Entries from January 2008
Today, the ASA have ruled against Health Products for Life (HPFL): a supplement company that Professor Patrick Holford (Head of Science and Education at Biocare) sold to Biocare, and which has a website - and sells pills - with a picture of Holford’s face on. Holford is beginning to amass a collection of ASA rulings both for his own offerings and those for products that he endorses. (more…)
Categories: ASA · IgG tests · food intolerance · health · health products for life · patrick holford · yorktest
Tagged: food intolerance, IgG, health, food allergies, Holford & Associates, 100% Health, Substantiation, Truthfulness, self-testing kit
Prof Patrick Holford of Teesside University presents himself as an expert in mental health and nutrition, and a number of bona fide mental health charities - including Mind - are affiliated with his Food for the Brain charity. I was therefore surprised to hear Holford on BBC London, referring to a schizophrenic client as “crazy” which is rather a culturally-loaded term. A valued correspondent then informed me that the same term is used on the Food for the Brain website. I find this quite surprising - ‘crazy’ is a rather offensive way to describe schizophrenic people, and a pretty unproductive diagnostic or descriptive term.
First to the BBC interview: Holford states that he “worked with one girl, she was schizophrenic…and she was crazy and she’d seen many counsellors”. (more…)
Categories: Food for the brain · patrick holford
Tagged: Mental Health, Mind, Schizophrenia
A quick break from your usual Holford coverage, to note how excited I was when I saw Wynford Dore claiming a number of breakthroughs in understanding and treating of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). However, when I followed the link he gave - expecting to find an article in a journal like Nature Neuroscience or The Lancet - I found an article in, um, that well-known medical journal The Leamington Courier. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with local papers - but they’re not peer-reviewed, and not exactly where one expects to break the news of one’s great research achievements.
Naturally, an article in a local paper doesn’t give the detail that one would want about methodology etc. However, among other things, The Leamington Courier notes that only 56 children with diagnoses of ASD (or, as The Courier tactfully puts it “diagnosed as suffering from autism”) have been through the programme. (more…)
Categories: Dore · autism · autistic spectrum disorders
A short break from Patrick Holford coverage, to report that the Quackometer’s host has been sent a wonderfully entertaining e-mail on behalf of ‘Professor Dr’ Joseph Chikelue Obi: demanding that Netcetera
immediately shut down the website and delete all of the defamatory material relating to the Royal College of Alternative Medicine, Professor Dr Obi and our clients` lawfully registered Trademarks.
It’s impossible to read this e-mail without picturing someone sticking their little finger in their mouth and stroking a fluffy cat.
Worryingly, though, both the Quackometer’s hosts and Google appear to have taken this nonsense seriously (more…)
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: free speech, freedom of speech, Joseph Chikelue Obi, quackometer, scepticism, skepticism
