Comments on: BBC drops information about Complimentary Medicine from it's health website

By: bryan

bryan — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:22:09 +0000

It seems that someone forgot to tell the powers that be in the world renowned Harley Street and Mayo Clinics that complementary medicine is so terrible. It is promoted strongly and used in both places, especially in cancer patients. So who is right…Quack Busters or the real experts? A no-brainer wouldn’t you say? Quack Busters just got busted! I guess there was no investigative journalist available from the BBC that could get to the bottom of this…eh…mystery. Knee jerk reactions can be very dangerous and stupid things to have…but to err is human so the BBC can be forgiven for overreacting. Fool you once BBC, shame on Quack Busters. Fool you twice, shame on you. Now be good fellows and upload the web pages again.

Bernadette Ryan

By: leigh

leigh — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 07:46:59 +0000

saddly it seems this is true this is what the beeb say The BBC’s response
The decision to remove the complementary medicine area of the health website was taken as part of a wider review of all the health content in order to enable the BBC to focus its efforts on creating new and exciting content.
In order to release resources for this redevelopment work, we’re reviewing existing content from an editorial and value-for-money perspective.
The complementary health section was incomplete and, therefore, not of a satisfactory editorial standard.
It also represented a small proportion of traffic to the site but was disproportionately time-consuming.
Therefore, the decision to take it down was based on a combination of factors: how much work it needed to maintain to a high editorial standard, how much this cost and how popular it was with site users.
We have already removed other sections of the health site and plan to reduce or remove others.
We appreciate people are disappointed this area of the site has been removed and apologise if the decision has appeared abrupt to site users or inconvenienced other sites linking to BBC Health.
The BBC will continue to cover complementary health in other areas of its output, such as TV, radio and news programmes, and may reassess its complementary health content in future.

By: stavros

stavros — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:17:12 +0000

Hannah said: Rather than taking a reasoned view and considering th evidence from good research studies on complementary medicine these individuals seem simply hell bent on trying to ’stamp out’ complementary medicine in any way possible.

Obviously there is a good reason why scientists want to ‘stamp it out’ as you say. It doesn’t work. Why the hell would a scientist (not one but the vast majority!) not want a simple cure for everything from cancer to AIDS and Malaria as homeopathy claims?!? Does that make sense to you? The old story of conspiracy is totally baseless.

The grace period for homeopathy is over after 200 years and a large amount of negative studies and a small amount of positive ones. And the positive ones were fully expected if homeopathy is placebo as dictated by Bayesian theory and prior probability because of the scientific implausibility of homeopathy.

So we have two facts: i) homeopathy goes against current scientific laws and well established theories and ii) the clinical evidence for its efficacy are by no means conclusive, on the contrary they show that it is no better than placebo.

So, tell me again why we should pay taxes to fund homeopathy and why BBC should put it back?

By: Andy Lewis

Andy Lewis — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:08:20 +0000

Hi there, just a quick one. I am a regular critic of alternative medicine and run a sceptical site at quackometer.net. I am also aware of people like David Colquhoun and his activities. What I am not aware of is any concerted attempt to shut down BBC CAM web pages. I know people may have pointed out factual errors from time to time, but there is no desire to see the pages disappear, as you suggest.

What evidence do you have for a campaign? I am most interested? I for one would like sites like the BBC to give clear and well thought out information about CAM and its evidence base. I fear no site that does such a thing. I personally believe CAM is so popular because people are unaware of the nature of much CAM and the though behind it. As far as I understand, the BBC pulled the pages because they were demanding a lot of editorial time and few people visited them.

Your thoughts, and the evidence for a ‘campaign’ would be most welcome!

Andy