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A media science guru, one Simon Singh, who amongst other things has co-authored a book with Professor Edzard Ernst, the worlds only professor of Alternative Medicine, has been hauled over the coals in the libel courts for saying in a piece in the Guardian that The British Chiropractic Association were promoting 'bogus' treatments. I don't propose to go into the details of the case because, frankly, all this yah boo sucks stuff bores me shitless and it's been going on ever since I first started as a chiropractor in 1974. Which is why, when I saw that the BCA were bringing this action, my heart sank. The two sides in this argument are never going to agree. As the chiropractic profession trims itself to fit some kind of acceptable model of what the likes of Simon Singh and his germanic mentor require, the model will change until all semblance of chiropractic as I knew it will have disappeared and its skills and scope will be emasculated beyond recognition. This has already happened to a large extent with the General Chiropractic Council's policing techniques eschewing all but the most anodyne claims to those that are 'evidence based'. The fact that approaching 50% of all medical procedures have no evidence base whatsoever does not seem to matter or is ignored. Also the fact that the so-called double blind trials so beloved of the champions of evidence based medicine are being called into question by advances in quantum physics also seems to have escaped many of the pack baying for the blood of the alternative movement.
Back to Simon Singh vs BCA. The BCA, no doubt under legal advice, saw fit to bring this case under the libel laws and who should it appear before but m' learned friend Lord Justice Eady. Anybody interested in the wider world will know that Lord Eady is the justice who has been single-handedly turning the justice system in this country into a laughing stock in the free-speaking world by supporting libel actions against book authors and publishers and preventing publication, at least in the UK, of several controversial tomes about shady characters in the international sprectrum.
So, it comes to pass that Simon Singh gets his knuckles rapped in round one of this saga for using the term 'bogus' which m'learned friend deems to have implications of fraudulent intent. And that, you might think, would be that. Done, dusted, time for quick one before home time. Sadly, and this was entirely predictable, things do not work that way in this day and age and a veritable firestorm is brewing on the internet including among other things a campaign of complaints against chiropractic clinics deemed to have broken the GCCs guidelines. So hundreds, if not thousands, of nit-picking geeks with nothing but time on their hands are currently pouring over the clinic literature of any chiropractic clinic they can get their hands on looking for guideline breaking verbage with which to beat the profession. Conveniently the GCC has made it very easy for them by making it's guidelines very exacting so it's pretty obvious when they're not being followed. The original guidelines were deliberately vague to allow maximum scope for varying interpretations but the GCC changed those rapidly once the full council got it's act in gear.
Still, one advantage of this coming storm is likely to be that the GCC will be far too busy covering it's arse to continue to persecute the members of its register.
At this point I should point out that I am no longer a chiropractor but an ex-chiropractor, having resigned from the register in 2004, I am free to pursue my particular form of unregulated bogus quackery which has kept me and an unspecified number of no doubt gullible clients happy since 1974 with little or no sign of an evidence base. Woohoo!
