science

Skeptic’s Circle #65 is now up at the excellent Neurologica blog. This circle is taking place in a museum, with Steven Novella serving as your knowledgeable guide. “The room was filled with that odd combination of excitement, interest and restlessness that accompanies children forced to walk through a museum”, but there was plenty to hold their attention.

Holford Watch is delighted to see that Patrick Holford is now getting the attention that he deserves: Novella has announced that Holford is “so busy cranking out the pseudoscience he gets his own display.” However, I don’t see visitors spending all that long watching Holford’s display - there are many more interesting things in the museum.

Those who are interested in food might first be drawn to a table laden with fruit and vegetables, used to illustrate why the Feingold diet is not an effective treatment for ADHD.  There’s also a wonderful bronze dog on display - and with it a good description of doggerel and how that can be used in pseudoscientific rhetoric. There is a new exhibit on sleep paralysis and ‘alien abduction’, too (sorry kids, no alien bodies to see). If you look closely, you can also see a plaque - commemorating the day when the Breath Spa for Kids blog took the British Medical Journal to task for its shoddy use of figures.

Registered Nurse Sandy Szwarc can be found curled up in a corner of the storeroom, howling eloquently in despair at what junk science is doing to her profession:

My state Nursing Association has become an official accredited approver of continuing educational courses for nurses to maintain their licenses. I just received this quarter’s educational offerings and I can receive 87.7 course hours of credit for classes on Chi Nei Tsang, Energy Medicine, Reiki certification, a Meditation specialty, and Homeopathy for the “whole” family. In contrast, a mere six hours is offered for emergency medicine and 16 hours for neonatal perinatal medicine.

I don’t mean to scare patients and their families. It would be disturbing to be lying in an intensive care bed or about to be rolled into surgery and learn that this is the sort of education one’s nurse had received, let alone believed.

Finally, the children file past an exhibit which looks only half-finished. There’s a big display on Andrew Wakefield’s research and ethics. As the kids walk past, they see Orac arguing with the curator - Orac can’t believe that anyone still takes Wakefield seriously enough for him to be in the museum:

First came the news in late December that at the time he did his “research” that purported to show a link between the MMR triple vaccination and autism and bowel problems, Dr. Wakefield was in the pay of lawyers looking to sue for “vaccination injury” and failed to disclose his clear conflict of interest…More recently, his reputation took an even nastier pummeling during the Autism Omnibus hearings in Washington, D.C. Dr. Stephen Bustin, a world expert on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), particularly quantitative PCR, explained in gory detail how the laboratory that Wakefield used to measure measles virus RNA sequences from the colon biopsies of autistic children used such shoddy technique and failed to use proper controls that it was very clear that the measles virus RNA that Wakefield claimed to have detected in the colon biopsy specimens was in reality due to widespread contamination of the laboratory with plasmid containing measles sequences. Worse for Wakefield, Dr. Nicholas Chadwick testified that in every case in which he detected measles sequences by PCR, sequencing the product revealed that it was the same as the laboratory strain and didn’t match up with any known natural or vaccine strains of measles and that all the specimens that he tested were either negative for measles virus or turned out to be false positives. Worse still, he testified that he informed Dr. Wakefield of his results. If the combination of Wakefield’s conflict of interest, unethical conduct, shoddy science, and reporting of results that one of his underlings had shown to be incorrect aren’t enough to destroy his credibility forever, I don’t know what is.

However, as the children file away it looks like the curator is winning the argument, and Wakefield will get his place in the museum: at least part of his credibility will be preserved. Thinking about the effects of declining vaccination rates, one of the children starts to cry.