Holford Watch: Patrick Holford, nutritionism and bad science

I was planning to blog something about Patrick Holford, but then I saw The Apprentice last night: they gave contestants a visit to the Energy Clinic as a prize, and Sir Alan Sugar recommended the clinic as a place where companies often send their ‘highfliers’. If wealthy business people and corporations want to waste their money on unpleasant herbal teas and implausible energy spa ‘treats’, we have no particular objection. However, the Energy Clinic (formerly called the Energy Bank) has had a darker side.

As we noted on this blog, at the Energy Bank there were

claims of efficacy for treating Aids. In 2003, BBC2 broadcast Annie Kossoff’s Kill or Cure series. Warwick Powell worked with Energy Bank to attempt to counter Aids. Powell eschewed conventional treatment because it offered disease management rather than a cure. After following the Energy Bank programme for some time, Powell has a blood test and is distressed to learn that his T-cell count has not improved.

Warwick’s cell-count result cut him up because - as the film shows - he had spent several months being bled of £30,000 by an organisation called The Energy Bank. Founded in New Zealand by a Chinese woman now styling herself Grand Master Aiping Wang, the Bank claims to cure terminal illness through eight hours a day of twirling around and chanting with arms in the air.

More recently, the Energy Clinic has been linked to Life’s 4 Living: a controversial charity which has made claims to cure MS through an unproven and implausible ‘treatment’ and - in an especially declasse move - apparently facilitated an autistic child being told that their “negative energy smelled so bad that the doors of the room had to be opened”.

It’s bad enough that the BBC implicitly recommends the Energy Clinic, but I was especially disappointed to hear Sir Alan Sugar explicitly recommend the Energy Clinic. I would have expected Sugar to have been a man of science, given the significant role that he has played in the development of IT in the UK. I mean, the first home computer I saw was an Amstrad, and it was nice…

I’m disappointed that the BBC and Sir Alan Sugar have chosen to give prime-time (free?) publicity to the Energy Clinic. I have to wonder whether they knew what the clinic has been involved in: while I have nothing against a bit of chanting, publicising a Clinic that has been linked to claims to treat AIDS and MS using energy medicine, as well as some very unfortunate statements about disabled people, is beyond the pale.