Harry's Place

Oh god.

We have GOT to get rid of our law of defamation. The judges are an absolute menace. I am ashamed of them.

I suspect this was an early application by Simon Singh to strike out the case as unarguable because Singh’s words didn’t have the meaning that the the BCA claimed they had, and/or that it was simply comment and so not libellous. The Judge having decided that neither applies, the case will now proceed to trial unless the (now vastly increased) legal expenses force him to settle.

Or at least change it drastically. Seems to be a throwback to the days when protecting a gentleman’s or a lady’s honor & reputation was of foremost importance.

The BCA have postulated something, with no evidential provenance.

In a sane legal system, they would not have a leg to stand on. It seems that Simon Singh has been legally saddled with the onus of proving that they were deliberately dishonest in their claims. But his complaint about them was rather more nuanced, and based on the complete lack of clinical evidence to support their claims.

There are very many people who cleave to wrong headed notions about all sorts of things, and they are prone to making rather wild assertions and claims. Some of them even insist that there is a great big invisible bloke in the sky who is on their side. Such notions should not be given legal protection.

And I agree that too many of our Judges are not fit for purpose.

Nothing to get in a twist about. Still, I hope it all gets straightened out soon. I hope Singh has sufficient backbone for the fight. I hope rationalists everywhere have his back.

This judge is opening up some very dangerous ground from a medical point of view. If no clinical trials or proper testing are required on alternative therapies and all a therapist has to do is to ‘believe’ that they at best work and at worst do no harm, the general public are no more than sitting ducks for every passing charlatan.
The ridiculous situation in which it is possible to sell treatments or substances which are not tested or regulated should not be allowed to continue and should certainly not be encouraged by the legal profession.

Absolute disgrace.

It seems that I could postulate some outlandish claim, eg, You will never suffer from woodworm in your house if you cover your cat in treacle.

And the Court will find in my favour if you can’t prove I knew I was lying when I said it.

Well the UK is a country where in addition to having an official state superstition, the state healthcare system pays lots of tax payers money for homeopathic ‘remedies’, derived from a nonsense pseudoscience, promulgating the absurd supernatural ‘water memory’ theories of Samuel Hahnemann, in essence just water peddled as a very expensive placebo. Hell there are even a state funded NHS hospital – ‘The Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital’ for fucks sake.

Is it any wonder that chiropractor is seen as kosher medicine? It’s worth looking at a subset of the Quackwatch site – chirobase.

Critical thinking is not on the syllabus in UK schools. I think it shows.

The origins of chiropracty are interesting (that’s what you get when you study medical anthropology). It originated in the American mid-West farming communities which were both remote and poor and did not have good access to medical treatment. The local population were very down-to-earth, practical people with a ‘hands-on’ attitude to their work and lives which led them to regard their own health in the same way. If the tractor was broken down, they fixed it. If the body was broken down, they wanted to be able to fix that quickly and on the spot too and to get back to work. And so a hands-on, relatively quick, mechanical-based treatment appealled to them – and chiropracty was born.

So, why isn’t the British medical establishment standing up for Singh or more importantly, forking over the dough so he can defend himself?

The judge is a complete moron. What else is there to say, except i hope physicians steer him to a chiropractor when his health begins to fail. I also wonder what the judge would say about homeopathy. I went to see famed skeptic James Randi at UBC a couple of months ago and he began his talk by swallowing an entire bottle of homeopathic “sleeping pills.” Needless to say, he did not nod off during his talk, perhaps because the pills are so diluted you need a swimming pool full to get a single molecule of the “active ingredient,” which is supposed to work BETTER the more diluted it is. By that logic, Randi said, if you don’t take any pills, you overdose.

I had an friend back in SA in a 4×4 club that I started up. He drove to Mozambique with his family some other friends in their respective LandCruisers, it was a Malarial area over the Pafuri border crossing through the North of the Kruger park. His friends all took Homeopathic anti Malarial prophylactics. Both their kids darn near died from cerebral malaria, it was a very close call.

This homeopathic shit is sold OTC in proper pharmacies; it’s criminally irresponsible.

Homeopathy means treating like with like. It’s much like inoculation, in that the patient takes a weakened version of what ails them…

Should I revive my homeopathic chemical weapons research?.

Aspirin is known to cure headaches, so in homeopathic dilutions it must surely cause headaches. So too with healthful vitamin C and oh let’s say chocolate. What it I were to release it into the world? It would carry on being diluted and gain in potency exponentially, causing heads to explode, rampant scurvy, and the misery of chocolatelessness.

…but would I do it?

Yes; yes. To hold in my hand, a capsule that contained such power. To know that life and death on such a scale was my choice. To know that the tiny pressure on my thumb, enough to break the glass, would end everything.

Yes! I would do it!

That power would set me up above the gods! And through the Daleks lua scripting I shall have that power!

Up to a point, this nonsensical stuff is amusing. Our Sovereign Lady the Queen is said to be a great believer in this malarky.

All kidding aside, Nick’s true story suggests there are scores more like it.

All REAL doctors and chemists and everyone else [retailers like Boots included] should boycott quack remedies and proclaim the fact aloud.

Monty should know that you can get treacle for covering his cat on the NHS.

How many of you think acupuncture is quackery?

People’s liking for homeopathy may have something to do with users living like the Queen Mother living to 101!

More seriously, I oppose such libel actions on principle as interference with free speech but I think Singh was wrong.

The influence of posture on good health is in my view undeniable. If chiropractice can achieve freer movement of the joints and muscle connections then it is going to contribute to overall health.

Whether specific claims of chiropractice are true is debatable and it is certainly not a risk-free procedure. But the same is true of conventional medicine. Recently we have heard that the much heralded statins can cause awful memory loss and other dysfunction.

kmag – feeling needled?

I’ll get my coat.

We need more militancy – protests outside the Hight Court, lawyers’ offices etc.

So the treatment isn’t bogus if the person administering it really believes that it works.

That’s an interesting approach to medicine.

kmag -a few years ago the WHO did some research into acupuncture and found that it is helpful for certain conditions such as chronic back pain, but completely useless for others.
One also has to take into account the tricky subject of interactions between many of these alternative ‘medicines’ and conventional treatments. When one is thinking of prescribing a conventional medicine one has all the necessary information available to check out contraindications or interactions with other drugs because these things have been tested.
With ‘herbal’, ‘natural’ substances there is no research, no documentation, no standardisation and this can be particularly dangerous because people often don’t think it necessary to tell the doctor that they are self-medicating on these types of substances because they’re ‘natural’ and therefore they think they can do no harm.
From experience, for instance, I know that St. John’s Wort, which some people take for depression, can completely negate the effects of some types of medicines used to treat epilepsy and some of these ’slimming teas’ on sale can cancel out the effects of anti-coagulants -both potentially very dangerous situations.
My usual reaction to the claim that ‘it can’t do any harm-it’s natural’ is that so are cocaine and heroin.

We have compulsory health warnings on fag packets, they’re on the way on booze packaging. Non scientific ‘remedies’, such as homeopathy should similarly have a statutory requirement to be prominently labeled as such, and kept separate in displays from mainstream, scientific medicine. Chiropractor practices should similarly have prominent displays on their stationary and outside the clinics indicating it’s non mainstream status.

Many people buy into homeopathy and other such quackery purely out of ignorance. My brother’s wife being a case in point, some 20 years back she was sadly diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Fairly early on after her diagnosis she spent six months on a course of homeopathic counseling and ‘remedies’, quite innocently she thought it a legitimate, mainstream form of treatment. Fucking criminal!

As for acupuncture –

In 1981, the American Medical Association Council on Scientific Affairs noted that pain relief does not occur consistently or reproducibly in most people and does not operate at all in some people [7].

In 1995, George A. Ulett, M.D., Ph.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of Missouri School of Medicine, stated that “devoid of metaphysical thinking, acupuncture becomes a rather simple technique that can be useful as a nondrug method of pain control.” He believes that the traditional Chinese variety is primarily a placebo treatment, but electrical stimulation of about 80 acupuncture points has been proven useful for pain control [8].

The quality of TCM research in China has been extremely poor. A recent analysis of 2,938 reports of clinical trials reported in Chinese medical journals concluded that that no conclusions could be drawn from the vast majority of them. The researchers stated:

Read the whole Quackwatch entry.

Under this judge, every lunatic who sincerely believes their hocus pocus could get away with it regardless of the consequences to others… because sincere belief now apparently counts as much as reasonable belief.

Usual HP arm flapping and snorting about people not saying the *right* thing.

“The judge also defined a’ bogus treatment’ as not being one which later scientific evidence has shown to be ineffective but instead as one which is known to be false and is meant to intentionally deceive.”

I should think many medical practitioners and drug companies are relieved about this part of the judgment.

I swear this is the last time I read HP, let alone comment.

Bye!

But Nurse, natural substances don’t contain all those awful chemicals …

What is causing Simon Singh’s problem here is probably the fact that he wrote that “[t]he British Chiropractic Association… happily promotes bogus treatments”. Regardless of the validity or otherwise of chiropracty (and I’m a Ben Goldacre fan, so you won’t be surprised to learn that my views on alternative medicine are in line with those of most commenters to date on this thread), this obviously does imply that the BCA is knowingly and deliberately misleading people, which is a very different accusation to make than simply saying “chiropracty is bollocks”. So it’s a bit less egregiously appalling a decision (particularly if all it’s saying is that there is a case to answer) that some might think….

By the way, are you on Atlantis time or something? We should be told.

This judgment reminds me of the one delivered in favour of comedy stage hypnotist Paul McKenna, who was accused of holding himself out as a genuine PhD when he had in fact bought one off the internet.

From memory, I think the judge ruled that McKenna had honestly believed that his qualification was real, and that therefore McKenna had been libelled when it was alleged that he’d obtained a shonky PhD. The only consolation is that McKenna came out of it looking like an idiot – but a somewhat richer idiot.

Yet another loophole in our rubbish libel and defamation laws.

all a therapist has to do is to ‘believe’ that they at best work and at worst do no harm,

Well, chiropractors fall down there as their manipulations can actively cause harm. Even homeopathy and crystal hugging can be harmful if a patient is encouraged or chooses to ditch his conventional medications or decides not to seek medical advice.

Israelinurse, I believe chiropracty was formed by a disgruntled osteopath who founded it as a sort of pyramid scheme. Even today chiropractors are encouraged to recruit new fodder.

But, Mrs. Trellis, is it really a loophole in this case? If the BCA sincerely believe that Chiropracty works, then surely it is libellous to state that they are deliberately deceiving people, which is basically what Simon Singh said. I think the judge is being reasonable when he says (and I paraphrase) that the word ‘bogus’ implies an element of fraud, not just inefficacy. I don’t want people trying to solve their health problems through reliance on useless or even potentially harmful treatments any more than you do but the battle won’t be won if we don’t base our case on facts. And the fact is that being mistaken is not the same thing as being a charlatan.

If the BCA sincerely believe that Chiropracty works, then surely it is libellous to state that they are deliberately deceiving people

Well I would argue that they – the BCA – have a duty of care to be informed on these matters, that failure to be informed – nothing less than willful ignorance- amounts to deliberate deceit every bit as criminally negligent as willfully firing a target target rifle over the butts at Bisley into the Surrey suburbia a couple of miles beyond and then arguing that you didn’t ‘deliberately’ hurt anyone.

This is really the sort of stuff that brings the law into disrepute; Lord Denning the up with it would not have put!

I think calling something “bogus” is fair comment if the average reasonable person – not to mention available scientific evidence – holds that it does not and cannot work, regardless of the ‘beliefs’ of those who say it does. People who provide services to the public and make claims based on their provision of services cannot hold beliefs in a vacuum. They must know those beliefs are disputed (and at best controversial) so to pretend that they’ve blocked their ears and sung ‘la-la-la’ and thus that their “beliefs” are pure and true is nonsense.

Unlike in conventional medicine where a treatment might ultimately prove less effective than hoped, but where the due scientific process is sound, homeopathic remedies can be described as bogus because the CANNOT work.

It’s the difference between a rescue effort failing because a rope snapped and because a ‘rescuer’ eshewed the use of a rope in favour of casting magic spells.

Once again, anti-enlightenment garbage triumphs. Sigh.

And what Nick ex-SA said.

Fair points, Nick and Brett. However, I still believe that basing one’s case against the complementary medicine industry on the idea that it is run by fraudsters is not necessarily the most effective way to go about tackling the problem. I am all in favour of more effective controls on complementary medicine. I am obviously against any public subsidy of therapies that are untested scientifically (although I can see the Machiavellian attraction of encouraging placebo use as a way of reducing the unnnecassary consumption of proper, active medicines by people who absolutely insist on getting a prescription every time they visit a doctor with the merest sniffle). So don’t get me wrong; I’m not defending the BCA. I’m just saying that Simon Singh may well have added one sentence too many to his opinion piece.

And in case you’re wondering how I think it should be tackled, the first step has to be to work out why so many people (and particularly those among them whose lifestyles, taken as a whole, are not characterised by a pre-enlightenment approach to things; there’s probably no hope for the others!) choose complementary therapies over scientifically-grounded medicine. And I suspect that the reasons are often to be found in the nature of modernity, rather than in pre-modernity. For example, modernity gives us a level of wealth that allows us to indulge ourselves but we still feel a degree of guilt about indulging ourselves too much, so we can be more comfortable about splashing out on, say, a massage, if we tell ourselves that it’s a therapy rather than a luxury. Modernity also gives us an expectation of a cure to all ills and we find it hard to accept that even modern medicine can’t make all the little aches and pains of life go away, so we look for something else to do so. Modenity, above all, gives us the material breathing space to be able to spend some of our resources on trying things out, even if, deep down, we don’t think they’re likely to work.

I find the judge ignorance not surprising in the land of Prince Charles.
The battle between rationality and belief is not only in the sphere of evolution x creationism after all. It appears that even the most enlightened societies have their share of superstition.

zumb, I don’t see anything in what the judge said (and I’m going on the extract in this post) that suggests he believes in the efficacy of chiropracty. On the contrary, the distinction he makes is between treatments “which later scientific evidence has shown to be ineffective” and treatments “known to be false and… meant to intentionally deceive”.

“why so many people …choose complementary therapies over scientifically-grounded medicine…”

In the case of chiropracty, and osteopathy as well, the reason is that doctors are quite useless on muscular and skeletal problems, unless there is a noticeable injury — ie. something is broken or sprained. Physiotherapy (which is medically recognized) is good for recovery from injury; I’ve never found it any use for chronic pain.

Osteopathy and chiropracty (they aren’t that different, except in the waffle) are (in my experience) good for freeing trapped nerves and increasing mobility.

I admit that the ‘philosophy’ behind chiropracty is absolute rubbish, but it has a few useful pragmatic techniques.

kmag -a few years ago the WHO did some research into acupuncture and found that it is helpful for certain conditions such as chronic back pain, but completely useless for others.

Israelinurse: Too often people will disparage western quackery or western religions, but lap up eastern ones because of their own biases. If acupuncture helps chronic back pain, it is due to a placebo effect. I have no problems with placebos — if it makes people feel better, good. But, I see it as no different than many of these homeopathic cures.

I forgot to add that ‘medically approved’ techniques are sometimes untested as well. A good example is chronic back pain, where the recommendation used to be 3 months of bed rest. Which was grotesquely wrong (unless something is broken, obviously) — in fact precisely the opposite of what should be done. Eventually some real scientists (not to be confused with doctors) actually examined outcomes, and the recommendation is now ‘get up as soon as possible’.

Marge, you do make a couple of important points there. My list of reasons wasn’t meant to be exhaustive! And, yes, it is important to recognise, as you say, that while “the ‘philosophy’ behind chiropracty is absolute rubbish… it has a few useful pragmatic techniques”, although it should be stressed that these pragmatic techniques have no effect (other than a possible placebo effect) in ‘treating’ many of the problems that chiropracty claims to be able to treat. Obviously, if my wife has a sore back, an experienced chiropractor is likely to do a much better job of jiggling it back into shape than I would!

Well this time, I disagree with my favourite HP commenters. We have been up this street before.

First of all, I hope Mr.Singh will not be fined. The chiros should have answered his article and put their point of view And I have grown up in a family – my father a doctor – entirely sceptical of alternative medicines and bogus treaments, and I am still sceptical.

I think Singh in his original article could have been a bit more careful, ie. explained that in his experience and research there was no proof of the efficacy of Chiropactice, rather than directly calling them charlatans and liars.

I know for absolutely sure that a Chiropracter saved me from infinite, unbearble pain. It’s no good saying that my condition might have improved any way, because I was submitting to official medical treatment that seemed to aim at worsening the pain at every session. It became more nand more excruciating with every session, until I could hardly sit, stand or lie down without heavy doses of painkillers which destroy your liver. At this high point of agony, I went to a chiropracter, and the pain was alleviated within a week & I have taken no painkillers since then.

In the two big hospitals in Verona, one believed in immediate surgical intervention which leaves a large percentage of people as badly or worse off than before. Of course they want guinea pigs on which to practise their art; at the other hospital I was sent to a torture chamber.

My chiropracter considers his art scientific and not magic. I don’t know enough about this. But what is absolutely scientific is that they look at your posture: how doistorted you are; whether your body and muscles are supporting your back; whether one shoulder or leg is lower than the other and you are given exercises to improve these defects. None of my official medics and specialists – talk of quacks – took the slightest notice of this.

My family doctor gave me a brace to wear around my torso, something that weakens the muscles that are supposed to support your back. The rest of his treatment of me was too horrific to recount. I have only had quacks as doctors – with the exception of my father, who took his profession very seriously.

The Singh article mentioned things that went wrong with Chiropractice – well how many quacks are there in this as in the medical profession?

In a Wikepedia article there is a statement saying that there is overwhelming evidence that chiropractice helps a large number of people. I saw a programme on German television in which a group of entirely sceptical medics were called in to observe, and admitted, to their amazement, that the treatment did work.

Then no sharp dividing line can be drawn between trick and treatment. Obviously there can be a psychosomatic element in cures – though not for ills which enable you to see that two of your vertebrae have come apart, the white cushion between them is dissolving and two black nerves come out to cause you all the pain.

I have suffered all my life from hayfever. At one point a friend gave me a natural cure – harmless enough, pills filled with powdered quail’s eggs. I was entirely sceptical but thought it would do no harm to take them. Well, I haven’t had hayfever for 5 years. To this day I don’t know if the cure was psychosomatic or not.

Even my ultra-rationalist father admitted that certain ailments like warts could be effectively and unscientifically cured by witch doctors or similar people.

(although I can see the Machiavellian attraction of encouraging placebo use as a way of reducing the unnnecassary consumption of proper, active medicines by people who absolutely insist on getting a prescription every time they visit a doctor with the merest sniffle)

Ah sod the placebo, rather prescribe a course of MDMA or better yet 1000 mg of Pentobarbital!

Very few commenters here know the first thing about chiropractic. Pity this doesn’t deter them from talking balls.

Could someone please ask Prince Charles to question a bed of petunias at Highgrove and get a clear ruling about this malarky?

A fatwa, as one might say.

George
According to Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst book “Trick or Treatment” there is small evidence that chiropractics is good for relieving back pain in some cases and nothing else. Nevertheless, some chiropractors claim they can cure a whole bunch of malaises. i think Simon Singh was talking about these guys.

Felix
You story is interesting and I believe you, but it has no medical or scientific value. To get to the conclusion that some drug or treatment really works, extensive double-blind tests involving hundreds or thousands of people should be conducted and published.
Placebo effect is weird, but is true. We still don’t understand how, but it works. That’s the most plausible explanation for the many anecdotal stories of cure by all kinds of alternative medicine.

To get to the conclusion that some drug or treatment really works, extensive double-blind tests involving hundreds or thousands of people should be conducted and published.

How do they do double-blind tests of something like physiotherapy?

With pills, sure, it’s clear. Pills are taken. Neither patient nor therapist knows which ones are real.

But how can they ‘fake’ giving someone an exercise to perform?

kmag -quite agree. Obviously the placebo effect is of importance, and I would also factor in two other things. One is attention -most alternative therapists devote a lot of time to their patients, which is something the conventional medical system largely falls down on. They also often use touch and these two factors -human contact and somebody devoting time to us -are very much lacking in many people’s modern lives. I have an entirely unproven theory that this boosts the placebo effect.
The other factor is money. If a person has paid hard cash for a particular treatment he is, in my experience, more likely to reap something positive from it in his view.
Again, entirely unproven, but based on years of community nursing, a lot of people come to the surgery seeking help for problem x when really they want to talk about issue y. In many cases the modern medical system just isn’t geared up to address these issues. Doctors work to targets in the 10 minutes allocated per patient. Alternative therapies are filling this void.

LR

You got a point. it’s not always easy to perform double-blind tests. For instance, it is posible to test the effect of acupuncture with fake needles (that retract once they touch the skin), but this would be only single-blind (only the patient does not know whether the treatment is real).
In the case of chiropractics and physiotherapy, I don’t really know if a double-blind test is feasible.
Mind you, physiotherapy is not controvertible and it does not claim treating diseases other than muscle and bone injuries.

Zumb

“Felix
You story is interesting and I believe you, but it has no medical or scientific value.”

Fuck the scientific and medical value. More interesting is postive results. They are the evidence. And you have ignored the scientific evidence I have illustrated above.

Response from a top city lawyer friend who I forwarded this to:

Some interesting issues – however, it was just a preliminary hearing to ascertain whether there was a prima facie case that could be tried or whether it should be thrown out. The judge obviously decided there was something to argue (he did not decide the outcome – that is for the trial). Poor reporting.

“Very few commenters here know the first thing about chiropractic. Pity this doesn’t deter them from talking balls”

Pity that you haven’t grasped at all what we are talking about.

Mrs Trellis –

I think that’s a bit unfair. IIRC McKenna had got his qualification from some sort of postal or internet college. But you did have to meet some minimal criteria to get your qualification. But you might surprised what qualifies for a degree in bona fide UK universities these days.

Nick SA –

Lots of people have nearly died or suffered psychotic reactions to anti-malarial drugs. Surely you know that?

Personally speaking I adopt the cowards of not going to malarial regions. But if you do go, surely it’s a matter of choice about how you protect yourself.

Are you prepared to take full personal responsibility for any ill effects suffered by people who take anti-malarial drugs? Of course not. That’s the question you should always ask your doctor – and have the tape recorder running.

Felix:

“Fuck the scientific and medical value. More interesting is postive results. They are the evidence. And you have ignored the scientific evidence I have illustrated above.”

Felix, there is an old aphorism: the plural of anecdote is not data.

Nor, in that vein, are ill-remembered sources evidence.

Say what you want about Singh (& Ernst), but at least he uses solid numbers etc. rather “a wikipedia article” or a programme on German TV. For scientific evidence something approaching a link like this would be more appropriate:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18280103
ie. a link to an abstract from a peer-reviewed journal indexed in MEDLINE.

I’ll leave it at that.

field:

“Lots of people have nearly died or suffered psychotic reactions to anti-malarial drugs. Surely you know that?

Personally speaking I adopt the cowards of not going to malarial regions. But if you do go, surely it’s a matter of choice about how you protect yourself.”

Field, I’m going to assume you are being truthful here, and not lying/exagerating/naively passing on misinformation.

Yes, lots(/most) of interventions have side effects. However, there is a difference between possible side effects of drugs that have been proven to work and taking water/sugar pills that offer no protection at all and have no side effects.

Given that the side effects of drugs being that drastic are really quite small and the chances of catching malaria in a high malarial region with no protection* are quite high. I think I know which I would choose. But I agree, discretion may be the better part of valour in such cases ;).

FWIW, the BHA agrees with all the skeptics here when it comes to homeopathy:
http://www.trusthomeopathy.org/export/sites/bha_site/hh_article_bank/in_practice/general_practice/autumn_08_general_practice.pdf
“Members of the Faculty of Homeopathy operate within very clear policy guidelines which advocate medical immunisation and condemn
homeopathic malaria vaccination.”

*remind me again how “like cures like” can protect against malaria.

Evert

I followed your link and read the article about chiropractice. The article seemed very reasonable to me, and does not exclude possible beneficial effects.

If you don’t mind, I’m not an ‘anecdore’ but a real person who has been relieved of pain – and so have may other people I know

The author of the article talks of the costs of chiropractic treatment. Well, they are on the capitalist market like many others. What one doesn’t have to pay for psychoanalysis – and is this a sufficiently proven treatment? I only had to peek through the door of a specialist to be told he was busy and I could come on another day. This peek cost me 90 euros, considerably more than my ch. treatment for a week.

I was treated gratis for my chiropractic manipulations, because they were funded by the National Health Service. Later Berlusconi took away this funding, not because he was against Chiropractice but because he was generally cutting funds. MY chiropracter takes me now for a special fee which is manageable for people who are not well-off.

But I think it is at present more than one’s life is worth to defend a chiropracter on HP. The – partly psychological and unscientifically generated – hatred is almost as great as other hatreds we know of. People are absolutely not prepared to listen to anyone who says the have benefitted from the unmentionable treatment.

And who wouldn’t sympathise with Mr. Singh? I certainly hope he will not be successfully sued for damages, and would be willing to militate against such an outcome.

This thread has been superceded by others on the same subject, so my comment will probably fall by the wayside. I can’t say that I really care.