This is really appalling—“Doctor Yourself”:

DoctorYourself.com

World’s Largest HEALTH HOMESTEADING website

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. This especially includes your health.

What is this, hmm? This is the work of one “Andrew Saul, PhD”¹ and what a piece of work it is. Every piece of woo medicine you’ve ever read about is contained in this one website. Homeopathy? Yep. What about vitamin C as a cure for AIDS (and HPV! Double whammy on the sexually transmitted diseases there!)? Oh yeah, we got that too. Maybe throw in magnesium for epilepsy too.

But this is all run of the mill stuff. What about his assertion that “the germ theory was complete bullshit” to really throw the cat among the pigeons?

We do indeed have a proper nutcase here. And he appears to have a love affair with vitamin C. Really, there seems to be nothing it can’t be applied to that won’t be fixed within the week. (I exaggerate, but only slightly.) He’s even got a full guide to strong-arming your doctors into giving intravenous vitamin C.

Unfortunately I don’t really have the medical knowledge to go through this site page by page. This is a lifetime’s project for someone.

I’ll leave you with the knowledge that Dr (or should that be “Dr”) Saul is “Assistan Editor of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine”, which is probably about as well regarded as Homeopathy. Ho hum.

Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. The history of lawyers' letters used to remove material from the internet never go in favour of the lawyers' clients. This is called the Streisand effect.

The Society of Homepaths are one group who have utterly failed to learn this lesson. David Colquhuon (himself no stranger to receiving legal letters) reports on the Society of Homeopaths attempt at bullying:

Many people now have written about the disgraceful and dangerous claims by homeopaths to be able to prevent and cure malaria. My contribution was “Homeopathic 'cures' for malaria: a wicked scam”

One of the best contributions was on the Quackometer blog, The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing.

But the post has vanished! Quackometer’s ISP has received threatening letters sent by lawyers on behalf of the Society of Homeopaths, who claim that the truth i.e. [sic] defamatory, while being unwilling to say which statements are wrong. These threats have forced the removal of the post (for the moment), though you can still read it from the Google cache. And a lot of other places too.

You can read the original article here: The Gentle Art of Homeopathic Killing.

I’m getting really fed up and pissed off at these utterly heartless bastards who would sacrifice someone’s health for the sake of their own paranoid fantasies.

By the Daily Mail’s own admission in the article, HPV is responsible for 700 deaths from cervical cancer every year. But they “revealed”, in their best stoke-the-controversy fashion, that the NHS is paying for this treatment “at the cost to the taxpayer of £241 per course of treatment”. So little to prevent death from cancer, but too much for the Daily Mail and the absurd arguments of the “National Family Campaign” or “Family & Youth Concern”.

The argument that being vaccinated against a sexually-transmitted disease makes you leap into bed is so silly on the face of it that it’s difficult to comprehend the kind of person that could believe it. Every single statement made in that article makes me want to reach out and slap someone, hard.

“It could be seen as helping to promote or encourage sexual activity in girls before they are physically or mentally mature.” (Hugh McKinney, National Family Campaign)

There are two points here, neither of which follow from the facts. First, that being vaccinated promotes sexual activity. Strange that the MMR vaccine doesn’t promote teenage pregnancy — even though mumps is a cause of male sterility and rubella causes developmental defects during pregnancy. Second, that vaccine can make someone have sex before they are mature. The only thing that will prevent that is adequate sex education and fewer religious twats turning sex into a forbidden fruit.

“Why should we spend so much money on vaccines against diseases which are totally preventable in other ways? We should be discouraging young people from having intercourse at an even younger age rather than promoting it.” (Dr Trevor Stammers, Family & Youth Concern)

The “other ways” hinted at here are not listed. I can only guess he means that great placebo panacea, abstinence. Of course, abstinence doesn’t prevent HPV transmission, unless what Dr Stammers really advocates is lifelong celibacy. If no-one had sex until the age of twenty five, then it would take longer before infected people spread the virus — but it would spread. There is no magical cut-off point of maturity past which HPV is no longer a threat.

Family & Youth Concern’s statement is completely irrelevant. They’re only there to issue their default opinion — promoting moral panic about the “permissive society” — which happens to align quite nicely with that of the Daily Mail.

Thankfully the commenters on the article are pretty much on the ball (for a change). There is one nutcase who seems to think that Nu Labour (sic) are doing this to “breed” the next generation of voters (!). Even amongst Daily Mail readers that’s a minority opinion. Bookdrunk also has more and some interesting links to previous HPV and sex education stories.

What do you think — are these anti-HPV campaigners seriously deluded or simply scum?

Just a short Beyond Parody today, as I’m really a bit stunned at this whole scenario. I’m really having second thoughts about putting it in this category, which I’ve been reserving for light-hearted stupidities.

But no matter, it certainly fits with the spirit of things. Never in all my life could I have predicted this. According to the state of Virginia’s laws on parental neglect, faith healing is a legitimate means of looking after your child:

However, no child who in good faith is under treatment solely by spiritual means through prayer in accordance with the tenets and practices of a recognized church or religious denomination shall for that reason alone be considered to be an abused or neglected child.

It’s beyond my limited powers of comprehension why this was considered an even half-way credible idea. That they are honestly advocating prayer healing as valid for anything — let alone cancer, diabetes or anything else life-threatening. — is absurd. What kind of crack are these people on?