WDDTY: My Master List

I thought it might be useful to keep a organised list of articles on the controversial and misleading alternative health magazine, What Doctors Don’t Tell You.

I aim to add new links to this post as they arise.

Last updated 12/12/14

Burzynski blogs: My Master List

Last updated 17/07/14

Here is a summary of information on #Burzynski – which will hopefully be of use to those daunted by the sheer quantity of links on my Stanislaw, Streisand and Spartacus post.

UPDATE 30/04/13 Many of the links are to the 21st Floor, which is now offline. Most of these can also also be found here, by searching for “Burzynski”.

IPSO has not upheld my complaint against Daily Telegraph naturopathy article

The press regulator IPSO has not upheld my complaint against the Daily Telegraph. The ruling suggests that it is acceptable for a newspaper article to repeat misleading claims, with no critical comment, if the claims are made within the context of ‘alternative’ medicine.

In an article headlined Alternative health: what is naturopathy, published on 7th November 2014, practitioner Katrin Hempel promotes live blood analysis, bioresonance and biopunture – all useless, pseudoscientific techniques. At no point is it made clear that her claims are misleading. Notably, Hempel’s company, London Natural Therapies, is listed as non-compliant by the Advertising Standards Authority because of her refusal to remove similarly misleading claims from her advertising.

Alcopal dissolved, but the website lingers

Alcopal claimed that their “clever little ingredient prevents alcohol being absorbed” and that their pills could help drink drivers beat breath tests.

Such irresponsible, misleading and unauthorised claims earned Alcopal two separate entries on the Advertising Standards Authority’s list of non-compliant advertisers. Complaints came from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) in 2012 and from Birmingham Trading Standards earlier this year.

Alcopal Limited was dissolved on 30th September 2014.

“Dr” Harald Gaier’s website ruled misleading by ASA

“Dr” Harald Gaier practises from a rented room on London’s Harley Street.
As one of their editorial panel, he also writes regularly for the controversial and misleading magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You, where he is described as “arguably the UK’s most knowledgeable practitioner of the major alternative medical disciplines”.

The Advertising Standards Authority ruled today that Gaier must remove misleading and unsubstantiated claims from his website and must not imply that he is a medical doctor.

Image taken from Harald Gaier’s website earlier today

The complainant challenged whether:

1.  the ad misleadingly implied that the advertiser was a medical doctor rather than a practitioner specialising in complementary and alternative medicine;

2.  the claim “Scientifically proven medical alternative medicine, paired with orthodox diagnostic tests” was misleading and could be substantiated, because they did not believe that the treatments and diagnostic tests were either scientifically proven or orthodox; and

3.  the claims for the efficacy of the three diagnostic tests described by the advertiser were misleading and could be substantiated.

Rather than simply updating his website, Gaier contested the complaint:

Tesco drops What Doctors Don’t Tell You

Tesco will no longer be stocking the misleading and controversial alternative health magazine, What Doctors Don’t Tell You.

As reported in The Times last October, scientists, doctors and patients condemned shops for continuing to sell a magazine which gives dangerously bad advice on vaccination and which has claimed that Vitamin C is a suitable treatment for measles and AIDS.

Unlicensed herbal medicines must now be removed from UK shelves

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) is reminding herbal companies and retailers that, as of 1st May 2014, unlicensed manufactured herbal medicines without a traditional herbal registration (THR) or product licence (PL) can no longer be sold to consumers and must be removed from shelves.