Edzard Ernst is a Fake
When I first heard, years ago, that there was a Professor of Complementary Medicine at Exeter University, I was quite excited. At last, I thought, academia is taking complementary approaches seriously! Should have known better, shouldn’t I?
Edzard Ernst is NOT a Professor of Complementary Medicine, because he only ever professes against it! He is also a member of the Medicines Commission of the British Medicines Control Agency (MCA), and one of the thirteen apostles of the pharmaceutical industry that were signatories to the now-infamous open letter calling for complimentary therapies to be dropped by the NHS in 2006, before they got a chance to prove effective and start encroaching on the territory ‘owned’ by Big Pharma.
Edzard Ernst has written extensively about problems and supposed dangers in the complementary field, whilst publishing so little in favour of any CAM therapy that it is obvious to anyone in our field that the Laing Chair in Complementary Medicine really exists as a platform from which to profess against alternative approaches, whilst suggesting that so-called ‘evidence-based medicine’ (EBM) is safer and superior , as if that were a matter of fact. Well we all know from the recent drug trial scandals that this is very far from the truth.
Who sponsors the Laing chair? How did it come into existence? Because I will tell you one thing for sure, it has nothing whatever to do with those of us who actually practise alternative and complementary methods. Ernst is a scientist, and only this morning I heard him on BBC Radio 4 calling for The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health to withdraw a booklet they first published three years ago, because (he said) it made claims for acupuncture and homeopathy that could not be substantiated.
So he claims. And obviously, if that’s what you want to believe anyway, it is effortless to assume that Ernst’s work finally proves it, ’scientifically’, and that is the end of that. Which indeed it would be, if Ernst’s methods were sound, exhaustive, and beyond reproach - but they’re not.
Dumb Mistake No.1
Ernst has been gifted a title which makes him seem - to some - like the world’s greatest authority on complementary medicine! This is laughable, because the real experts are the best-trained and most talented and experienced full-time practitioners in the active field itself. Are these people drafted in to help Ernst to discover just how useful their talents are? No. Instead, it is assumed that the best people to carry out studies into the effectiveness of highly skilled therapeutic procedures like hypnotherapy or acupuncture are… scientists.
Dumb Mistake No.2
If you are just testing a new pill, and the pill is the sum total of the medical intervention, then a blind controlled trial makes sense, provided you look at ALL the evidence that results (not just the bits that seem promising), and follow up the results for long enough to be sure the success is lasting success. But with some CAM therapies - and this is particularly true of hypnotherapy - there is bound to be a very significant difference between the way people respond in real therapeutic settings… when the whole procedure is all about them… and the way they feel in a controlled scientific trial which is not all about their outcome, but the general efficacy of the method, which is then necessarily in question. This may even create a form of ‘performance anxiety’ in which the subject feels obliged to respond well, and therefore is not able to simply respond normally. Put simply, the setting is abnormal, which affects everyone involved in a negative way, just as attempting a tonsillectomy in the car park of a busy motorway service station would. This factor is multiplied if the ’surgeon’ is not really a professional, but a scientist who wants to find out for himself if operations like this are really as safe and easy as surgeons claim. To ignore such factors is simply unscientific, but here is a link accusing Ernst of adopting methods that virtually eliminate the crucial factor of real expertise and professional experience - not to mention 99% of the actual trial evidence available to him! (Link)
Dumb Mistake No.3
Edzard Ernst has been criticised not only by CAM practitioners, but by the scientific world too. One newspaper report suggested that “this must mean he is getting something right”, ignoring the rather more obvious conclusion that maybe he isn’t getting anything right. In that article, Ernst stated that he isn’t troubled by getting flak from both sides, but what would trouble him, he remarked, was if someone said the science was wrong. Enter Robert Verkerk, to trouble him with this: (Link)
Recycling Old Rubbish
Most people would probably assume that the work Ernst has been doing, in his capacity as the World’s First Professor of Complementary Medicine, will have been new experimentation investigating those complementary approaches as they are actually practised, and using the best modern methods - making full use of the skills of the real practitioners, the experts people actually consult on a daily basis. How else can you ascertain the true value of the therapies as they are practised in reality?
Actually, this is not the case at all. Scientific trials cost an awful lot of money, and although governments used to fund a lot of scientific research half a century ago, they don’t now. In fact, the only organisations who still put large amounts of cash into new experimentation are the big drug companies. They don’t want to spend a dollar unless there’s a chance of it making them some profit, so obviously all that research goes into new drugs.
This means that so few trials have ever been undertaken into methods like hypnotherapy and acupuncture by Western medical scientists, and it was mostly done so long ago (and often clumsily) that the entire scientific evidence-base is tiny when it comes to complementary therapies, and it ain’t likely to get much bigger any time soon. Why would drug companies fund studies into hypnotherapy? They can’t sell that!
So what scientists actually do, when they ‘research’ complementary therapies, is they sift through old studies and cherry-pick which of those they are going to regard as “significant” or “relevant”, according to what they want to conclude, and then review that bit, leaving out whatever they prefer to leave out. This is highly selective, and basically means you can organise particular elements from the overall evidence which are then presented as if they can be regarded as representative of the overall picture, and if those elements did not indicate anything exciting or significant (that’s why they were chosen), you can claim that this evidence indicates “no significant evidence of the efficacy of these methods”, without mentioning any other evidence at all.
In fact, you could do exactly that with all therapeutic or medical methods, and make it seem as if nothing works. All very amusing, but it’s not science.
Watch out for the word ‘Review’
Most scientific dismissals of complementary approaches will use this expression: “A review of all the relevant evidence from a number of research trials found no significant evidence of efficacy…” Those who hear that, and were already skeptical, will instantly accept that statement as if it were scientific proof that the methods don’t work. But it is not research. It is selective reporting, organised in such a reductive manner that it is often useless and sometimes very misleading.
True science is supposed to be objective, but men like Ernst are not objective, they are on a mission. For some skeptics, like Richard Dawkins, it is a personal mission to disprove anything that doesn’t square with his own personal view of the world. Nothing wrong with that, we need diverse views and that one serves an intellectual purpose, just as other views can. But men like Ernst are fakes because they pretend to be something they’re not.
He claims that his work will help complementary methods gain credibility by “proving what works and what doesn’t”. All he is really proving - and crucially, without most people realising it - is that if you go about this in ways that seriously distort the usual manner in which these things are REALLY done by the true experts in these matters, you make it look as if the methods aren’t much good, which is worse than not investigating it at all.
Imagine a Professor of Surgical Medicine who only ever seemed to publish papers warning everybody about the potential dangers of surgery. Constantly questioning its efficacy, and pointing to cases of surgical error, but hardly ever mentioning all the marvellous successes? Mentioning just a few though, to make it look as if this was truly an objective procedure. Surgery is successful more often than it is not, generally speaking, but a professor behaving like that would create the opposite impression, would he not? How could Surgery possibly be advanced in that way?
In my own hypnotherapy practice, I know that hypnotherapy is also successful more often than it is not. I cannot speak for chiropractors, acupuncturists or homoeopaths in this regard, but I do hear the familiar warnings and dismissals from the likes of Ernst, using the same language constructions such as the phrase above (”a review of all relevant studies found no significant evidence” etc.), as we find in material routinely dismissing methods like hypnotherapy, published by the Royal College of Physicians, A.S.H., and other similar bodies closely tied to the pharmaceutical giants. I KNOW hypnotherapy works very well, so why are they getting it so wrong? Either they are just incompetent - which is bad - or they’re choosing to screen out/ignore any evidence to the contrary.
So Ernst may not be a fake scientist, but his methods are certainly questionable. To those of us who are proud to be practitioners in the field of alternative medicine (if we must call it that), he is certainly a fake Professor of Complementary Medicine, because he has clearly and consistently established himself as one of a number of key professors against it. They warn against the ‘dangers’ of methods that people have been using for centuries, whilst we note that they have nothing to say about the horrors caused by “evidence based” medications which kill thousands. Instead they expend all their efforts suggesting we should all be deeply suspicious of traditional therapies that are really quite popular and don’t kill thousands of people. That imbalance is NOT scientific objectivity, obviously - it is ideological bias, prejudice and (at the end of the day, just as it was at the start of the day) all about power, profit and influence.
The Chief Executive of The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health, Kim Lavely, conducted herself admirably in that interview, and was unmoved by Edzard Ernst’s claims against alternative methods. Why was he speaking out now, when that booklet has been out for ages? Well it’s not the first time he has attempted to thwart attempts to integrate drug therapies and alternatives, not by a very long way. But the timing is significant, because all the press lately has been against Big Pharma, hasn’t it? So they’re rolling out their big guns, trying to win back some of the ground they’ve lost through recent scandals involving so-called ‘evidence-based medicines’ which turned out not to be, actually, because they had so little regard for efficacy in reality that they withheld some of the actual evidence.
Nicotine Replacement Poisoning isn’t truly ‘evidence-based’ either, as all the real evidence in my book - and on this site - proves beyond doubt. In that Radio 4 interview, Ernst said: “If anything in healthcare is misleading, it is dangerous.” Might that apply to publishing boasts of 90% ’success’ for South West Kent Primary Care Trust’s Stop Smoking Services in the Department of Health’s press release dated 9th July 2004, when we now know the real, long term outcome for those methods is 6%? That’s about as misleading as you can get, mate. Nicotine is also very poisonous, frequently causing heart attacks, strokes and thrombosis in thousands of people every year.
So, Edzard, if you really believe - as you claim - that the same standards should apply to both alternative methods and drug therapies when it comes to approving them - or indeed dropping them, as you called for in 2006, with regard to alternatives in the NHS - will you now join me, as I’m sure any real Professor of Complementary Therapy would, if one existed, in calling for nicotine-based products to be dropped by the NHS? After all, the evidence of their long-term effectiveness is now known to be so dire that they function very poorly even as a placebo - with the unusual drawback, as placebos go, of also being highly poisonous?
Of course you won’t. Because you are a fake, and everyone in the field of complementary medicine knows it. You’re just another lackey of the pharmaceutical industry, with no more real regard for the truth than they have. It’s not hypnotherapists, acupuncturists or homoeopaths who are killing people by the thousand every year. It’s your so-called ‘evidence-based medicines’. Those are the facts, so how dare you suggest that we are the ones that are posing a danger to the public? You are ridiculous, and if anything is particularly “misleading in healthcare”, it’s you!
Filed under: Drugs on Trial, The Campaign by Chris
Well said! Glad someone else has got Ernst’s number. What a cheap publicity trick to pick on the Prince of Wales in order to publicise his book! People will be bored by now with all the negativity and following on from the Shapiro diatribe its just more of the same. What a joke this man and his grandiose title are. As for Singh he is a signed up sceptic anyway, highly biased - 90% journalist 10% scientist about sums it up.
Rather than attacking the man (ah hominem) why don’t you try to come up with a reasoned argument about why he is wrong about something? Or is that above you?
I’m not attacking the man. I don’t know the man. And I would not call him a fake either, if only he correctly identified himself as a scientist who is so anxious to be taken seriously by his peers that he has adopted a super-critical approach that is not genuinely objective. He does not have the same attitude to conventional medicines at all. He never pops up on Radio 4 objecting to Pfizer’s claims about Champix or calling for it to be dropped before anyone else kills themselves, but he will get very self-righteous about any suggestion that acupuncture might be useful for this or that.
Is it somehow beyond your comprehension that the tiny, tiny number of cases of people suffering any kind of harm through the advice or actions of a complementary practitioner pale into insignificance compared to the horrific toll of death and injury caused every year by pharmaceutical products? A man who claims he is simply applying the same ‘rigorous’ standards to complementary approaches as he would to pharmaceutical products is clearly lying, when you would be hard-pressed to find him campaigning in public for any pharmaceutical product to be withdrawn - either on grounds of safety or efficacy. And before anyone says “That’s not his job”, the reality is much worse than that. His academic job actually performs the function of routinely distract attention away from the global horror story of the pharmaceutical industry by suggesting the risks lie elsewhere!
He is not a Professor of Complementary Medicine. There isn’t one. There probably never will be. And here’s a question for you to puzzle, Bobble: Ernst said that if anything in healthcare is misleading, it is dangerous. I heard him. So how many more thousands of people have to die or suffer horrible side-effects before people like Ernst, and yourself, finally admit to yourselves where the real threat to public safety lies? He’s a fake. And if he really thinks he’s helping to protect the public by putting them off complementary approaches in favour of pharmaceuticals, he is wilfully ignoring vast amounts of evidence to the contrary. And so are you.
* Later addition, 30th July 2008: Yesterday I found a reference to this post on guardian.co.uk, where someone calling themselves ‘bassireland’ launched an attack which I will reproduce here, with a few comments of my own. I have noticed that some of the more vociferous opponents of complementary approaches have a kind of blank allegiance to the notion of ’science’ to the point of being in blind denial that anything bad could possibly come of it. It is impossible to convince anyone like this that this is sometimes wrong, because they simply will not look at the evidence. I suspect that this is because they know they are not really very bright, so they do not want to risk thinking for themselves because they don’t have that much faith in their own judgement, but they feel a need to seem intelligent nevertheless. So they play safe, by pledging allegiance to the official intelligence code - Science - which they believe is pre-validated. Science also cleverly declares that anything that is not ’scientific’, or approved by those in scientific authority, is delusional or dangerous because it is not scientific. This is a fascist ideology: conform, or be condemned.
Actually this would nevertheless be useful and progressive, if only science was infallible and incorruptible - but it is clearly neither. Whoever ‘bassireland’ and ‘puzzlebobble’ are, I guarantee you that they didn’t bother to read Professor David Healy’s article in the Trust Me, I’m a Doctor section of this site, which is a frightening indicator of just how corrupted the drug trials and approvals systems have become. ‘Bassireland’ accuses this site of being merely polemical and lacking in evidence. Oh no, pal, this site is all about evidence, you just didn’t bother to read any of it because you feel safer backing the mainstream. You will always avoid seriously considering any detailed evidence that might make you have to think again.
Anyway, I said: “Edzard Ernst is NOT a professor of complementary medicine, because he only ever professes AGAINST it!”
bassireland said: “He investigates. Using rigorous scientific analysis: the same level of analysis of safety and efficacy you would expect (well, I would expect) for any treatment. You don’t like some of the results, and because of your anger at these you then ignore the points he does make in favour of various therapies.”
Oh, I see - would that be the same kind of rigorous scientific analysis that gave us Prozac? And although Ernst does hand out faint praise here and there for various therapies, you are assuming that this proves he’s being fair and accurate! Right, here’s a perfect example of what I’m talking about: I have been a professional hypnotherapist for eight years. I’ve worked with thousands of people, helping them to get rid of all kinds of problems too numerous to mention here. My speciality has to be smoking, with which I’ve had tremendous success. Most of my smoking clients are cured in a single session, as I recently demonstrated for Channel M television in Manchester, working with one of their staff.
Ernst is supposed to be the expert, is he? So when he sums up hypnotherapy thus: “Dozens of clinical trials show that hypnotherapy is effective in reducing pain, anxiety and the symptoms of IBS. However, the evidence is that it is not effective to help you stop smoking, even though it is frequently promoted in this context.” …it is obvious to me that either the methods he is using are wrong, or he is part of a misinformation machine. In fact it has to be the latter, because there is already a large amount of published scientific research supporting what I know for sure through lots of personal experience: that hypnotherapy is by far the most successful method for smoking cessation when it is done properly. Of course, if it is done badly (through ignorance or by design) it won’t work, but then you can say the same for any therapy.
Also, if Ernst’s work were actually about establishing any kind of truth, answer me this: If the clinical evidence shows that hypnotherapy is “effective for treating pain and anxiety”, why is it still not an option for Primary Care patients anyway? Because of the massive lobbying power of the pharmaceutical industry, which has managed to slow that kind of progress to a glacial crawl, that’s why. Ernst’s lame endorsement making zero difference there, which is why we might as well “ignore the points he does make in favour of various therapies”. His “supporters” are only cheering his negative pronouncements about CAM therapies, because that’s what they had always assumed anyway. They won’t be converted from that position by anything positive he might have to say - they just ignore that.
Next quote:
“He is also a member of the Medicines Commission of the British Medicines Control Agency (MCA), …”
To which ‘bassireland’ says: “And? I think he is eminently qualified.”
Yeah, you would. That’s because you have never looked into it, have you? Allow me to enlighten you: The British Medicines Control Agency “has two objectives: To reduce licensing times for medicines, and to ensure that all medicines on the UK market have met appropriate standards of safety, quality and efficacy.” (Link)
Reducing licensing times for medicines is evidently the primary objective, though - not ensuring medicines are safe, which should be the priority. This is evidenced by the fact that there are ‘approved’ medications still being prescribed which have killed a lot of people, like the anti-psychotic I mentioned in another post, which is reckoned to have killed at least 700 people in the last five years. This is why I suggested that Ernst would do far more good doing that job properly, rather than spreading stupid, wrong information about hypnotherapy.
Can you sense that I’m angry, ‘bassireland’? You bet I’m angry: I have every right to be, and not just on behalf of professional hypnotherapists either. How many thousands of people have read what he said, assumed it’s all ’scientifically proven’ and not bothered with hypnotherapy when it could have cured them easily? Some of them die too, so people like Ernst have blood on their hands. I don’t care whether it’s by design or incompetence that those scientists are failing to recognise the true value of hypnotherapy. They are wrong, wrong, wrong.
Incidentally the document quoted above about the BMCA objectives comes to us courtesy of the American Chemical Society. Nice of them to take an interest in British Governmental affairs, isn’t it? You’d think they’d be too busy running their business to be bothering with the doings of Professor Ernst, et al. But maybe that gives a clue as to why I pointed out that he was:
“…one of the thirteen apostles of the pharmaceutical industry that were signatories to the now-infamous open letter calling for complementary therapies to be dropped by the NHS in 2006, before they got a chance to prove effective and start encroaching on the territory ‘owned by Big Pharma.”
To which ‘bassireland’ says:
“Tax euro should be spent on treatments that work demonstrably, reliably and repeatably.”
Oh, is that right? In that case perhaps you can explain why hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been wasted on Nicotine Replacement products that function very poorly even within the normal placebo range. How much was wasted on Prozac? You cannot take this pompous stance that just assumes that pharmaceuticals have been proven to be effective, safe and worthwhile when so many have proved dangerous and/or useless. Ernst is certainly not applying the same standards to each – he is not required to do so.
Methods On Trial
It is a very naive person who still holds up the myth of the “scientific trial” as if it is pure and objective. It’s a bit like saying to the Court of Appeal: “Just go through the motions, guys, because as we all know, if the original trial said guilty, then guilty it is!” What a happy little black and white world you must live in, bassireland. These are human procedures, these institutions are not independent, there are vast fortunes at stake in all this! You really think science is pure?
We then get a friendly warning from ‘bassireland’, which is a bit like the one I got over Paraxel, which I also ignored:
“To suggest as you do that Professor Ernst is falsifying his results because of some imagined link to pharmaceutical companies is on the face of it close to libellous: I think you should provide some evidence or withdraw it quickly.”
HA! You’ll have to do better than that, bassy. As you very well know, I have not suggested he is falsifying anything. That’s a loaded suggestion. I’m happy to say he is wrong - especially about hypnotherapy - and I did call him a lackey of the pharmaceutical industry, because everything he does serves them very well, but I don’t believe I said they were paying him. Somebody pays him, and I suppose he is closely associated with ‘the Establishment’ generally, in the sense that he is a top academic and he works for the government through the BMCA… and the pharmaceutical industry has enormous lobbying power with governments… Is this a conspiracy theory, or just pieces of a jigsaw that a chimp could put together?
Were the drug companies that witheld vital trial data that showed Prozac was no better than a placebo “falsifying results”? Or were they just being selective? Such a great deal of selection is involved in any kind of scientific trials that although it is quite difficult to prove something works when it doesn’t at all without being simply dishonest (as they were with Prozac, for sure), you can always manage to make something seem useless if that’s what you prefer to publish in the end, just by conducting it badly.
Were any drug company executives or employees prosecuted for withholding trial data from the approval bodies? No. Are approval bodies ever held to account when drugs they have approved kill hundreds of people? No. Are those drugs always withdrawn, so they don’t kill anyone else? Unbelievably, no. Not always. That simple fact is quite clearly because it would not be in the interests of the drug companies, even though it would save lives. Yes, that’s right - human lives are routinely sacrificed to protect drug companies from being sued, despite the fact that it is almost impossible to successfully sue them anyway.
I don’t think it is libel to point out that Ernst has obvious associations with the medical profession and the pharmaceutical world, but none with the world of complementary medicine as it is actually practised professionally. I withdraw nothing – I called him a lackey of the pharmaceutical industry because he is part of a loose association of like-minded individuals dedicated to keeping complementary therapy out of the medical mainstream, but they’ll let any old drug in there, even if it doesn’t work very well and/or kills people.
Look at Champix: not very rigorous about that, were they? They already knew it was linked to depression, aggression and suicidal thoughts before they passed it for use in the U.K. How many people have killed themselves since? How many will kill themselves on the new NHS weight-loss pill Acomplia, which N.I.C.E. saw fit to approve last month, even though that one is actually banned in the U.S. because of mental side-effects including suicidal thoughts?
We will find out! TRUTH WILL OUT, and I will be blaming those people directly involved in those decisions - even though we already know from the Champix suicides that they will try to blame the victims - because I guarantee you, if that had been a herbal remedy, Ernst would have been warning everyone left right and centre, and it would have been banned in a flash.
Open your eyes, bassireland, this is a global drugs racket involving billions. So-called “evidence-based medicines” are killing people in their thousands, and YOU ARE SUPPORTING IT! Read the evidence on this site. Investigate further! You have a computer, investigate! You seem to think it’s a good idea for Ernst to investigate - why not do some for yourself? I already know you won’t, though – because you know everything already, don’t you?
Bassy’s last comment proves complete ignorance about Truth Will Out:
“By the way, polemics from a site called “TruthWillOut” (which, like many conspiracy nutcase sites, seems to use “truth” in the same sense that the German Democratic Republic was “democratic) do not constitute evidence.”
You couldn’t be more wrong, buddy. This site is all about evidence. So is the book. You just didn’t bother to read any of it, did you? But more and more people are reading the evidence daily, all over the world. And they will recognise the truth of it, because these are not wild conspiracy theories - the pharmaceutical industry is killing thousands of people and products are being approved that don’t work and some are dangerous, because the approval system has become a sick pharmaceutical joke. And now that the internet has become the new shop window, all the cosmetic ‘controls’ will soon be ditched altogether, along with the medical profession, who are sleepwalking into their own demise. But it’s not personal, you understand - it’s just business. And if you doubt any of this, just read Professor David Healy’s article in Trust Me, I’m a Doctor. You don’t have to take my word for it. Read around. Polemics? No. Evidence, this site is all about evidence. It’s piling up, and so are the corpses. It’s not complementary medicine killing all these people and threatening many more. Ernst is part of a smokescreen - as are others - but the truth will blow them all away.