What What Doctors Don't Tell You don't tell you
There's an alternative health magazine here in the UK called "What Doctors Don't Tell You" (actually, I think "alternative to health" might be a better description). It peddles all sorts of pseudoscientific nonsense, such as antivaccinationism and similar. When people are selling pseudoscientific nonsense, I think it's always interesting to wonder whether they genuinely believe the stuff they're selling, or whether they know that it's nonsense and are cynically seeing an opportunity to make money.
So I thought I'd do a little experiment.
WDDTY have a Facebook page. I recently asked on their Facebook page whether they were interested in hearing dissenting views about their articles. Their reply was an unequivocal yes.
Well, that all sounds very well. Makes it sound like they are prepared to engage in reasoned discussion, doesn't it?
Unfortunately, the reality is rather different. Earlier today, I noticed they were making a claim that amiodarone increases cancer risk by 45%. Well, there has been a recent study that found an increased cancer risk with amiodarone, although it was 12%, not 45%, and it was also not statistically significant. Now, amiodarone is a drug that's had its fair share of safety problems, and it may well be true that it raises cancer risk to a small extent, but over-stating the risks by pretending they're nearly 4 times higher than they really are is not, in my opinion, something that's going to help patients. So I posted a comment on their story.
That comment has now been deleted, and I have been banned from WDDTY's Facebook page. I don't think my comment was rude, offensive, or derogatory. All it did was point out that their article was wrong.
WDDTY have shown that they are not prepared to engage with dissenting points of view. They would rather pretend those points of view don't exist. In any discussion of medical issues, suppressing dissenting opinions is pretty much pathognomonic of quackery. It won't surprise you to know that this is exactly how homeopaths and Stanislaw Burzynski's PR operation behave as well.
So when WDDTY said they welcomed discussion and would only delete rude, offensive, or derogatory comments, they were lying. This does not seem like the actions of an organisation acting in good faith. It seems like the actions of an organisation acting dishonestly.
Heh! Typical - but we still can't really tell whether their intolerance of dissent is because they're cynical quacks or because they're fragile believers, can we?
[...] What What Doctors Don’t Tell You Don’t Tell You Adam Jacobs, Dianthus Medical, 12/04/13 [...]
Remember when Lynne McTaggart accused the Alok Jha and the Guardian of fabricating the story that WDDTY had threatened to sue Simon Singh? We had screenshots (see 06/10/13 update and links http://josephinejones.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/quack-rag-distributor-threatens-to-sue-singh-relevant-links-and-what-you-can-do/).
Apologies for the typo - I didn't intend to write "the Alok Jha"!
Yup, I got banned for pointing out -- very politely -- that the that the olive stone is, in fact, a seed.
It is very difficult to distinguish between delusion and fraud with the anti-medical brigade. Your experience is certainly not unusual. Another feature which tends to sway myself to the fraudulent side for many of them is the reposting of wrong information after it has been clearly shown to be incorrect. It will be interesting to see if they repeat the 45% claim.
I've just been blocked from the Facebook group and my comments deleted for calling some of their 'facts' into question.
They then replied to a tweet I sent them, suggesting that I was 'posting offensive comments' on all their posts.
I had, actually, posted sceptical comments on a very few of their posts.
They are liars and charlatans. It's time we printed out some 'Warning: May contain misleading bullshit' stickers and visited some of their stockists, methinks!
[...] written before about the magazine “What Doctors Don’t Tell You”, but just to refresh your memory, it is a [...]
[...] I’ve written before about the magazine “What Doctors Don’t Tell You”, but just to refresh your memory, it is a dreadful pile of nonsense, carrying dangerously misleading health advice. It includes such gems as suggesting vitamin C can cure AIDS or that homeopathy can cure cancer. If you want to know more about just how outrageously irresponsible the magazine is, you might want to visit http://wwddtydty.com or look at Josephine Jones’s impressive list of links. [...]