London Evening Standard promote live blood quackery

Yesterday’s Evening Standard featured an advertisement article promoting live blood analysis, in particular Katrin Hempel’s London Natural Therapies clinic.

It begins…

The last time I looked at anything under a microscope was at school, identifying the nucleus of a plant cell. So seeing my own blood — fresh out of my fingertip — is a novelty.

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PCC rule that Evening Standard Burzysnki article did not breach the Editors’ Code

The background to my complaint is here.

I already had little faith in the Press Complaints Commission as an effective regulator so it didn’t particularly surprise me that they failed to agree that there were several (indeed any) inaccuracies.

Incidentally, the title of the piece was “Cancer girl’s £130,000 plea for life-saving operation in US“.

The full text of the PCC ruling (25/01/12) is below.

The Observer fails once more to address concerns regarding the Burzynski Clinic

The Observer readers’ editor, Stephen Pritchard has responded (by email) to criticism of his 4th December column regarding complaints about an article on the controversial Burzynski Clinic. I have published his email in full at the end of this post.

I hope that this inadequate response will not be the Observer’s final word on the subject. It remains to be seen whether the Press Complaints Commission will be able to resolve the situation (together with my more recent complaint against the Evening Standard)

The Evening Standard fail to address my concerns about the Burzynski clinic – will the PCC act on this?

UPDATE (25/01/12) The PCC have reached the decision that the article did not breach the Editors’ Code (details here).

UPDATE (18/01/12) The Evening Standard have now published an article by their in-house doctor, Christian Jessen, which is critical of Burzynski’s claims to provide innovative, cutting-edge “Personalised Gene-Targeted Cancer Therapy”. He mentions that scientists have been unable to reproduce what few results the clinic has published and that Burzynski’s treatments have been described by experts as ‘scientific nonsense’.

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Since the Evening Standard have failed to adequately address my concerns regarding their recent article promoting the Burzynski Clinic, I have now made a complaint to the PCC.

My original email was sent to Geordie Greig, the Editor. I received an unsatisfactory reply from their Managing Editor, Will Gore earlier this week.

I replied as follows:

Dear Evening Standard, it is immoral to promote the Burzynski Clinic

This Wednesday, the London Evening Standard published an article promoting a fundraising campaign set up in order to send a five-year-old girl suffering a rare form of brain cancer to the controversial Burzynski Clinic. This was despite the author of the piece already being aware that Cancer Research UK had raised concerns about the clinic and that seventeen-year-old schoolboy Rhys Morgan had received intimidating threats from those claiming to represent it.

I summarised my concerns in an email to the Editor (geordie.greig@standard.co.uk):