Holford Watch: Patrick Holford, nutritionism and bad science

We have covered Dore - a rather implausible ‘treatment’ for dyslexia and dyspraxia, now also being marketed for autistic spectrum disorders - on this blog in the past. We found that Dore’s research was extremely poor but they are still been able to get largely positive coverage in the UK mainstream media. We were therefore interested to hear that Dore Australia has now gone into administration. A Dore staff member states that Dore Australia is seeking

to evaluate different options for setting up a sustainable model for the delivery of the Dore Program going forward…Currently Wynford Dore is subsidising each client by amounts up to A$2,500 each. This he can’t do for ever.

The statement on Dore’s forums does not address the issue of whether those currently on the programme in Australia will receive a refund of what they paid (or the full service they paid for) or address reported staff concerns as to whether they will receive the money that they are owed. It has been suggested that critical media coverage (a Four Corners documentary in particular) may have played a role in this. The UK mainstream media - with some honourable exceptions - has generally been much more gullible: keen to repeat ‘positive’ stories about Dore, but failing to give similar coverage to newsworthy critiques of Dore’s research. I should know - I was pedantic enough to contact a number of UK papers to ask about this, and the silence was deafening while their ‘positive’ coverage of Dore continued.

The Dore staff member announcing that Dore Australia has gone into administration states that

The issues of learning and attention are problems that the Government should be taking responsibility for. They don’t even automatically screen every child in our schools. Dore has spent huge sums of money developing screening tests and providing them for parents who are concerned….The reason why Dore has tackled it is because nothing else deals with the root cause and helps so many symptoms. Everyone knows that their child only gets one chance through school, waiting 20 years for Governments to realise what they need to do means that our children will struggle the rest of their lives needlessly.

We are doing our best to make [Dore] available now. If they came along today to put it into schools, we would help them all we could – and that is where it needs to be.

I am afraid that I lack sympathy for this position. Of course, I am sorry if people will lose their jobs as a result of this, and the families stand to lose money. However, despite claiming to spend large sums of money on research, Dore have failed to produce good quality evidence as to whether their programme is effective for anything (except, perhaps, showing that doing Dore exercises such as balancing one wobble boards can improve one’s ability to balance on wobble boards). While there may have spent a lot of money on developing screening tests, Dore have entirely failed to provide good evidence that these tests are useful. It is, therefore, entirely understandable that governments do not want to invest large sums of taxpayers money in an expensive, time-consuming and expensive ‘treatment’ which has not been shown to work, or on screening tests which do not appear to have been well-validated.

Dore are right to emphasise that “child only gets one chance through school”. However, this only provides an additional reason why children should not be made to waste countless hours of their time doing peculiar Dore exercises unless there is evidence that this works. In the absence of such evidence, I am pleased that - while the Australian government has apparently made at least some use of Dore - they have not substantially taken up Dore for use in their schools. We hope that the UK national and devolved governments take note of this: it would make our education an international laughing stock if the government were to take large amounts of money from our inadequately funded Special Educational Needs education system - and take up large amounts of our children’s time - in order to run an unproven ‘treatment’ such as Dore.

The Dore staff member quoted above claims that “We are doing our best to make [Dore] available now”. Great - in that case, I would suggest that Dore releases their ‘treatment’ from any copyright claims, and makes details of their exercises, screening programmes etc. freely available to teachers, researchers and governments. This would allow a critical assessment as to whether Dore - or some elements of it - can make a useful contribution to the education of our children, and whether Dore can help adults with specific learning difficulties.

UPDATE: you can find the documents confirming that Dore has gone into administration here. Podblack has blogged about how Dore Australia now appear to be closed until further notice.