Making judgment just by reading the L4L website and not trying to see whether there is some truth in the whole thing is truly irresponsible.
I wonder do they know how much damage they made to this highly successful healing method which produced many fantastic health results. Not just with MS people but with many other incurable health disorders.

Just by having freedom of speech and modern communication methods does not mean that you can attack everything around you without taking any moral consequences.

I suggest that people from Holford Watch give a call to L4L and ask phone numbers of 5-10 people who can directly give testimonials about their results. They will be very glad to do that because they are very clear how they get their results.

This is real. Everything else is just philosophy.

And if you still care to be a voice of the truth you would publish these testimonials on your websites.

But Im afraid that HW does not care about truth.

Being negative attracts more readers. Who want to read positive news?!

Sad but true.

But luckily organizations like L4L will continue to bring light on this planet.

And it will get stronger.

If Life’s 4 Living wish to know whether I am involved Holfordwatch then they need only ask. I am not.

For the record, I also have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the activities of Life’s 4 Living.

I contacted them in passing, simply because I am writing about the regulation of alternative therapies, which will doubtless be a big story this year. The Barefoot Doctor, Stephen Russell, has acknowledged having sex with former patients. This is the kind of activity which regulators are involved in offering guidance on, and I simply asked what steps L4L took to review the issue when they began to work with him, in the absence of a formal framework regulating his profession.

So far the only response from Life’s 4 Living has been, confusingly, to deny that it is even an issue, and to state twice that Russell has no patient contact through their organisation.

This is despite announcing that they are making a film in which they will be sending a group of 10 children 5 – 21 years old to China for 3 months accompanied by Stephen Russell.

http://www.lifes4living.org/documents/The-Lifes-4-Living-Film.pdf

I should be clear that I have absolutely no view on whether this is problematic. I was simply asking what mechanisms they had in place, what discussions took place before making the decision, and so on.

I can only say I’m very surprised to see how this has progressed.

B

http://www.lifes4living.org/documents/The-Lifes-4-Living-Film.pdf
Life’s 4 Living – The Film
Creation Film & TV create a powerful documentary called Life’s 4 Living.
Accompanied by the Barefoot Doctor (AKA Stephen Russell), the film
follows a group of ten children and young adults, aged between 5-21
years old, who suffer from severe illness or disability that is beyond
current medical assistance, on a journey of healing and discovery.
This journey will take them all the way to China where they will spend
up to 3 months experiencing the ancient healing arts of World-Leading
Masters.

However, that’s not what you are doing.

Reading the blogs linked to from your main page suggests that you aren’t sticking to things to ‘improve the quality of life’.
This was written by the mother of a child on one of your blogs:

My understanding of illness and disability is quite different to Life’s 4 Living – I am proud of Joseph and what he achieves – I see him as different but not sick. At the end of the first day I wondered if I had made a big mistake in coming – I had come a long way to be told my beautiful child’s negative energy smelled so bad that the doors of the room had to be opened and for other children to laugh at him when all he wanted to do was play with them.

That is appalling, and if it happened in the UK I would expect any organisation working with vulnerable children to immediately stop working with the people concerned, and to look at disciplinary procedures or striking off the practitioner involved. I’d like to know what you have done about this person to prevent a repeat of such an appalling statement, please? The reference is there on your own website, here: http://lifes4living.org/blog/?cat=4 (bottom of page).

Elsewhere on Youtube, and on the blogs linked to from your site, it is quite clear that parents & children are being taken off their medication, including asthma prevention (potentially fatal) and pain relief: ‘My mum was getting painful attacks in her legs for a few nights now I wake up and hear her moaning and groaning with pain. But she didn’t take her medication.’

People are being led to believe that: ‘Energy can cure any diseases.’

This is a far cry from using complementary therapies simply to improve quality of life, as most of your website would suggest. Indeed, in the cases on your blog I would go so far as to suggest that some of the things people were told have reduced their quality of life.

The idea behind your charity seems to be a good one, but the application of it horribly misguided.

“We wondered basically, with the advances in technology, whether you could get the complete indulgence of a massage or the real rejuvenation and relaxation of a meditation session or the real cleansing and de-toxification of a yoga class … could you actually do that via modern methods of communication? Because that was the whole ethos of our organization: taking techniques that were developed over 5000 years and could you deliver the energy through the phone or through a computer? That was the question we wanted to investigate.”

And what an amazing investigation that was.

We’ll look forward to a refutation of these points in your future posts, but you certainly haven’t demonstrated this here. If you feel that everything we’re saying it wrong – it isn’t – then it’s a shame you concentrated on boring ad hominem arguments instead of more substantive points.

This site is one of the strangest I have ever seen.

You haven’t seen much of the Internet, then, I’m guessing.

It is therefore a good idea to take some time to examine the secrecy of Holfordwatch more closely. On the web-site, in the section entitled, ‘About Us’, it states: “We’re not oversharing on biographical details….because we find it distracts from a critique of the science and ideas.” This is bizarre. Exactly how putting a name to Holfordwatch’s malicious gossip would be distracting is not explained. Indeed, in over twenty years of being in journalism and around reporters I have never heard this argument made before. Following the logic of Holforwatch’s reasoning, academic journals would refuse to include the names of the authors of learned papers in case they ‘distracted’ from any ‘critique’ of the science. This is nonsense, designed, as far as I can see, to provide a flimsy cover for a lack of transparency.

We’re neither professionals nor journalists – we don’t get paid for doing this, and would rather avoid tedious ad hominem arguments about our personalities. Anonymous blogging isn’t exactly anything new, and readers are free to either engage with our ideas, or not. By the way, it’s still common practice for journals to anonymise papers prior to peer review.

It all makes you wonder what exactly Holfordwatch is afraid of.

Well, it goes with the territory, but we do get the occasional outbreak of cyberstalking and threat of violence and/or death. Nothing we take that seriously – but we don’t think our identities are particularly relevent, and this is another disincentive to giving them out.

the whole enterprise smacks of disproportionate prejudice on a monumental scale.

For example? – where do we say something that’s inaccurate. I find this especially daft coming from a supporter of a charity which claims that all Chinese people – the whole billion of them? – back traditional chinese medicine?

Holfordwatch is in some way connected to Ben Goldacre

We like Ben’s work, if that’s what you mean. He doesn’t write, edit, run or own this blog. As for using the term ‘bad science’ – it’s not exactly patented (or original to Ben) and I’m sure Ben would not object to its use. By the way, is ‘Life’s 4 Living’ an original name?

Holfordwatch feels free to assert, without any supporting evidence, that Russell’s explanation for them is “less than exculpatory.”…Is Holfordwatch saying that helping to raise funds for a good cause is wrong?

Russell himself admits having sex with former patients. This is certainly a ‘less than exculpatory’ response to the allegations that were made – frankly, I think we were rather polite here.

The Barefoot Doctor is not and never has been in contact with any of those people whom Life’s 4 Living Trust helps in its charitable works, be they vulnerable or otherwise…the author completely misunderstands the involvement of Stephen Russell, whose role is clearly restricted to accompanying (i.e. helping with) the making of a film of the trip. It was never envisaged that Russell would be directly involved with the patients. And the proof of this is that Russell never met any of the individuals concerned. Had Holfordwatch followed normal journalistic practice and asked the charity to explain its position, it would have been made aware of the true situation. Instead it failed to seek any answers and simply went ahead and assumed its own view. Or at least we think that’s what it did.

We trusted one of Life’s 4 Living’s own PDF on this. Russell is quoted as saying that “for the best part of a year now I’ve been working with Life’s 4 Living. We are doing some fantastic work with children suffering from life limiting or life threatening conditions, many of whom have little or no medication available to treat them”. The same document states that “Accompanied by the Barefoot Doctor (AKA Stephen Russell), the film follows a group of ten children and young adults, aged between 5-21 years old, who suffer from severe illness or disability that is beyond current medical assistance, on a journey of healing and discovery. This journey will take them all the way to China”.

If Life’s 4 Living does not want journalists and/or bloggers to presume that the discussion of their activities on their own website is accurate, perhaps they should add a disclaimer to this effect? If Life’s 4 Living did not mean to say that Barefoot Doctor was working with their clients, they should look to revise this document.

One such allegation is that “people” went to a training school and “died of cancer”. Perhaps Holfordwatch would be better employed investigating the huge numbers of “people” who have died of cancer at the hands of conventional medicine but this, of course, would not fit in with the author’s prejudices. This matter will be fully examined in subsequent postings.

We do do things other than this blog – and have analysed other issues elsewhere. However, the important question – completely dodged by Lynton here – is whether or not people died of cancer at the training school we referred to. Even if ‘conventional’ medicine were evil, this does not excuse nasty things done in the name of ‘alternative’ medicine.

To be honest – Lynton – I’m annoyed. I’ve waded through a near-enough 2000 word rant from you, and found remarkably few substantive issues to engage with. We do make a number of significant criticisms of Life’s 4 Living – perhaps, in your next response, you might like to address some of them, instead of obsessing about who we are or are not?

A First Response

As someone who is independent of Life’s 4 Living Trust but has a working knowledge of its operations, I have been asked to reply to stories about the charity recently posted on the Holfordwatch web-site. This is my first response. Others will follow.

On February 21st, 22nd and 25th 2008, in three separate articles, Life’s 4 Living Trust came under a vicious, sustained and unprovoked attack from a source that can only be described as cowardly and unprofessional. But perhaps more important, every allegation made against the charity in these postings is demonstrably wrong.

The attack emanated from a site called Holfordwatch. This site is one of the strangest I have ever seen. It is dedicated to debunking the work of one particular individual, an alternative nutritionist called Patrick Holford. Now I know little of Mr. Holford’s endeavours but whatever his transgressions may have been, from my analysis it appears that they hardly merit the labours an attack-site such as this takes to set up and keep going. In fact the whole enterprise smacks of disproportionate prejudice on a monumental scale.

Before turning to the specifics of Holfordwatch’s articles on Life4Living Trust there is one other extremely weird aspect of the site’s activities worth inspecting: its carpet-bombing of those to whom it takes a dislike is carried out anonymously. Moreover, its justification for this stance is not only one that to my knowledge has never been put forward before (probably because no-one normally involved in the investigative reporting of others would be so cowardly) but is also mind-bogglingly smug and, in journalistic terms, unacceptably unprofessional.

It is therefore a good idea to take some time to examine the secrecy of Holfordwatch more closely. On the web-site, in the section entitled, ‘About Us’, it states: “We’re not oversharing on biographical details….because we find it distracts from a critique of the science and ideas.” This is bizarre. Exactly how putting a name to Holfordwatch’s malicious gossip would be distracting is not explained. Indeed, in over twenty years of being in journalism and around reporters I have never heard this argument made before. Following the logic of Holforwatch’s reasoning, academic journals would refuse to include the names of the authors of learned papers in case they ‘distracted’ from any ‘critique’ of the science. This is nonsense, designed, as far as I can see, to provide a flimsy cover for a lack of transparency.

It doesn’t end there. The site goes on to say: “It doesn’t matter whether we are the pride of our mothers and the despair of our schoolfriends.” This displays a juvenile approach which is breathtaking. Perhaps, ordinarily, this wouldn’t matter but these people are in the business of trying to destroy those with whom they disagree.

And there’s more. They say: “It’s the ideas, science and analysis which count”. Once again, the authors fail to tell us why these two propositions – putting a name to an article and ideas, science and analysis – are mutually exclusive.

Some of those who have responded to this self-serving rubbish have seen through Holfordwatch’s pathetic attempt to justify its secretive approach. Jim Manson, for instance, asks, “Who are you naughty boys and girls?” The site, in its answer to Manson, completely ignores his question, which prompted him to ask again….”Who is behind the site?” In the face of such persistence Holfordwatch was forced to provide some sort of answer. Having first reiterated the previous point that “our biographical and personal information has nothing to do with the criticisms we make….” (in which case why not include it?) they then ask of Manson, “Why are you concerned?”

This strange stance to legitimate questions is best summed up by the respondent ‘youtellmeyoursandilltellyoumine’, who asked, “Surely if your names are not a secret then why not state them unless, of course you have something to hide?”

It all makes you wonder what exactly Holfordwatch is afraid of.

Given that the writer prefers to hide behind the parapet of secrecy, we can only speculate as to his or her identity. It is possible – but not certain – that Holfordwatch is in some way connected to Ben Goldacre, who writes the Bad Science column which appears in the British newspaper, The Guardian, once a week. Suffice it to say that no reputable newspaper would allow a column like Bad Science to be published without the author’s name on it, hence Ben Goldacre’s visibility when he writes for such an internationally renowned publication.

The reasons for this supposition are as follows. First, the nomenclature Bad Science is used in the site’s headlines. If Goldacre is not involved, then among Holfordwatch’s many sins, the stealing of his label shows an inclination for dissembling and a complete disregard for the usual conventions. Second, Ben Goldacre’s name is cited by a number of respondents to the site. These postings are neither confirmed nor denied by the author(s). Third, Mr. Goldacre recently contacted Life’s 4 Living Trust with some questions about Stephen Russell, aka The Barefoot Doctor. Perhaps the subsequent appearance of these articles is mere coincidence but I wouldn’t place a bet on it. But if it is anything to do with Goldacre, why would he abandon the high-profile method used in his Guardian stories? Perhaps the Guardian requires a higher standard of professional care than a web-site. Whatever the case, it is odd that a web-site and its blogs should wish to hide themselves so completely when they are in the business of producing hatchet-jobs on others. It is hardly reassuring to know that while they are happy to attempt to ruin the reputations of their targets, they themselves refuse to reveal who they are.

The first article was posted on February 21st under the title ‘Barefoot, Sex, Sleaze and Life’s 4 Living’. Its main thrust is twofold: that Stephen Russell plunders the spirituality of other cultures and sells it in a repackaged form to a western audience; that he has had sexual encounters with women who, at one time or another, were his patients; and that Life’s 4 Living Trust has allowed him access to vulnerable people.

No doubt the Barefoot Doctor can deal with these questions himself. However, to give the reader a flavour of Holfordwatch’s style, it is worth making the following point since it displays the techniques Holfordwatch uses again and again. In the attack of February 21st, the site refers to matters relating to Russell which “have yet to be adjudicated upon.” Yet despite this fact, Holfordwatch feels free to assert, without any supporting evidence, that Russell’s explanation for them is “less than exculpatory.”

Although the site quickly degenerates into a News of the World type of sexual innuendo, we’ll let that pass for the moment. It is not long before the document brings Life’s 4 Living Trust into the equation when it states that “Barefoot Russell is fronting for the Life’s 4 Living Trust.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Holfordwatch goes on to profess concern that a charity should be associated with someone of Russell’s disposition. This is nothing more than a pejorative and biased interpretation of the situation. Let’s state here the facts. The Barefoot Doctor is not and never has been in contact with any of those people whom Life’s 4 Living Trust helps in its charitable works, be they vulnerable or otherwise. He is a patron of the charity and has been instrumental in attending events and assisting with its fund-raising activities, for which the charity thanks him. He also allows his name and image to be used in publicity material. Is Holfordwatch saying that helping to raise funds for a good cause is wrong? It seems so. We may ask at this point whether the anonymous and secretive persons behind the site have ever done anything for charity themselves.

Holfordwatch then turns its guns on a director of the charity, Claire Sutton. The most it can say about her is that she expressed a desire to help sick children who might benefit from a fully-paid-for trip to China to see if they could experience any improvement in their conditions through undergoing traditional Chinese treatments. In the eyes of Holfordwatch, this is wrong because of the charity’s association with the Barefoot Doctor. But the author completely misunderstands the involvement of Stephen Russell, whose role is clearly restricted to accompanying (i.e. helping with) the making of a film of the trip. It was never envisaged that Russell would be directly involved with the patients. And the proof of this is that Russell never met any of the individuals concerned. Had Holfordwatch followed normal journalistic practice and asked the charity to explain its position, it would have been made aware of the true situation. Instead it failed to seek any answers and simply went ahead and assumed its own view. Or at least we think that’s what it did. In response to a question from the aforementioned Ben Goldacre on this very subject, the charity fully explained both this point and Stephen Russell’s general association with the charity. If Goldacre has nothing to do with Holfordwatch, then fair enough. If, however, he is connected to the site, it appears he has wilfully ignored the inconvenience this knowledge must have brought. We, nor anyone else, can say whether he has had any input into the article because of Holfordwatch’s propensity for secrecy. If he is not involved then surely he should take steps to distance himself from this appalling and inaccurate site.

The rest of Holfordwatch’s February 21st document can be categorised as a trailer for the attacks of February 22nd and February 25th. It refers to some so-called “seamier antecedents” of Life’s 4 Living Trust. All of these allegations will be refuted in the responses to the subsequent two articles, which will be posted within the next few days. Having said that, it seems a good idea to nail a couple of the final allegations, which are made but not fully explained in the document of February 21st.

One such allegation is that “people” went to a training school and “died of cancer”. Perhaps Holfordwatch would be better employed investigating the huge numbers of “people” who have died of cancer at the hands of conventional medicine but this, of course, would not fit in with the author’s prejudices. This matter will be fully examined in subsequent postings.

In a similar vein, Holfordwatch berates Life’s 4 Living Trust for seeking sponsorship from corporations. Tell us, Holfordwatch, whether it is nobler to encourage corporate entities not involved in health-care to become interested in the plight of sick people or if it is ok for the conventional health industry to be in bed with multi-national drug companies and huge health insurers, who already have massive vested interests in the field.

To sum up, let’s state some simple facts, a procedure that appears quite alien to those at Holfordwatch. Life’s 4 Living Trust exists to raise money and pay for treatment for those unfortunate enough to be suffering from some of the worst diseases in the modern world. Often these conditions are incurable by conventional western medicine. Is that so bad that anonymous and secretive organisations like Holfordwatch can denigrate this work simply because it doesn’t fit in with their narrow-minded world-view? It appears so from this shoddy and malevolent piece of work.

Lynton Guest AKC: March 2008

There seems to be some connection between sexual transgressions and so-called self-help gurus. I am thinking in particular of M Scott Peck and Dr Phil.

We are not surprised when some people are attracted to the Police force or the military because of the “power”, to say nothing of the violence. Similarly we shouldn’t be surprised when some people are attracted to the wonderful world of quack medicine and magical therapies because of the opportunities it provides to meritlessly influence the lives of others.
CAM is by and large, in my opinion, an intellectual- and integrity-free zone. A license for ignorant or unscrupulous individuals to take advantage of and defraud whoever desperate or ill-informed that comes along.