Dianthus Medical Blog Archive

Cancer quackery infests snooker

I don't have a great deal of interest in watching sport, on the whole. The only sport that I would ever willingly watch is snooker. So it is with great dismay that I have discovered that the former world champion, Peter Ebdon, is being sponsored by Gerson Therapy in the world snooker championship that's currently being played in Sheffield.

Gerson Therapy, in case you're not familiar with it, is dangerous quackery, offering fake cures for cancer despite no evidence of any efficacy. Here is what the highly respected cancer charity Cancer Research UK has to say about it.

To advertise this quackery on national TV, even in such a subtle form as merely displaying the name of the treatment on the player's waistcoat, strikes me as highly irresponsible. It may even be illegal under the 1939 Cancer Act, although it's not totally clear to me whether displaying the name of treatment counts as advertising.

I was going to write more about this, but the excellent bloggers Andy Lewis and Josephine Jones have already written more substantial blog posts about this incident, so I think you should just go and read what they have to say instead.

 

 

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