Holford Watch: Patrick Holford, nutritionism and bad science

In yesterday’s Telegraph, Damian Thompson asks whether we’re seeing “The last rites for alternative medicine?” For Thomson

CAM’s [Complementary and Alternative Medicine's] real problem…is shortage of proof. The information technology brilliantly exploited by unorthodox therapies is now being harnessed to spread the inconvenient truth that most of them don’t work. Sceptics in the blogosphere have assembled a global daisy-chain of links exposing the falsehoods of alternative practitioners.

Interestingly, Thompson believes that media nutritionists such as Prof Patrick Holford of Teesside University (and - in particular - Holford’s unjustified support for Wakefield’s bad science) have played an important role in CAM’s problems (more…)

In mid-March, Prof Patrick Holford of Teesside University chose to greet the start of Wakefield’s GMC hearing with a magnificent torrent of canards about MMR and autism. He sent out an e-mail to his mailing list, titled ‘The Truth about Vaccine Damage’. However, Holford appears to have an unusual concept of ‘truth’. He manages to confuse correlation and causation, imply some kind of dark conspiracy, misrepresent legal information, and argue from false authority. Managing all this in a single e-mail is somewhat impressive. I’m going to go over a few of Holford’s canards here. (more…)

In a 17/3/08 e-mail to his mailing list, Prof Patrick Holford of Teesside University discusses Wakefield’s work and the possible role of the gut in autism.

Wakefield’s hypothesis can be summarised as follows:
[A] subset of children…develop[e] a particular form of developmental regression following previously normal development, in combination with a novel form of inflammatory bowel disease…Exposure [to the MMR vaccine] leads to long-term infection with measles virus within key sites, including the intestine, where it is associated with lymphoid hyperplasia and acute and chronic mucosal inflammation.

It sounds like a plausible hypothesis, but it’s wrong. One would expect a professor carrying out research in this field to know this - but we will recap the evidence, in case Prof Holford might have missed some of it. This idea of a ‘novel form of inflammatory bowel disease’ is - as a scientist writing on Left Brain Right Brain argues - an example of how one can manufacture a disease (which then creates a market for treatments) (more…)

Professor Patrick Holford of Teesside University is a staunch supporter of Dr Andrew Wakefield and in 2007 set out his case as to why others should likewise support Wakefield. Holford has updated his website to explore the issue: Patrick Holford’s Concerns About the MMR Vaccine.

Patrick Holford claims to have remarkable insight into the causation of autism and how to “bring them back” when children are on the autistic spectrum. He suggests that there is hard evidence that links MMR and autism. (more…)

Professor Patrick Holford of Teesside University and Head of Science and Education at Biocare frequently upbraids professionals and researchers for what he perceives as their lack of up-to-date research.

Yet, it was with an extraordinary sense of deja woo that we learned about Patrick Holford’s Concerns About the MMR Vaccine. (more…)

I used to think that the Observer was a proper, accurate paper - that when you saw an article in it, you could assume that it was well-researched, probably accurate and, if a mistake was made, the Observer would correct it. Maybe I was naive before: at any rate, the Observer has very effectively disabused me of this belief. Apologies in advance for any typos etc. in the below: I’m sufficiently annoyed about this that I’m struggling not to break into any Stott-style swearing, so the bile might come out in an occasional spelling or grammatical mistake instead.

On 8/7/07 the Observer ran two awful articles on autism and MMR - and got things wrong in many, many ways. The problems with the Observer’s 8/7/07 article on autism rates and MMR, and Wakefield interview, have been dealt with at length - here and elsewhere - and I won’t go over all of these points again here: the Observer got things wrong in so many ways that it frankly becomes tedious to keep listing them again. They have also made a real hash of their two - woefully inadequate - responses to well-justified criticisms of the article: criticisms that were in many case far better-researched, more nuanced, and closer to what good journalism should be than Denis Campbell’s attempts at being a health/science journalist in the original Observer articles. The Observer have now removed one of the two offending articles from their website (although this appears to be for legal reasons, rather than a retraction due to the article being mostly wrong on most things it covered).

In this week’s Observer there is not (so far as I can tell from their website) any mention of their previous coverage of MMR and autism. After previously trying to cover up their horribly embarrassing failures with a bodged clarification, it looks like the Observer may now be hoping that if they don’t mention the elephant that is in the room - and currently stamping all over their reputation for quality journalism - the elephant will go away. However, that is not going to happen.

What I’m going to focus on here is the Wakefield/Campbell interview still on the Observer website - and two embarrassingly basic errors in the interview, which still remain uncorrected. In the interview, the writer (Denis Campbell, I presume) states that:

Critics point out that the US [Autism Omnibus] court case is not about the MMR vaccine itself but centres on the use of a preservative called thimerosal, which contains 50 per cent mercury and until a few years ago was added to routine vaccinations given to children in the US under one. Crucially, it has never been an element of the MMR vaccine here.

The Observer is simply wrong to imply that MMR contained thimerosal, anywhere, ever: this is a live vaccine, so adding such a preservative would render MMR ineffective. Moreover, the Autism Omnibus has discussed MMR at length: for example, Chadwick’s testimony to the court offers a devastatingly effective critique of Wakefield’s science. (more…)

Now I’m annoyed with the Observer. I had a nice Holford Watch post mostly written - looking at some particularly odd claims for vitamin C - and was planning on spending the rest of the day relaxing with a newspaper. Then I saw the Observer’s truly dismal (2nd) attempt at an apology for their terrible MMR/Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) coverage. Now I can’t buy myself an Observer, and feel obliged to insert a break in your usual Patrick Holford coverage to write another post on the Observer.

Lots of the mistakes in the Observer’s latest ‘clarification’ have already been covered by Ben Goldacre and Mike Stanton. The Observer’s mistakes have also been extensively covered already: in the Guardian, the Times, the BMJ, a number of blogs, and in numerous e-mails and letters to the paper (I wrote to the Observer Readers’ Editor myself, to point out some of their mistakes).

The Observer coverage of this is so bad, though, that there’s always room to point out more errors. Incredibly - despite being told, repeatedly and very publicly - what they got wrong, the Observer continued to make more mistakes in their ‘clarification’ of the failures in their MMR/autism coverage. I will summarise some of these below: (more…)

This blog has been critical of Holford’s writing on MMR, autism and Wakefield. We were surprised that Holford made such a hash of summarising the evidence on this issue, and especially disturbed that he failed to note that Wakefield faced serious charges from the GMC - including the charge that he carried our unethical, unnecessary, painful and potentially harmful experiments on vulnerable children. Naturally, I expected that - even if Holford chose not to let his readers know about the serious charges Wakefield faced - the mainstream media would offer a more accurate summary of the issues. At least as far as the Observer is concerned, I was disappointed. My next post will look in more detail at the ethics of experimenting on children - if right-on papers like the Observer are totally incapable of doing a competent job of this, maybe blogs can offer slightly less dismal coverage - but first I think that the Observer deserves some attention.

Last week, the Observer ran a jaw-droppingly awful front page article on MMR. Luckily, though, they have a Readers’ Editor - Simon Pritchard - to correct this type of mistake. Well, kind-of. In fact, in a “short piece…riddled with self-exoneration“, Pritchard fails to correct most of the mistakes in the original article, and actually includes basic mistakes in his own column. Genius.

Pritchard ends his column by stating that “the central point, in my view, is that the leaked story of the apparent rise in the prevalence of autism was a perfectly legitimate and accurate story in its own right, which did not need the introduction of the MMR theory.” However, this was only a draft study and therefore was not reliable. Prof. Baron-Cohen (a prominent participant in the team behind the leaked study, described by the Times as “head of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University and one of the most authoritative figures in the field”) makes clear that the leaked draft was at a stage where it “is as accurate as jottings in a notebook”. More damningly, the alarmist 1/58 autism rate referred to by the Observer was, um, not a measure of autism diagnoses - but results of a pretty basic questionnaire, which showed that 1/58 research subjects were at risk of being on the autistic spectrum. Moreover, for Baron-Cohen we should interpret the current rise in autistic spectrum disorder diagnoses as “more to do with diagnostic practice” than a rise in autism rates. So the leaked study only showed an ‘apparent’ rise in autism rates for those who lack basic statistical and critical analysis skills. Perhaps the Observer should get a Science Readers’ Editor - so that it can properly correct its mistakes in future - or just find a Readers’ Editor with basic analytical skills. (more…)

2

222Shinga posted yesterday on “extraordinary…correspondences between Patrick Holford and Dr Andrew Wakefield”. The ’science’ behind this story has already been torn to pieces all over the blogosphere - read a summary of posts here and here - so I’m not going to look at this again. Frankly, if copies of this newspaper are getting used for soaking up guinea pig crap, then I feel sorry for the guinea pigs - and I can’t really think of much more to say about this ’science’.

However, when I was looking into the debate around Sunday’s awful Observer story on MMR, I found another surprising correspondence: both Holford and Wakefield appear to be linked to the Safe Harbor organisation. Safe Harbor is a controversial ‘alternative’ mental health organisation, which was established by “a very prominent Scientologist called Dan Stradford who apparently has reached the level of Operating Thetan - Level VIII” and which has had a history of substantial Scientologist involvement. (more…)

The correspondences between Patrick Holford and Dr Andrew Wakefield are extraordinary. Even leaving aside the fact that Patrick Holford recently emailed a large number of people, asking them to sign a petition in support of Andrew Wakefield (albeit the first few times that I checked after this email, Patrick Holford and his name are conspicuous by their absence). They both regard themselves as prophets who are without honour in their own country. Read remainder of entry