Goldacre and Wakefield

John Stone is a great example of an Andy Wakefield sycophant to whom the actual facts do not matter. I personally know this as he and I have butted heads at Huffington-Post.

His latest whitewashing of the unethical liar (proven beyond a reasonable doubt) is a bit unusual. It is Ben Goldacre, Can We Have it Straight Now about Wakefield and the GMC?  Goldacre's view as it relates to the role of the media in reporting on medicine and medical studies in the underlying article isn't new for him.  Goldacre argues that there will always be doctors or researchers with every conceivable idea and that they get published so that the news media in reporting or not reporting on these 'stories' must actually read and understand the study and the context of the study.  The media bears some of the responsibility and cannot merely blame everyone else.

OK.  I don't have much of a problem with that.  But then Goldacre uses Wakefield's infamous 1998 paper as an example and actually does a bit of rehabilitation of the study as published in The Lancet.  I disagree with that.

But what Goldacre does not do is say anything about Andy Wakefield or the GMC (UK medical licensing organization.  So that should be that.   But that's not good enough for Mr. Stone.  Despite not saying a word about Wakefield or the GMC, apparently we now have a defense of Andy Wakefield and a condemnation of the GMC.

Goldacre's comments are about the article as published with the assumption that the article as published in 1998 was reasonably accurate.  If the paper had been reasonably accurate as to what it reported then there never would have been a GMC hearing.  Being stupid or wrong in published research is not a disciplinary matter.

What made it a disciplinary action was evidence of unethical behavior, unneeded procedures and lying about the research.  You see, doctors are held to a higher ethical standard than the proverbial  used car salesman. Sadly this is something that Wakefield sycophants such as John Stone somehow leave out.

I've read the actual  GMC decision a few times and while I have some disagreements, they are pretty minor. It takes amazing blinders to read it through and still believe there weren't more than sufficient grounds to yank his license.

Acupuncture - Hardly an Ancient Chinese Remedy

From my comment at Huffington-Post.

Acupuncture, as largely practiced today just isn't that old. What is old is Chinese bloodletting, whose history has been appropriated by acupuncture. According to one of the links below, it was only in the 1930s that acupuncture points were moved to their current locations.

"To start with, this ancient Chinese treatment is not so ancient and may not even be Chinese!"

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=252

"What’s maddening about the acupuncture longevity myth is that it isn’t true, and demonstrably so."

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=252

"In addition, the alleged predominance of acupuncture amongst the scholarly medical traditions of China is not supported by evidence, given that for most of China’s long medical history, needling, bloodletting and cautery were largely practiced by itinerant and illiterate folk-healers, and frowned upon by the learned physicians who favored the use of pharmacopoeia."

and

"However, in the early 1930s a Chinese pediatrician by the name of Cheng Dan’an (承淡安, 1899-1957) proposed that needling therapy should be resurrected because its actions could potentially be explained by neurology. He therefore repositioned the points towards nerve pathways and away from blood vessels-where they were previously used for bloodletting. His reform also included replacing coarse needles with the filiform ones in use today."

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=583

It is also true of acupuncture for animals.