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Sunday, 4th November 2007
Health nutters
I can’t make up my mind about whether the article on the Top 20 health gurus in the Telegraph is an elaborate wind-up or whether it was written by an uncritical idiot.
Of the so-called nutritionist Patrick Holford (who, amongst other things, thinks Vitamin C is a more effective treatment for HIV/AIDS than AZT) it says —
Are men of almost 50 meant to look so youthful and trim? Holford’s pioneering nutritional theories evidently work brilliantly for him and beautifully preserved women hang hungrily on his every word at packed seminars around the country.
Are we really supposed to take the message that because Holford is so good looking that women swoon in his presence then the nonsense he spouts about food must be true?
The article quotes Dr Michael Dixon1, who is a trustee of the Prince of Wales’s2 Foundation for Integrated Medicine3, as saying of the critics of so-called alternative medicine, I am not sure how much credibility these pointy-heads have
and as insisting that the efficacy of complementary treatments cannot be measured using the standard ‘double-blind’ test used by medical researchers. What are we to make of that?
If the article is a wind-up or some sort of satire I fear that the desperately deluded won’t see it that way. If it’s a genuine attempt to big-up these health nutters then its publication in a supposedly serious newspaper makes me very afraid.
1 Dixon is a genuine medical doctor but since when did being a doctor stop you believing in demonstrable nonsense? Dixon is a visiting Professor to Westminster University which is one of the few universities in Britain offering degrees in homeopathy (the provision of pure water and sugar pills masquerading as medicines).
2 Presumably this is the same Prince of Wales who has, in the past, been said to talk to trees?
3 The Telegraph article gets the name of this organisation wrong I think. They, presumably, mean the Foundation for Integrated Health.
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I have some ideas about how to make it a bit easier but they depend on writing another script. I hope to get around to it ‘eventually’.
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