Worth a look?

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

http://www.macmillanscience.com/1403945004.htm

By the way, Badly Shaved Monkey has no financial interest in this publication!

 

[Soapy Sam]

Looks interesting. Have you read it?

 

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

No. Only had it brought to my attention today when it featured on Nature's e-mail contents list.

I'm going to order it.

 

[Mojo]

Here's a snippet from Murcott's Times column this week (22.1.2005):

Looking back through my notes I found a sentence I wrote shortly after I started writing my Body&Soul column, What’s the Evidence?, in which I evaluate whether alternative medicine really works. “What’s the Evidence? looks at complementary therapies through the eyes of Western medicine.” That was, and is, true, but I have come to question the scope of that vision. There are good arguments that Western medical research is blinkered with respect to complementary therapies.

This look a little too much like "if the test doesn't show it works there must be something wrong with the test" for my liking.

 

[Badly Shaved Monkey]

Here's a snippet from Murcott's Times column this week (22.1.2005):
This look a little too much like "if the test doesn't show it works there must be something wrong with the test" for my liking.

Agreed. There also seems to be a discrepancy between the publishers' summary and the quote from Prof Ernst that implies the book adopts a more critical tone. Guess I'll just have to read it.

I'd hate to give money to a closet semi-woo, or a semi-closet woo, but I'm getting the book anyway.

Taking this quote narrowly "There are good arguments that Western medical research is blinkered with respect to complementary therapies." he is right. Real medicine comes to no harm when it broadens its horizons, but the crucial point is the criteria by which efficacy is judged. I've been selling quite a lot of dog pheromones to people recently. Very 'holistic'. Quite strong anecdotal evidence. Difference between me and a woo is that I accept the principle of objective testing and if trials showed I was kidding myself I'd accept the verdict. One of the problems of my little world is that the market is small and there is not much money to fund good clinical research, so we have to accept the application of professional judgement in areas for which we would really like to have proper trial data. But, how many times have I told a client today that if their animal gets better on treatment to be aware that it might be coincidence and we should not be fooled into giving credit to the drugs? About 5 times! Do you ever hear a woo telling a patient that just maybe nature will take its course and they will just be bystanders? Never, because their whole house of cards would collapse, whereas I am happy to tell people the truth because I work with a system of medicine taht has such a solid core of reality that even if I am moving into relatively uncharted territory I am still likely to make accurate assessments. It's the thing Bach calls clinical evidence except that my judgement pushes an envelope with good hard data at its heart.

 

[Mojo]

I first spotted the book a few weeks ago, looking for something else on the Macmillan site. I had a look at some of his earlier columns (I have access to the back run of the Times at work, but not here) and I seem to remember finding other material that seemed to me to lean a little too much towards the woo. I'll have another look when I get to work tomorrow morning, and then I suppose I'll see if the forum is still around...

 

[Mojo]

While the forum has been down I’ve had a look back through Dr. Murcott’s columns. The column is called What’s the evidence? and is in a Q & A format. I think it’s printed as a kind of “side bar” balancing a positive story (generally anecdotal) about an unorthodox therapy. He never seems to say anything particularly negative about a therapy, tending to restrict himself to anodyne comments along the lines of “more research is needed” or citing opposed positive and negative research results without going into any real detail or saying which results may be more reliable.

He also tends to rather uncritical, sometimes quoting other people's opinions without additional comment. For example, in a piece about aromatherapy (6th Dec 2003) he says that “Dr. Alan Hirsch of the Chicago-based Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation”

has found that sniffing scent of banana, green apple or peppermint instead of snacking can help people lose weight.

No further comment is made. I would have though that doing almost anything (e.g. not snacking) instead of snacking would help people lose weight.

On the other hand he often makes the point that there is no way to know whether the therapy the original story was about was what had the alleged positive effect, or whether it was either caused by other factors or a spontaneous recovery.

The approach used may, of course, be what his editor has asked for rather than the approach he would normally use.

A few more quotations:

When discussing bio-energy healing (23rd Oct 2004) he writes:

Is it just placebo?

Possibly but this does not mean it doesn’t work

He also implies (8th Nov 2003) that there was an establishment witch-hunt against Benveniste (or anyone else researching homeopathy):

SO SCIENTISTS ARE INVESTIGATING?

Yes, but those who are remember the cautionary tale of Jacques Benveniste. He published a paper claiming to show evidence for homeopathy in the respected journal Nature. An outcry from the scientific establishment led Nature to investigate his laboratory. The investigators, including the quack-busting magician James Randi

Hurrah!

concluded that the results were unproven, ruining Benveniste’s career

Checking that your results are reliable before publishing them applies to any scientist, not just those researching homeopathy.

I’m also worried about his statement (15th Jan 2005) that

complementary therapies often have multiple treatments and clinical trials are best at looking at one thing at a time.

Surely a properly designed clinical trial can determine whether a particular course of treatment works or not no matter how many separate elements it has. Either the patients receiving the treatment do better than the controls or not. The difficulty involved in designing trials for many types of CAM lies in the fact that they are "hands-on" (e.g. types of massage/manipulation, or acupuncture) so that the person doing the treatment is almost bound to know whether they have really treated the subject.