Stuff that occurs to me: Errol Denton

Showing posts with label Errol Denton. Show all posts

Saturday, 19 January 2013

Errol Denton racist accusations and live blood testing

Update 20 March 2014: Today the subject of this post was fined £9,000 for nine counts of the Cancer Act of 1939 at Westminster Magistrates Court and handed a total bill (including costs) of over £19,000. He did not attend this final court hearing and did not represent himself.

This might take a wee while to load. It's a long Storify story which captures some of the tweets by an account going under the name of @FightRacism2. The stated aim of this account is to fight racism, as the name suggests, however it seems that the actual purpose is more to hamper attempts at reducing racism by spamming people with a link to an ineffective petition thereby distracting them and wasting their time.

The account appears to be using a bait-and-switch tactic by posting two links in most of the tweets - the first is to some unambiguously repugnant example of racism, the second is to his petition which is effectively cuckoo-egged or trojan-horsed into the tweet. This is unfortunate.

It's also a bit annoying, in that the petition is calling one of my blogger friends, and me, racist simply for pointing out some misleading claims made on Errol Denton's websites about Live Blood Analysis (LBA). We're nothing of the kind and we (and loads of other people too) have reported several people to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) without paying any attention to their ethnicity, or indeed anything about them personally beyond the fact that they've made claims for which we don't think they have evidence.

I don't know for certain that whoever runs the @FightRacism2 account is the same person that runs the @ErrolDenton account (nor do I know that either of them are actually Mr Errol Denton, the nutritional microscopist with rooms in Harley Street whose business is Fitalifestyle Ltd and who runs the SeeMyCells.co.uk and LiveBloodTest.com websites).

Whoever writes the posts that appear on Mr Denton's blogs often writes in the third person so it is entirely possible that there are teams of people responsible for this output - after all he, or someone else, is well-used to using crowdsourcing tools such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk and ShortTask to pay people to sign misleading petitions (around 930 of the current signatures seem to have been paid-for according to screenshot timestamps), and curiously to pay people to send tweets to the Errol Denton Twitter account with the following keywords:

Errol Denton
Live Blood test
www.livebloodtest.com
Errol Denton Live Blood Test
Errol Denton Harley Street
Errol Denton live blood analysis

...though not Errol Denton four Advertising Standards Authority adjudications upheld and one addition to their non-complicant misleading advertisers, a mention in The Mirror and complaints on various forums about poor customer service. Not to mention featuring in a You & Yours programme on live blood tests being a nonsense diagnostic tool.

I presume this keyword business is some sort of Search Engine Optimisation strategy - I struggle to see how it would work on Twitter which isn't fully indexed by Google but perhaps I'm missing something here).

All very strange. Although not as strange as catching up with fellow blogger Josephine Jones' Twitter feed yesterday and learning that the BBC's latest episode of the medical drama Doctors features the following storyline: "Jimmi is caught between medical ethics and legal boundaries when he tries to expose a live blood testing consultation" - it even features the live blood analyst falsely accusing a GP of racism (quickly disproven by the fact that the GP had recorded the conversation) - has the BBC been reading our blogs?! Watch it on BBC iPlayer.

Here's the Storify. I'm putting it here on my blog because I want to give Google something else to index, the embed code is available at the original Storify page, if you click the icon marked < / >

I can't help noticing that by linking Errol Denton so strongly with the word racist both account holders (whoever's running @ErrolDenton and / or @FightRacism) might have inadvertently damaged Mr Denton's reputation somewhat, at least according to Google:

I am aware that Google personalises results, but several friends have confirmed that they see the same thing.

Saturday, 10 November 2012

Not the only live blood analyst I've complained about actually

Recently, in one of his blog posts, Errol Denton complained that he was being singled out from other live blood analysts (also known as live blood testing or nutritional microscopy) for particular attention and criticism by bloggers.

He has attributed this particular attention to racism on the part of the bloggers. As I'm one of the bloggers he's tagged in his posts (a sort of oblique reference) I'm a bit bemused by this because the simple reason he's experiencing attention is that he failed to respond to the Advertising Standards Authority's requests to remove misleading claims from his websites, and consequently found himself on their 'non-compliant online advertisers' page. It has nothing to do with the colour of anyone's skin.
I thought it might cheer him up to know that back in May I also put in a complaint about a live blood microscopist who turns out to be white (and no, I didn't single her out because of her skin colour either) - Katrin Hempel [http://www.londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk/About-me.html]. I've reproduced the complaint in full below.

Normally I prefer not to publish these complaints before there's been an ASA adjudication (which I'd be notified about, I don't remember this one being adjudicated on and I checked a couple of pages and some of the claims are still there). However since Errol is so convinced that I and another blogger, Josephine Jones, are racially motivated I'm quite keen to address that as best I can.

What I need to do next is chase up exactly what happened with this one** - I have a feeling it may have been deprioritised because of the massive workload the Advertising Standards Authority is under, which only increased when they started investigating claims made on websites in addition to television and radio broadcasts, and magazine adverts and leaflet inserts etc.

This complaint was put together with Simon Perry's Fishbarrel tool that saves you having to copy and paste each claim into a separate email.

I would also add that it is surprising to me that Errol has tagged his posts with our names and rac15t accusations alongside tags relating to his own company keywords - this seems an odd business strategy.

**14 January 2013 - the complaint was not adjudicated on (because the ASA has already seen sufficient evidence that live blood analysis is nonsense) and instead was passed to compliance. When that failed Katrin Hempel's London Natural Therapies site was added to the ASA's list of non-compliant advertisers.

Complaint to ASA sent 4 May 2012

Dear ASA

I am concerned about some of the claims made by Katrin Hempel trading as London Natural Therapies and don't believe there is evidence to suppor them. I first became aware of her treatment clinic through a news item in the Evening Standard which highlighted her live blood analysis treatment.

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#1. Claim found at http://www.londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk/Live-Blood-Analysis.html

"Live blood analysis can be beneficial for the following conditions:

Arthritis, weakened immune system (recurrent cold - and flu's), gastro-intestinal tract disorders like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) or inflammatory conditions like Chron's disease or ulcerative colitis, leaky gut, as well as allergies, hormonal imbalances, nutritional deficiencies, anemia and many more!"

Live blood analysis is not a real diagnostic technique and does not give as much information about someone's health as is claimed here. The list of conditions includes some really quite serious conditions that are better managed with the help of a proper doctor.

I understand that some nutritional deficiences CAN be spotted (eg anaemia from vitamin B) by looking at blood under a light microscope - but this would still need to be confirmed with a test of serum levels of the relevant B vitamin - however previous experience of live blood analysis suggests to me that this is used as a way to sell expensive and unnecessary vitamins or dietary supplements.

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#2. Claim found at http://www.londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk/Live-Blood-Analysis.html

"Live Blood testing can be especially useful in chronic, on-going conditions, that have not responded well to other treatments, as with darkfield microscopy many underlying factors that could be fuelling the condition can be detected, which aren't always evident with other means."

I doubt that live blood testing offers any information that can't be found from a much cheaper (free to the patient) blood test that a proper doctor would order. Again from previously looking into this quite often people are given information that all is not well with their blood based on artefacts that arise during the creation of the slide. Analysts also give incorrect information which is both misleading and worrying to the customer.

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#3. Claim found at http://www.londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk/Live-Blood-Analysis.html

"It is an excellent preventative and prophylactic measure as usually changes in the blood can be seen long before the symptoms manifest or progress, so disease may be prevented from developing."

While some changes in the blood may well be apparent before symptoms appear live blood analysis is of no use in determining them. To give an example, a standard blood test for 'glycated haemoglobin' (HbA1c) or fasting blood glucose levels can pick up Type 2 diabetes in someone who otherwise does not have very noticeable (or easily ignorable) symptoms but this is not something that's seen under a microscope.

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#4. Claim found at http://www.londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk/Live-Blood-Analysis.html

"Live Blood analysis is also a fantastic tool to use as a general health check-up. A regular examination of your blood every 6 months ensures you stay healthy and nutritional deficiencies can be found out about and corrected early on before problems arise."

I think it's a very poor tool and this just sounds like a way to keep customers coming back to spend more money.

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#5. Claim found at http://www.londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk/Iridology.html

"The iris of your eyes is totally individual and can give important insight into overall health status, constitutional tendencies and metabolic status."

Very limited information about a person's overall health can be gleaned from just looking at the eye or iris. The phrase 'constitutional tendencies' doesn't really mean anything and it's not possible to tell much about someone's metabolic status either. There are a couple of conditions where metals, eg copper in the case of Wilson's disease, are taken up by various tissues of the body, including the iris - and this is quite visible - but generally looking at eyes doesn't tell you much.

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#6. Claim found at http://www.londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk/Iridology.html

"Every organ and tissue of the body is connected to the iris by a vast number of nerve fibres."

This is incorrect.

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#7. Claim found at http://www.londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk/Iridology.html

"with iridology through reflex association signs and marks relating to certain organs in the body are displayed in the iris."

This is nonsense.

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#8. Claim found at http://www.londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk/Iridology.html

"Thus it is ideal to use as preventative tool and can be very valuable to assess treatment plans"

Iridology cannot help here.

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#9. Claim found at http://www.londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk/Sickle-Cell-Anemia.html

"I am using an all natural treatment for sickle cell disease, which has been successfully applied for many years in Germany."

I'm troubled that someone would make claims to be able to help with this serious condition and this statement implies that good evidence for the claims should by now be available.

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#10. Claim found at http://www.londonnaturaltherapies.co.uk/Sickle-Cell-Anemia.html

"This remarkable therapy produces phenomenal results with 50% of patients showing a complete stop of painful episodes (crisis) and 30% of patients showing a marked improvement overall. The treatment strategy will be exclusive to me and will not be used by any other practitioner in the UK."

Two things concern me about this - the boldness of the claims and the fact that only one practitioner will be offering such a treatment. This is fairly unusual and doesn't offer patients much of a choice, it also prevents information about the use of the treatment from being shared among other practitioners and this is something that benefits patients.

-----------------------------------------------------

I confirm that I have no commercial interest in the outcome of this complaint.

Kind regards,

Jo Brodie

Also known as London Natural Therapies, non-compliant online advertiser

Wednesday, 7 November 2012

Someone is wrong on the internet - diabetes and live blood analysis

A toy microscope, from spike55151 on Flickr

Live blood analysis also known as nutritional microscopy is an example of something that looks and sounds sciencey but for which there's no good evidence. It can't be used to diagnose diseases nor can it be used to determine what their treatment might be. It seems that some of the practitioners are very confused about physiology and even more confused about the use of blood smears in microscopy.

While I've done some basic microscopy in my time (biology degree, worked in various labs) I'm no expert myself so why do I think I can pass judgement on live blood analysis?

Partly it's that it's pretty implausible, but there's also a bit of 'well that's just not true' in the mix as well, and a good portion of evidence from other sources (and some blogs too) that shows how and why it isn't any use.

The reason I think it's important not to just dismiss live blood analysis out of hand is because it would be wrong to say 'well you can't tell anything just by looking at blood', that's obviously not true. Similarly the practice of iridology is nonsense as well but there are some things you can surmise about some people's health just from looking at their eyes.

Photomicrograph of red blood cells and bacteria (gonorrhea) - the blood has been stained to pick out the bacteria.
Picture source: CDC Public Health Image Library ID #15018, taken by Bill Schwartz, CDC.
Basically, you can spot some stuff in blood smears...

For some time I've been a bit troubled by the claims that Errol Denton has been making for his live blood analysis service which is based in Harley Street. He doesn't appear to be a fan of me either and recently tagged one of his blog posts with my name and the words 'racist nazi blogger' (1). That doesn't really strengthen his case much.

I've written before on the nonsense that is live blood analysis, as have others, so I shan't retread those steps. Today I spotted that Errol had written a blog post about diabetes, my post below is about correcting the misinformation in his post.

(1) see tags at the end of his post, which I prefer not to link to directly requiring you to copy and paste I'm afraid: http://erroldenton.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/errol-denton-live-blood-quack-or-super-hero-natural-health-physician/

Incidentally the tags in the original version of another of his posts did not mention either Josephine or me, or for that matter racist nazi bloggers, though it does now: http://erroldenton.wordpress.com/2012/10/18/errol-denton-complaints-about-racist-nazi-bloggers-highlights-big-cover-up-against-alternative-medicine/

Here's a screenshot of the original - click to enlarge. He's insulted us retrospectively ;)

Errol's post can be found here: http://erroldenton.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/errol-denton-solves-another-diabetes-complaint-with-live-blood-analysis-harley-street/

Duty calls, from xkcd

"Diabetes is a growing epidemic in the world with over 150 million sufferers worldwide"
Well, we're off to a reasonably good start in that this figure (unreferenced) is roughly within an order of magnitude of being correct. The IDF Atlas for 2012 estimates the figure to be nearer 366 million people with diabetes worldwide in 2011.

"The answer from the medical fraternity is to create more and more drugs for their victims to consume which only suppresses the symptoms."
I suspect anything I say here will only convince Errol further that I'm a big pharma shill (I'm actually paid by the taxpayer) so I will acknowledge that there is indeed a great deal of medication going on of people with diabetes. I'm not sure what he means by 'only suppresses the symptoms' - the drugs suppress symptoms of high blood glucose levels by helping glucose to be taken up and used... I'm not quite sure what is meant here.

"With the NHS spending 3.9 Billion on Diabetes care but yet 24,000 die needlessly each year isn’t it time to look at Errol Denton’s safe natural alternative using live blood testing?"
Goodness me. Diabetes UK's key statistics on diabetes suggests that it's probably nearer £10 billion on diabetes care - it's difficult to know where he's getting his figures from as there don't seem to be any references. I think the 24,000 comes from the York & Humber Public Health Observatory (YHPHO)'s 2008 publication on 'diabetes attributable deaths' which did suggest that, in England "26,300 deaths between the ages of 20 and 79 years in 2005 can be attributed to diabetes" so that's pretty close. The registered deaths for diabetes in England and Wales tend to hover around the 5-6,000 mark but these are an underestimate and only include registrations where diabetes has been listed (diabetes can be a contributory factor but people tend to die of something else, although there is space on death certification to record contributory factors).

Edit: 7 Nov 2012 - pal at Diabetes UK has pointed out that 24,000 is actually a perfectly reasonable figure as it's cited by the fab NHS IC.

The final clause suggesting that it's time to look at his 'safe natural alternative' is not at all contingent on the earlier clauses outlining the scale of the problem. Yes, diabetes is crap, but live blood testing doesn't do anything to help. I'd definitely concede that if someone is given the advice to improve their lifestyle that'll help, but they don't need to spend any money on this (or buy expensive supplements) as that service is available completely free from their doctor or dietitian.

"Errol Denton says this is complete nonsense as Diabetes is not actually a disease it is simply caused by poor nutrition."
I'm not sure if Errol writes his blog in the third person or if someone else writes it but this statement is a bit of an oversimplification. For starters I think the author really needs to clarify that they're talking about Type 2 diabetes as opposed to Type 1 diabetes. But I won't deny that nutrition plays a role - this isn't a big secret and any doctor will tell you that lifestyle (which includes nutrition, though not to the exclusion of physical activity, good night's sleep etc) is important in managing the condition and in preventing the development of Type 2 diabetes.

Tokyo Tower lit in blue for World Diabetes Day, from Flickr user Clint Koehler

"He says that there is absolutely no reason that anyone should have to take any medication for this condition if they follow the natural laws of nutrition."
I think this should be much clearer that it is Type 2 diabetes that's being discussed, not Type 1 diabetes which definitely requires insulin to prevent hyperglycaemia and diabetic ketoacidosis. While people with Type 2 diabetes who have made lifestyle changes may sometimes be able to reduce or stop some of their medications (which is fantastic) this statement is a bit un-nuanced and this won't be the case for everyone.

"He asks when was the last time that we saw a Diabetic animal just to make the logical point that is the diet of humans that is at fault."
I once took a call from a zoo vet asking about diabetes in Old or New World Monkeys (I forget which but that was a fun afternoon looking on PubMed). Possibly Errol won't accept diabetes cases in captive animals as they're fed by human beings. It's probably difficult to get the prevalence of diabetes in animals in the wild - if it's Type 1 diabetes the chances are the animals won't survive for very long, although they can probably survive for much longer with Type 2 diabetes - though I suspect that it is probably pretty rare in wild animals anyway.

In captivity the animals can often live for longer and Type 2-like diabetes is more likely to occur spontaneously in older animals.

The rest of the blog post talks about a case study of a man who, after working with Errol was apparently "able to discard all his medication in a very short space of time as he no longer had blood sugar or cholesterol problems."

I hope the decision to come off medication was made after discussions with the man's own doctor - I hope Errol isn't offering anyone medical advice.

His blog's tagline is "Harley Street Natural Health Physician Getting Results Where Conventional Medicine Has Failed" - bit puzzling to use the word physician.

Tuesday, 1 November 2011

Errol Denton / Fitalifestyle: sixth (was fourth) ASA adjudication upheld

Update 20 April 2018: Today the subject of this post was fined £2,200, ordered to pay costs of £15,000 and given a Criminal Behaviour Order (which, if breached, puts him in contempt of court). The Advertising Standards Authority referred his protracted case(s) to Camden Trading Standards who brought proceedings, resulting in a trial at Blackfriars Crown Court which concluded in March 2018 with sentencing today. The ASA has said that it welcomes the outcome. See also info from Court News.

Update 12 October 2014: On Friday the subject of this post was fined £4,500 and lost his appeal at Southwark Crown Court. I don't know if the £4.5k is an adjusted figure or an addition to the previous fines.

Update 20 March 2014: Today the subject of this post was fined £9,000 for nine counts of the Cancer Act of 1939 at Westminster Magistrates Court and handed a total bill (including costs) of over £19,000. He did not attend this final court hearing and did not represent himself.

One man, six ASA adjudications... an epic tale.

minilink: http://is.gd/foDseG

Edit 12 March 2013 - There are now six (six!!) Advertising Standards Authority adjudications or other actions against the misleading claims made by this man on his various websites (and a leaflet). It's almost unfathomable but yet another citation against his claims was posted on the non-compliant advertisers today. Probably not that coincidentally, yesterday someone from the ASA spoke to BBC Radio 4's You and Yours specifically about his claims and how they've been unable to get him to budge on them.

You can hear the six minute clip about "the blood test 'expert' who says he can treat cancer yet can't back up his claims" and read the ASA's latest ruling against Live Blood Test trading as Errol Denton.

More interestingly, of the 43 advertisers posted on the ASA's non-compliant list three of them have made misleading claims about what live blood testing also known as nutritional microscopy can do. However at least neither of the other two undertook a smear campaign to call skeptic bloggers racist, which seems to have backfired somewhat, judging from Google's autofill.

Edit 27 February 2013 - Unbelievably there's been another ASA adjudication upheld (the complaint was from two different people, neither of them me, I've been reluctant to get involved since this all happened. It means there are now five adjudications (four specifically against Mr D, one against Groupon which was advertising Mr D's services) and a sixth citation for him on the ASA's non-compliant online advertisers list. SIX separate sanctions. Unbelievable.

Edit 16 November 2011 - Josephine Jones tweeted earlier today that Fitalifestyle / SeeMyCells aka Errol Denton has been added to the Advertising Standards Authority's "Hall of Shame" ('advertisers who fail to comply' pages) which didn't surprise me in the slightest. It's not immediately obvious if you're looking in the ASA's adjudications that four of them are about Errol Denton because there are so many different websites and claims involved. Three separate websites (including one on Groupon's site) were cited in four complaints to the ASA (all of which were upheld) on different 'treatments' or diagnostic tests including liquid chlorophyll and nutritional microscopy.

It was only because Josephine (see more below) Googled, found my blog and emailed me that I knew of her other complaints. I've no idea if the ASA's database flag up situations along the lines of "gee this looks familiar" but I know I mentioned within the last month to the ASA that this was actually the fourth adjudication and I suspect Josephine may have done so too, or quite possibly they've looked at our blogs.

I wonder if Jeni Barnett knows...

-------------------------------------------------------

Short version
The Advertising Standards Authority has upheld my latest complaint. This adjudication was against Fitalifestyle Ltd’s website which made misleading claims, yet again, about nutritional microscopy – a nonsense diagnostic tool. Fitalifestyle Ltd is the trading name of Errol Denton and there are two main websites: LiveBloodTest.com and SeeMyCells.co.uk, there’s also LiveBloodTest.webs.com.

“Fitalifestyle Ltd (Fitalifestyle) did not respond to the ASA’s enquiries”.

This is the fourth complaint upheld against misleading advertising claims made by or on behalf of Errol Denton: two complaints were from me and two from another blogger, Josephine Jones.

Previous complaints to the ASA, all now upheld adjudications
• Leaflet - complaint by me: Adjudication | Blog post this was advertising Errol Denton's LiveBloodTest.com website too

• Liquid chlorophyll from Fitalifestyle trading as SeeMyCells.co.uk - complaint by Josephine: Adjudication | Blog post

• Groupon ad for Live Blood Test - complaint by Josephine: Adjudication | Blog post - this one was particularly interesting as in addition to the misleading claims made about the intervention it seems that a lot of customers had a miserable customer experience as well and many have added their 'testimonials' on a variety of forums on the web.

• Fitalifestyle website (LiveBloodTest.com) - the most recent complaint, by me: Adjudication | (and this is the accompanying blog post)

Longer version
One rather useful thing about the internet is that it helps you draw different bits of information together. It was over a year ago that I blogged about a leaflet for Nutritional Microscopy (specifically that sold by Errol Denton as Fitalifestyle Ltd / LiveBloodTest.com). After learning more about the evidence (none at all) for the claims made I was able to put in a complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority which was upheld (and I updated the blogpost).

A few months after that I got an email from blogger Josephine Jones who said that she’d put in a complaint about someone else who was offering live blood analysis. She also had a complaint against Errol’s website which was making unwise claims about liquid chlorophyll. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with selling liquid chlorophyll (I seem to remember it fluoresces in an impressively blood-red sort of way when viewed under ultraviolet light) but saying that it does anything special when consumed by people seems to be taking things a bit far. Josephine also had a complaint upheld against Groupon because they were selling live blood tests and repeating the misleading claims.

So because Josephine searched online for information on live blood testing, found my blog and got in touch I know that there are at least FOUR upheld adjudications against this individual / company’s marketing for nutritional microscopy (on a leaflet, SeeMyCells.co.uk, LiveBloodTest.com and on Groupon’s website). Probably if she'd not got in touch I wouldn't have known there were this many as I'd not have thought to search for the Groupon one.

My recent complaint, about Fitalifestyle Ltd’s web pages, included the claim that nutritional microscopy provides an “insightful view of the biological terrain” which is a phrase that appears on rather a lot of websites, including LiveBloodTest.com (it’s still there at the time of writing): http://www.livebloodtest.com/what_is_live_blood_analysis.php?gid=6

That phrase isn’t particularly problematic but I think it does suggest that all of these practitioners are getting their web content from the same place. I think someone’s done an analysis on errors in transcription that appear in various copies of the bible and other texts where monks made mistakes and people can track phrases in different versions of books. I wonder if anyone will do a similar study on this ;)

Next steps
Ongoing monitoring of the site (this can be automated in Google of course) for the misleading words and phrases and their appearance on other pages on one or more of the websites. This has happened before.

Further reading

Edzard Ernst writing in The Guardian in 2005 on live blood analysis
Science-Based Medicine's 2009 blog on the same topic
Quackwatch's 2006 article (updated in 2009) on live cell analysis

Sunday, 4 April 2010

Live Blood Analysis and nutritional microscopy - unconvincing so far

Update 20 April 2018: Today the subject of this post was fined £2,200, ordered to pay costs of £15,000 and given a Criminal Behaviour Order (which, if breached, puts him in contempt of court). The Advertising Standards Authority referred his protracted case(s) to Camden Trading Standards who brought proceedings, resulting in a trial at Blackfriars Crown Court which concluded in March 2018 with sentencing today. The ASA has said that it welcomes the outcome. See also info from Court News.

Update 12 October 2014: On Friday the subject of this post was fined £4,500 and lost his appeal at Southwark Crown Court. I don't know if the £4.5k is an adjusted figure or an addition to the previous fines.

Update 20 March 2014: Today the subject of this post was fined £9,000 for nine counts of the Cancer Act of 1939 at Westminster Magistrates Court and handed a total bill (including costs) of over £19,000. He did not attend this final court hearing and did not represent himself.

EDIT: 13 October 2010 - the Advertising Standards Authority have now adjudicated on the leaflet and the complaint was upheld - details of two other upheld adjudications are below.

The shortened link for this page is http://is.gd/bdoh0

Earlier today I picked up a flyer for a 'nutritional microscopy' service which claims that a drop of blood, viewed under a microscope, can be used to identify the following

* relative level of acidity in the body fluids and the effects they have especially for weight loss!
* blood sugar imbalance
* vitamin deficiency, allergies, cholesterol
* uric acid and mycotoxins
* gastro-intestinal tract dysfunction
* detection of parasites, yeast, fungus and mould
* imbalance associated with degenerative conditions ect (sic)

Flyer page 1 | Flyer page 2

Not surprisingly Quackwatch doesn't have much time for the claims made by this sort of thing:
Live Blood Cell Analysis: Another Gimmick to Sell You Something
http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Tests/livecell.html

This looks like something for the Advertising Standards Authority to investigate as the claims seem... a little unlikely. Before I write a letter of complaint to the ASA I wanted to find out a bit more about some of the claims and also to find out what light microscopy can and can't do in terms of diagnosing things to do with blood. I shall add to this post as I come across things of interest, while trying to trim the text a bit.

Detection of parasites...
Tempting as it is to denounce the entire flyer as unmitigated nonsense it probably pays to be a bit careful as light microscopy of blood can apparently be used in the diagnosis of some infections (malaria, with a bit of staining of the smear) or conditions (sickle cell anaemia). PLos One has a paper on turning a mobile phone into a microscope for global health applications which includes some example pictures:

Mobile Phone Based Clinical Microscopy for Global Health Applications
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0006320

The paper suggests that diagnosing malaria from blood microscopy is fairly uncontroversial, but this does not seem to be the case for Lyme disease - from borrelia spirochaetes. I hadn't realised that Lyme disease has its own subset of woo tests, one of which is inappropriate use of microscopy.

Unorthodox and unvalidated laboratory tests in the diagnosis of Lyme borreliosis and in relation to medically unexplained symptoms
http://www.dh.gov.uk/assetRoot/04/13/89/17/04138917.pdf

Microscopy of whole blood (p5 of 9)
"It has been claimed that chronic Lyme borreliosis can be diagnosed on the basis of
seeing spirochaetes in the blood of patients by high power (on-screen magnification
reported to be X 10,000) ‘live’ microscopy of blood. A drop of blood is placed on a
microscopy slide, covered with a cover slip, and then left to stand for a period of at
least 6 hours and up to 24 hours in a moist chamber. The film is then examined by
dark field and phase contrast microscopy. It is claimed that spirochaete forms can be
seen emerging from red and white cells in these blood films. They have been
described as being ‘intracellular L-forms’ that can be seen emerging from blood cells.
Patients and medical practitioners have been told that this test for Lyme borreliosis is
positive in chronic fatigue syndrome patients, showing that CFS is caused by chronic
B. burgdorferi infection."

"However, these tests are not being performed by medical practitioners or
clinical/biomedical trained or qualified in laboratory medicine specialties such as
microbiology, parasitology or haematology that would include specific training in
light microscopy. They are not performed in laboratories accredited for clinical
pathology testing."

The article continues with

1. Microscopy of whole blood (p7 of 9)
"The objects purported to be borreliae in the whole blood films are not considered to
be borreliae but to represent artefacts of the method used. If they were spirochaetes
the number demonstrated by light microscopy in such a small sample would indicate a
substantial spirochaetaemia which could readily be confirmed or refuted by electron
microscopy, immunofluorescence or PCR. Some of the structures appear to be
contaminating debris, as would be expected in samples collected by inexperienced
individuals (patients, carers etc) in non-sterile conditions. Other strands appear to be
fibrin produced by the clotting mechanism that would occur in whole blood held for
several hours in this way, collagen fibrils or cell membrane fragments shed from
degenerating red and white blood cells."

.....

"Furthermore, the biological basis for the test is fundamentally wrong. B. burgdorferi
sensu lato is an extracellular bacterium in the bloodstream. It is not an intracellular
bacterium that could be seen ‘emerging from infected blood cells’. Moreover, any
spirochaetes in a thick blood smear, covered by a cover slip, would not remain viable
for long. Blood is not an ‘ideal medium’ for borreliae, the organisms are fragile in
vitro, requiring special media and careful temperature regulation. Spirochaetemia
occurs in the early stages of infection and is intermittent and short lived, with a low
number of organisms."

.....

"Diagnostic tests that require microscopy or culture of samples from patients should be
supervised and the results interpreted by consultant medical microbiologists or
clinical scientists of equivalent standing. Tests should also be done in an accredited
laboratory with quality assurance standards."

The HPA (Health Protection Agency, UK) specifically mentions that microscopy isn't recommended in the diagnosis of Lyme disease.

Diagnosis and Treatment of Lyme borreliosis Clinical signs of Lyme borreliosis (LB)
http://www.hpa.nhs.uk/web/HPAweb&HPAwebStandard/HPAweb_C/1204031510081

Unorthodox Clinical and Laboratory Practices Related to Lyme borreliosis (overview)
http://www.hpa.nhs.uk/web/HPAweb&HPAwebStandard/HPAweb_C/1204013002855

I'm not convinced that it's possible to tell anything about 'blood sugar imbalances' from looking at blood cells. There are easier enzymatic methods used to test blood glucose concentrations from a small drop of blood, and laboratory (eg chromatographic) methods for assessing how much haemoglobin in the blood has had glucose added to it ('glycated' - the test for this is called the HbA1c test). I have to assume that some sort of chemical testing is being implied by this claim.

Discussion on Twitter with @medtek suggested that other information can be gleaned from blood smears, including a limited assessment of vitamin deficiency in the case of B vitamins leading to different types of anaemia - but even this would be confirmed by a test for serum levels of the vitamin/metabolites.

Flyers are generally a little more circumspect regarding health claims but the website to which this flyer leads has information implying that iridology can help too (nonsense) and there's even an opportunity to have an online iridology consultation
http://www.livebloodtest.com/membershealthclub.php?gid=1

This mp3 is quite illuminating (a phone in to an LBC radio show)
http://www.livebloodtest.com/images/march2010.mp3

More to follow... at some point...

EDIT: 13 October 2010 - the complaint was upheld

----------- EDIT 5 April 2010 ------------

Lab Tests Online is a very useful resource for finding out about different blood tests - this is a page on the UK version (there's are little flag icons on every page providing information for other countries too) about taking a pinprick of blood, smearing it on a slide and peering at it microscopically: Blood Film: At a Glance
http://www.labtestsonline.org.uk/understanding/analytes/blood_film/glance.html - this is the overview page, note the other tabs on the page for more detailed information on what this type of test can be used for.

Further reading
Fellow blogger Josephine Jones has also been writing on Live Blood Analysis, for example see these two posts:

Introducing the curious world of the Alkaline Diet and Live Blood Analysis (22 March 2011)
My third ASA adjudication: Groupon’s Live Blood Test claims exaggerated, misleading and unsubstantiated (7 September 2011)

A new era of scientific discovery? (12 July 2005) by Edzard Ernst, in The Guardian.

"Intrigued by the spectacular claims made for Live Blood Analysis? Don't be. It doesn't work"The three Advertising Standards Authorities adjudications which were upheld are as follows:

Live Blood Test (13 October 2010) - a leaflet advertising Live Blood Test in Harley Street
Fitalifestyle Ltd trading as seemycells.co.uk (1 June 2011) - an onlnie advert for liquid chlorophyll sold on seemycells.co.uk (same owner registration details as livebloodtest.com)
MyCityDeal Ltd trading as GrouponUK (7 September 2011) - a promotion for Live Blood Test which provoked some angry comments on other blogs (including Josephine's) and forums

Also known as live blood test, see my cells, nutritional microscopy

Stuff that occurs to me