Edzard Ernst, the Quack Professor, retires defeated!

“Has Ernst been beating around the bush in his previous assessments of alternative therapies then? Outspoken, eh? Yeah, you do that, Ernst. You become “really outspoken”. I’ve been saying you were a wolf in sheep’s clothing for years. Here’s the rope: you hang yourself, pal. The fact is you were never bright enough to quit while you were ahead, and now the only people who have any time for you at all are the other mindless zealots who don’t know anything about CAM therapies anyway, and that’s why you really lost your job – it has nothing to do with Prince Charles…”

by Chris Holmes

In a fawning interview extract from Zeno’s blog, the Professor Against Complementary Medicine announces his academic demise and threatens to become “really outspoken” against CAM therapies! HA HA HA HA HA!

What really makes me laugh about this latest evidence of his total loss of credibility – as well as his job, which he should never have had in the first place – is this astounding statement:

“The trouble is that it is relatively easy to get research funds if you have the reputation of being “sympathetic” to CM. If you are critical, it is much harder.”

Hmm! Is it really “relatively easy” to get research funds if you are going to be ‘soft’ on Complementary Medicine? Who FROM? Who are all these kind donors who are lining up to give universities funding for research into CM, but unfortunately for Ernst stipulate that he mustn’t be too critical? Can you NAME ANY, Prof.?

Or perhaps he was unconsciously referring to the £2 million he secured from Maurice Laing by pretending he was going to be fair and even-handed about CM? He claimed he wasn’t going to be “critical” or pro-CAM when he started out, but open-minded. After a while it became apparent that he was actually an anti-CAM zealot, and now nobody really wants to fund that project because anti-CAM zealots are really in quite a small minority. Nobody, that is, except perhaps drug companies but of course if they’ve ever provided any funding to Ernst’s project in the past they would have taken careful steps to make sure no-one noticed, and they wouldn’t want to fund it now because Ernst got a bit carried away and no longer has the sort of credibility he enjoyed for a while.

Has Ernst been beating around the bush in his previous assessments of alternative therapies then? Outspoken, eh? Yeah, you do that, Ernst. You become “really outspoken”. I’ve been saying you were a wolf in sheep’s clothing for years. Here’s the rope: you hang yourself, pal. The fact is you were never bright enough to quit while you were ahead, and now the only people who have any time for you at all are the other mindless zealots who don’t know anything about CAM therapies anyway, and that’s why you really lost your job – it has nothing to do with Prince Charles. Academics in the U.K. are not there by Royal Appointment, are they? And the Royal Family don’t have the power or influence to remove any of them either – what planet are you on? Nobody wanted to fund your little misinformation game any longer, and your University got sick of your unacademic, self-publicising media antics, as they were bound to in the end.

Go to America, where I’m sure there’ll be a cushy job for you. Take the PharmaDollar, and stop posing as an objective scientist!  You’re a joke.

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Central Hypnotherapy

*Update, 4/8/11:  I couldn’t help laughing when I noticed that one of my centhyp tweets had been re-tweeted on 18th April by… none other than Edzard Ernst!  Since I have been very critical of him, he threatened to sue me and he was rather rude to me on skepticat’s blog, I was surprised he had done this… until I realised that he had not even bothered to check the link he re-tweeted.  If he had, he would have realised that it just led to a publishing website that sells my book!  So why did he re-tweet it?  Because before the link, I had written: “Why doctors don’t provide hypnotherapy”, which happens to be the title of one of the chapters.  Ernst must have glanced at that, assumed it was some anti-CAM argument and re-tweeted it as a knee-jerk decision based on his own over-zealous anti-CAM agenda… but without even bothering to check what it actually was!  VERY scientific, Eddie-boy!  Perhaps that says a lot about the way you’ve been conducting your “research” all along, eh?

By the way, if anyone doubts that anti-CAM zealots are in a pretty small minority, I think it’s very telling that one of their most celebrated and widely-published champions, Edzard Ernst, still only has 3166 followers on Twitter after 17 years of constant CAM-bashing!