Holford Watch: Patrick Holford, nutritionism and bad science

Former Visiting Professor Patrick Holford but still Head of Science and Education at Biocare is keen on promoting the value of his 100%health subscription service. He spoke about his service in glowing terms at the recent Allergy and Gluten Free Show 2008^[1] and recently sent around an email that trails a lot of interesting topics for his upcoming mail out to his 100%health subscribers: amonst the topics are where the Cochrane reviewers went wrong and a promise of an updated Holford review of the evidence behind vaccination guidelines. (more…)

A quick post to note some more of the unfolding coverage of Dore UK’s closures. Ben Goldacre uses his Guardian bad science column to point out that, when analysing the coverage of Dore:

it seems the bloggers win on timeliness, accuracy, relevance, effort, ethics, and stupid names. (more…)

Clifford J. Shoemaker has filed his response to the instruction to show cause in his action against blogger-supreme, Kathleen Seidel: Welcome to My Conspiracy. We can’t begin to do it justice, go and read it.

But, any of you women who are sassy enough to think that you can use Google and consult journals and basically read and stuff, you’d better take any blood pressure medication that you can get your hands on. (more…)

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…)

Last year some UK blogs complained vociferously about the Observer piece that unwisely, inaccurately and irresponsibly reported the shocking figure that 1 in 58 children in the UK has some form of autism.

So, it is no surprise that this figure is still cropping up around the world with new accretions. Enter Jenny McCarthy who is the new champion of parents of children with ASD. You can see her on talk shows, shouting at scientists to wild cheers from the audience and much approbation for slogans such as “[my son] is my science”. And revelations such as the enlightenment she gained from typing ‘autism’ into Google. (more…)

Here at Holford Watch, we are in awe of Kathleen Seidel, the blogger at neurodiversity.com. She has an enviably fine mind, remarkable research skills, an uncanny attention to detail and a good, clear, writing-style. She writes clever, thoughtful, impeccably-researched and substantiated posts. She is an admirable role-model for any blogger who comments upon poor science or the application of poor science: she is systematic, meticulous, unfailingly courteous and dogged.

Seidel has also just received a subpoena in the matter of Rev. Lisa Sykes and Seth Sykes in their suit against the Bayer company. The Sykes are claiming that thiomersal in vaccines caused/contributed to their son’s autism. (more…)

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…)

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…)

I thought that - when the Scotsman published Blissett’s dire article on Holford a while after the Standard - it was just letting its standards slip, and running a poor-quality cast-off from the London media. However, having taken a closer look, the Scotsman have form on this type of ’science’ journalism. Last year, they gave Holford the chance to share his insight into how “autistic children are almost all allergic either to wheat, milk or both”. This is an interesting claim - and very likely inaccurate.

IgE-mediated allergies are pretty rare, symptoms generally come on pretty quickly, and we do have reliable tests for such allergies. If ‘almost all’ autistic children were allergic to such staple foods as wheat and milk, one would expect that evidence-based medicine would have noticed by now. Oddly, they haven’t. The available evidence just does not support this claim.

It may be that Holford is talking about something else (e.g. he might believe that almost all autistic children are gluten and casein intolerant). However, this isn’t clear from the Scotsman piece (and even this weaker claim is not supported by reliable evidence). The article also does not make clear that - if cutting milk and wheat out of their child’s diet - parents should do this under the supervision of a suitably qualified medical professional such as a dietitian.

The Scotsman therefore allowed Holford to - incorrectly - give the impression that “autistic children are almost all allergic either to wheat, milk or both”. They also failed to warn parents of the need to see a qualified medical professional if removing staple foods from their child’s diet. This is horribly bad science, and horribly bad journalism. Surely the Scotsman’s readers deserve better.