As the British Chiropractic Association's battle with Simon Singh continues to work its way through the legal system, chiropractors are counting the fincancial costs of a major backlash resulting from a libel action that has left the Lord Chief Justice "baffled". What was originally a dispute between the BCA and one science writer over free speech has become a brutally effective campaign to reform an entire industry.

A staggering one in four chiropractors in Britain are now under investigation for allegedly making misleading claims in advertisements, according to figures revealed by the General Chiropractic Council.

Continue reading at The Guardian!

Over the weekend I received a rare honour, a press release directed at me with the full intellectual might of the British Homeopathic Association behind it.

The statement came after I wrote a piece for the Guardian which was published under the title "Homeopathic association misrepresented evidence to MPs". Since they've taken such a personal interest in my work, I feel obliged to respond.

So, now the verdict is out, what does it actually say?

Background:
As we all know, Wakefield and his colleagues published a case series on autistic children in the Lancet back in 1998. The paper itself was not particularly remarkable and scientifically was rather substandard and barely of publishable merit. However it did mention a possible link between MMR vaccination and autistic enterocolitis, something Wakefield went on to suggest this in much stronger terms in media interviews, implying causality. The rest is history.

The king of the Zulus has issued an edict to bring back circumcision in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, two hundred years after it was abolished.

King Goodwill Zwelithini claims to be reintroducing the practice because it reduces HIV transmission but evidence for its effectiveness is contentious, as I have discussed here, here and here.