That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘Health’

Letter issued from the McTimoney Association to all its members which appears to be in response to the Simon Singh libel case (here’s some background information):

Date: 8 June 2009 09:12:18 BDT

Subject: FURTHER URGENT ACTION REQUIRED!

Dear Member

If you are reading this, we assume you have also read the urgent email we sent you last Friday. If you did not read it, READ IT VERY CAREFULLY NOW and – this is most important – ACT ON IT. This is not scaremongering. We judge this to be a real threat to you and your practice.

Because of what we consider to be a witch hunt against chiropractors, we are now issuing the following advice:

The target of the campaigners is now any claims for treatment that cannot be substantiated with chiropractic research. The safest thing for everyone to do is as follows.

1. If you have a website, take it down NOW.

When you have done that, please let us know preferably by email or by phone. This will save our valuable time chasing you to see whether it has been done.

2. REMOVE all the blue MCA patient information leaflets, or any patient information leaflets of your own that state you treat whiplash, colic or other childhood problems in your clinic or at any other site where they might be displayed with your contact details on them. DO NOT USE them until further notice. The MCA are working on an interim replacement leaflet which will be sent to you shortly.

3. If you have not done so already, enter your name followed by the word ‘chiropractor’ into a search engine such as Google (e.g. Joe Bloggs chiropractor) and you will be able to ascertain what information about you is in the public domain e.g. where you might be listed using the Doctor title or where you might be linked with a website which might implicate you. We have found that even if you do not have a website yourself you may still have been linked inadvertently to a website listing you or your services.

CHECK ALL ENTRIES CAREFULLY AND IF IN DOUBT, CONTACT THE RELEVANT PROVIDER TO REMOVE YOUR INFORMATION.

CHECK OUR PREVIOUS EMAILS FOR SPECIFIC ADVICE AND KEY WORDS TO AVOID.

KEEP A LOG OF YOUR ACTIONS.

4. If you use business cards or other stationery using the ‘doctor’ title and it does not clearly state that you are a doctor of chiropractic or that you are not a registered medical practitioner, STOP USING THEM immediately.

5. Be wary of ‘mystery shopper’ phone calls and ‘drop ins’ to your practice, especially if they start asking about your care of children, or whiplash, or your evidence base for practice.

IF YOU DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ADVICE, YOU MAY BE AT RISK FROM PROSECUTION.

IF YOU DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ADVICE, THE MCA MAY NOT BE ABLE TO ASSIST YOU WITH ANY PROCEEDINGS.

Although this advice may seem extreme or alarmist, its purpose is to protect you. The campaigners have a target of making a complaint against every chiropractor in the UK who they perceive to be in breach of the GCC’s CoP, the Advertising Standards Code and/or Trading Standards. We have discovered that complaints against more than 500 individual chiropractors have been sent to the GCC in the last 24 hours.

Whatever you do, do not ignore this email and make yourself one of the victims. Some of our members have not followed our earlier advice and now have complaints made against them. We do not want that to happen to you.

Even if you do not have a website, you are still at risk. Our latest information suggests that this group are now going through Yellow Pages entries. Be in no doubt, their intention is to scrutinise every single chiropractor in the UK.

The MCA Executive has worked tirelessly over the last week keeping abreast of development and contacting at risk members. We have decided that this is our best course of action to protect you and the Association at this time of heightened tension. This advice is given to you solely to protect you from what we believe is a concerted campaign, and does not imply any wrongdoing on your part or the part of the Association. We believe that our best course of action is simply to withdraw from the battleground until this latest wave of targeting is over.

Finally, we strongly suggest you do NOT discuss this with others, especially patients, Firstly it would not be ethical to burden patients with this, though if they ask we hope you now have information with which you can respond.

Most importantly, this email and all correspondence from the MCA is confidential advice to MCA members alone, and should not be shared with anyone else.

Please be aware that the office phone lines are likely to be busy, so, if you need our help, please send an email to the office and we will get back to you as soon as we can.

Yours,

Berni Martin

MCA Chair.

Thanks to the excellent quackometer for publishing this. Reposting just in case anyone gets upset and sends quacky a takedown notice

(my emphasis)

It’s a Quote of the Day!

Health scares enable media-hungry doctors, public health officials and drugs companies to benefit by manipulating fright.

That was Guardian hack Simon Jenkins being totally unironic while bitching about how scares such as the current swine flu thing are normally propagated by people who have something to gain from it.

Yes, Simon, they are called “newspapers” and they gain because they make money selling more of their newspapers.

Prostitution is likely to be criminalised because there is a victim right? After all, the mandate of the government when criminalising stuff is to halt behaviour that impacts on others in a negative way, right? Some stuff like murder is obvious, the victim is the person who is murdered. Some stuff like drunk driving is a preventative thing because it stops accidents from happening and it stops people from becoming victims. And there are some crimes which exist solely to cut down on self-inflicted injury which cost the tax payer (thanks to the wonders of the NHS) and the state as a whole some serious cash.

In the case of prostitution it’s hard to find the victim though, it’s like a giant game of Where’s Wally, in which Wally fails to make an appearance. Let’s go through the interested parties:

The Tom

The tom is making good money and in most cases chooses to be in the trade. The hours are good and the pay is good too. Working the streets is a lot less pleasant than working in a brothel where you may have a pimp or a madam taking their cut but either way the flexibility of being your own boss has its advantages. There is a cost to social capital if your job is to be a ho’ but that is made up by the good wages.

The Pimp

The pimp certainly isn’t the victim: he’s taking a cut of the action in return for fixing up the tricks. Some pimps offer protection as well, but in general the arrangement is that they fix up the deals which means the toms don’t have to find their own trade.

The Johns

The johns are the nearest thing to a victim; you could almost argue that they are the victim, but then they have a choice in the matter. Either way they want a service and they are prepared to pay for it. At typical European rates, Paul McCartney could have got laid every night of his life for considerably less than it cost to get rid of that batshit insane Mills woman (€1.2m assuming he was up for it 7 days a week for the whole of the usual three score years and ten compared to about €25m which it cost him to marry and then divorce the mad slag with the missing limbs).

Society as a whole

Hmmm. Not sure how they are the victim here. At the moment the toms don’t pay tax; if they did then it would be hard to claim that society would be suffering. There are health implications to prostitution but legalised and licensed prostitution means that health and hygiene rules can be imposed to ensure that everyone goes about their business in a safe way.

I’ve skipped over the one excuse that governments around the world use time and time again: by criminalising prostitution the government is protecting the innocent girls who get forced into a life of prostitution by their exploiting pimps. That’s just bullshit. It’s like saying that all work should be banned because a few employers don’t pay minimum wage. If prostitution were legalised and licensed then there would be a line drawn between those who want to make good money on their backs, and those who are trafficked and working as illegally trafficked immigrants. The government could pay for the regulation because those who want to work in the sex trade would be tax payers and the health concerns could be tackled by introducing health and hygiene rules for licensed hookers.

Combine this with harsher penalties for johns using unlicensed toms and the demand for illegally traded women dries up, thus forcing the traffickers out of business. Of course the government isn’t going to do this because they are obsessed with the idea that all toms are victims of exploitation, after all, who would choose that life?

Quite a few it would seem.

It’s no big deal, it’s natures way.

Some twat in Scotland has proposed that a tax should be levied on chocolate; the BBC HYS forum is currently red hot. It’s not a bad idea to do something about obesity but we are attacking it from the wrong angle, the current thinking is to tax everyone in order to waste money telling fatties that they should eat less and exercise more, all the while the fatty food companies are spending more money getting the fatties through the door and plying them with lard. We are now considering taxing everyone for eating crap in the same way that we tax smokers and drinkers, something which the tobacco industry fought by making smokes a luxury and desirable product and something the booze industry fought by lowering production costs, lowering margins and increasing volume.

So if we know that these things don’t work why are we doing them? We tax booze and fags not to lower demand but to line the coffers of the treasury so that they can offset the cost of booze and smoke related illnesses. So why not attack the costs head on rather than trying to scrabble around for the cash to pay for it? Why not just withdraw free NHS treatment for smokers, drinkers and fatties. Not only does it provide a real incentive for people to stop smoking, drinking or cramming junk down the gullets, it means that those who don’t can continue to make that choice without impacting on the rest of society. Sure a few fatties will die but they are going to die anyway and prolonging their lives is a pointles waste of time. Parents who allow their kids to become fatties can of course be prosecuted for child abuse and the kids rehomed with parents who are actually going to take care of them.

Guest post from ‘Sensibly Ginger’
The Independent, on Thursday 26th Feb said:

“Health officials have been forced to withdraw 21,000 doses of the meningitis C vaccine from GP clinics around the UK after it emerged that some doses may have been contaminated with a blood-poisoning bacterium.
“More than 60,000 doses of the vaccine, which is offered to all four-month-old babies, could be contaminated with the hospital-acquired infection – the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium – and a third of these had already been sent to vaccination clinics before officials became aware of the problem.
“Officials within the Department of Health and the vaccine’s manufacturers are believed to have known of the problem since Tuesday but only issued an emergency recall last night after being contacted about the potential contamination by The Independent. “

Maybe that’s because ALL of the vaccines in the UK were safe, as the Independent evidently knew:

“In a statement, the Department of Health denied that any contaminated samples had entered the UK market. Two batches have been identified and are being recalled as a purely precautionary measure. These two batches passed all routine quality testing, including a sterility test.”

What has happened, as the BBC reported, is:

“The recalled batches of the Menjugate Kit, which were manufactured in Italy, had passed safety checks before leaving the factory to be transported by road to the UK.
“But a small number of samples were sent overseas by aeroplane to test whether the sample would remain secure under different air pressures.
“At the destination, these were found to be contaminated with staphylococcus aureus bacteria, but never entered the supply chain.”

So really, what it should have said is:

Novartis bend over backwards to make sure your kids are safe, and don’t die from meningitis. 

But that wouldn’t sell adverts, if all they did was inform you of the important news you need to know.

The media have fueled the fire, yet again, and are helping the public misunderstanding of science. Vaccines are safe, they really, really are. Children are now dying because parents aren’t getting their children vaccinated.

Raising worries over safe vaccines is not only a fucking stupid thing to do, it is a public health risk.