What Doctors Don't Tell You magazine returns as Get Well magazine in UK shops

tl;dr: I've asked Sainsbury's why they've started selling Get Well magazine (also known as What Doctors Don't Tell You and WDDTY) again, having previously stopped selling it, and their spokesperson said -

“We stock over 700 different publications and, with the exception of explicit material, we do not routinely make a judgement on content.

We are however aware of the concerns around this magazine so have taken the decision to review whether we will continue to stock it.”

 Of course they could decide that their review has convinced them to continue to stock it...

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It seems I've not written on this blog about What Doctors Don't Tell You aka WDDTY aka Get Well (its new branding) magazine since 2014. Around that time (2012-2014) the magazine was on sale in a number of UK supermarkets before the efforts of doctors, scientists, activists and skeptics got it largely removed, though it crept back in a few places.

Concerns about the content of and advice given in the magazine had done the rounds in mainstream and social media / blogs. Tom Whipple reported in The Times (Oct 2013) that there had been a "Call to ban magazine for scaremongering". Dr Margaret McCartney tore strips off it ("ridiculously alarmist") in an exchange with one of the editors, Lynne McTaggart, and umpired by Dr Mark Porter on Inside Health (Oct 2012). A big chunk of the advertising within the magazine was found to be in breach of the Advertising Standards Authority's codes.

The best place to get an overview of the catalogue of the various magazine articles considered problematic is on Josephine Jones' blog: "WDDTY: My master list" which links most of the mainstream articles and blogs, and gives a timeline of events.

Earlier this year the magazine sent an email to subscribers highlighting that they were rebranding the version of the magazine on sale in UK stores as 'Get Well' though keeping the 'What Doctors Don't Tell You' branded version for subscribers.

The magazine now seems to have reappeared in Sainsbury's and concerns were immediately raised about that and about one article in particular called 'Reversing Autism' which is a story of one woman and her autistic son. There has been an emerging Twitter campaign to ask @Sainsbury's to remove the magazine from its shelves and shops. I contacted their press team, explained I was going to write about the magazine's reappearance there and asked if they'd be happy to explain why they decided to start stocking it again. The quote above was the reply. I hope they will decide to stop stocking it but have spotted the ambiguity in the spokesperson's quote.

I have not seen the magazine myself 'in the wild' for a number of years but have no reason to doubt everyone on Twitter who's saying it's reappeared.

My favourite of WDDTY's errors
On 1 July 2014 the magazine editors wrote a Facebook post about several of the people who'd written or complained about the magazine and they somehow managed to include me in this. Amusingly there were a number of errors in there (my name spelled wrongly, they said I worked for someone I'd never heard of, my efforts to get them to correct this went nowhere) but more interesting was the tiny error they made about how many people followed Simon Singh on Twitter.

Here's what the post said "Their numbers aren’t large (there’re only about 80 of them in total), and they aren’t well followed ... Simon Singh, just 44 actively following him..."

Here's a screenshot of his Twitter profile from 2014.

As of 2014 Simon was following 44 people and had 54.1k followers.

They'd simply got it the wrong way around, an easy thing to fix. Everyone pointed this error out assuming that the 'cognitive typo' as I called it would be quietly fixed and we'd move on.

In an unusual scene in the Facebook comment thread they instead offered this clarification - "Just to set the record straight.Simon Singh has had 54k people over the years who have, at some point, tuned into his Tweets. But the actual number of people who are actively following him at this time are, as I said, 44." 

This is just not true.

It seems the magazine 'What Doctors Don't Tell You' doesn't like me

I was surprised to discover this afternoon that I've now made it into yet another* Facebook rant from the people behind What Doctors Don't Tell You (there have been many rants though this is my first inclusion). They've been escalating their rants about skeptic activists (while unironically noting how few of us there are) ever since Tesco decided to stop stocking their magazine. The reason Tesco gave was that the magazine wasn't selling^ - I've no idea if this is true or if Tesco really did listen to the complaints against the magazine's content (or possibly they just read it and drew the relevant conclusions themselves).

*https://www.facebook.com/WDDTY/posts/770960436257904
^https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152543438997767&set=p.10152543438997767&type=1&theater - this link might take you to a picture shared on WDDTY's public page, it's a screenshot of an email from Tesco saying that they'd removed it in response to feedback.

Anyway, What Doctors Don't Tell You is now blaming skeptics for the withdrawal of the magazine and is now reduced to publicising personal and work information about us. To me this is very telling. Each of us has blogs where we've criticised the magazine's content or the framing of its content. If they think we're wrong it would be better to point out where we've missed something. The fact that the chosen tactic relies on personal attacks speaks volumes.

Remember that a number of the advertisers in the magazine have been found to be in breach of the advertising standards guidelines and in one particularly amusing case, someone whose research was written about in the magazine pointed out that the author had got it wrong.

Here's what WDDTY would like you to know about me... or at least someone whose name rhymes with mine (I have spelled it as Jo Brodie for... ooh, forever).

The bits that are accurate are fine. The bits that are inaccurate are quite wrong (surprise!) and it ropes in another Jo Brodie who might be a bit miffed to find herself (himself? Jo can be a man's name too) connected with this, so my post here is published to clarify my own 'involvement' in the list of skeptical activists. At the end of this post I'm including links to any other relevant blog posts that clarify the misinformation in the WDDTY Facebook post.

My work / volunteering
I do indeed work two days a week (2.5) for the CHI+MED project, yes. It's funded by the EPSRC (one of seven research councils) which are funded by the taxpayer. We are not paid by the pharmaceutical industry or, for that matter, the medical devices industry. We do work with medical device companies - we're trying to reduce the harm that can happen when complicated devices are used under stressful conditions.

My job is partly to update the website and expand the project's online presence - fair enough. I also give talks about our research, in particular the work we've done on public (& stakeholder) engagement and science communication.

For the rest of the week I do not work at Diabetes UK and haven't done since June 2012. Diabetes UK made the entire Science Information Team redundant then (5 people affected) but I'm on friendly terms with them, they do good stuff and I learned a lot while there.

I have never worked for Prof Wharton and until today had never heard of him. If you google his name and add mine you'll find that he does have a secretary with my name (spelled -ie not -y) but it isn't me. There are a surprising number of people called Jo Brodie who aren't me in fact. Prof Wharton's based in Sheffield, I'm in London. I'm sure I'd do quite a good job if I did work for him though as I have a Masters degree in Neuroscience and he seems to work in that sort of area.

For the rest of the week I actually work (1.5 days) on the Teaching London Computing project - supporting computing teachers who'll be delivering the new subject / curriculum. I also volunteer one day a week (1d) at JDRF (the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) so that I can put my diabetes statistics knowledge to good use.

"I'm not medically trained"
The reason I freely admit that I'm not medically trained is because it's true and some of the things I post here touch on health and medical topics. I think it's important to state this so that people aren't misled - I am not qualified to give advice, in much the same way that this magazine isn't qualified to give medical advice. To be honest even if I was medically qualified I'd still not be acting appropriately in giving advice because I don't have access to your medical records and might give advice that isn't relevant to you.

This concept was made very clear to me while working at Diabetes UK. We took calls from the public, explained that we were science information officers and then hopefully did a competent job of explaining complex topics simply. Quite a few people referred to us as 'doctor' (of course we corrected them) and many callers maintained the belief that we were medically trained, some were surprisingly quite deferential. That bothered me because we were trying to signpost them to information, not give them medical advice, and we certainly didn't want to misrepresent ourselves. I hope to make it clear from the outset (in the blog bio bit at the top) that I'm not medically qualified and I also re-mention it in relevant posts too.

Qualifications and competence
The post mentions several other people, largely to try and imply that we're a bunch of un-medically-qualified folk who are not fit to assess the content in the magazine. By contrast, their own advisors include:

"seven medical doctors on its editorial panel, plus several PhDs and highly qualified practitioners of a number of alternative disciplines. Thousands of doctors and health practitioners of every persuasion regularly read WDDTY and comment enthusiastically. The two editors of our magazine have been medical science writers for 25 years, and every word in our pages is checked by a science editor with a an extensive history of writing and editing medical studies for the pharmaceutical industry."

You might be interested in the background of these doctors...

I'm amused by the bit pointing out that a fact checker worked for the pharmaceutical industry - the magazine often criticises Pharma for distorting evidence so I'm not sure what to make of that. Also if the magazine is called What Doctors Don't Tell You it seems odd to tout the fact that you're taking editorial advice from them.

While I am not a medical science writer I've done a fair bit of it (only 8 years, so I can see immediately how my qualifications fall dramatically short of theirs) and am not too bad at critical appraisal. Really, anyone who's been trained as a scientist is reasonably competent to critically appraise scientific or medical information - and we can all improve with practice.

WDDTY's message is that we're not qualified to comment on their magazine. While I maintain that anyone who can make sense of evidence is qualified to do this, it's not at all clear who WDDTY would accept as suitable:

• Not the eight of us because we're not medically trained
• Not doctors because they are medically trained...
• ... except some doctors who agree with them.

In addition to my sciencey qualifications I actually think that my most relevant-to-WDDTY one is that most of the complaints I put in to the ASA result in upheld adjudications or are informally resolved. I can think of only two that were rejected outright - one because the ASA disagreed with me and thought the advert wasn't misleading, the other one (recently) was because the complaint didn't actually fall within their remit.

Others have shared the Facebook status, taking WDDTY's message that we're not qualified to comment -

Personally I think the first line should read "This important magazine is being written by people who have no credentials whatsoever to give opinions on medical issues..."  my criticism is not about anyone's qualifications but based on the evidence of the magazine's published output. 

I'm a little bit miffed about the last line of course because my qualifications and experience are all about the health and medical field, just not as a doctor.

They end with:

"...write to Tesco today and ask them to re-stock What Doctors Don’t Tell You. And tell them a bit more about the people who fire off ‘complaints’ – that they are neither true customers nor people with either the training or experience to evaluate the information in our pages: customer.service@tesco.co.uk"

Unfortunately for WDDTY I (and the others mentioned) have both the training and experience to evaluate the information in their pages, and that's why they're a bit mean about us.

Others' take on being included in the list (will add as more are written)
Skepticat aka Maria
http://forum.thinkhumanism.com/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=6604

Guy Chapman's blahg
WDDTY goes "the full Errol"

WWDDTYDTY (What What Doctors Don't Tell You Don't Tell You)
Meet the people who would dictate your health care

The campaign against WDDTY continues, apparently

Lynne McTaggart has published a post [http://www.lynnemctaggart.com/blog/272-the-campaign-against-what-doctors-dont-tell-you-continues] suggesting that skeptics (we're in 'quotes' for some reason) have managed to convince Tesco that customers have been complaining about the magazine ​What Doctors Don't Tell You​ . I don't think this is quite right - any complaints I've sent to Tesco either by email or Twitter haven't focused on my customer status, only why I think the medical information in the magazine isn't up to scratch.

Ms McTaggart also suggests that we've "harrassed dozens of [WDDTY's] advertisers by reporting them to the ASA" - well I'd say the advertisers have made misleading advertising claims and the expected response to that would be to report it to the ASA. From what I can tell the ASA agreed that the ads were misleading and adjudicated against quite a few of them for breaching the advertising guidelines that all marketer are meant to follow.

Then things get a bit odder - she says that various skeptic organisations "sent their foot soldiers to hide our magazines on the shelves of stores and attempted to destroy our Google ranking."
True enough several people hid magazines, but framing this as 'foot soldiers' is a bit daft. A couple of people tweeted about doing it on the #wddty hashtag, it amused some others and they did it too. Not really a command from on high.

Regarding the Google ranking - this seems to relate to a persistent misunderstanding of how 'Do Not Link' works. When a website links to another website it is effectively implying to Google's webcrawlers that it values that website. By using tools like Do Not Link we're telling Google to ignore this implication - but we're not worsening the Google ranking, we're just not increasing it.
The sentence "One of our websites was even mysteriously hacked into" seems to suggest that "skeptics did it" but websites are hacked all the time and I suspect it's more likely a coincidence. Of course it is possible that there are rogue skeptics doing this but I doubt it.

"Simon Singh is busy these days tweeting his supporters to write Tesco to thank them for not stocking us." - yep, I followed this suggestion as it seemed a good one. I was quick enough to write to them when they were selling it, no bad idea to thank them for (eventually) listening to my concerns.

Delighted that #WDDTY have reported on the #AllTrials campaign

In the past I've been a tiny bit⁽¹⁾ critical of both the content and editorial stance of the magazine 'What Doctors Don't Tell You'.

I am really pleased though that they've recently acknowledged (admittedly indirectly by not actually mentioning them by name) the work done by Ben Goldacre, Sense About Science and many others to put pressure on the pharmaceutical industry, via the Government, to make its full trial data available, not just the good bits.

Here's what's on WDDTY's website - UK government demands drugs industry comes clean on hidden data⁽²⁾ (7 January 2014) What Doctors Don't Tell You 

The first paragraph mentions that the UK Government wants greater openness from pharmas after having spent £424m stockpiling Tamiflu without being able to be certain if it works.

The second para mentions that the Public Accounts Committee wants all trial data from all prescription drugs published.

Then it cuts off and the last bit is hidden behind a login but this is visible on cached copies, or from this copy. WDDTY highlights the source of the news is the BBC's website, from 3 January 2013.

From a search on the BBC's site I assume it's referring to this page - Lack of drug data 'extreme concern' (3 January 2014) BBC News which mentions all the stuff above (Tamiflu, £424m, Public Accts Cttee, concern at lack of data) and it also mentions the AllTrials campaign which WDDTY leaves out in a sort of reverse cherry-pick manoeuvre.

The AllTrials campaign has been running for over a year now and many organisations have signed it, though I don't believe WDDTY have done so yet. This is both expected and surprising. Expected because the campaign is organised by people and organisations that WDDTY is critical of and has been criticised by, and surprising because the campaign is aimed at the pharmaceutical industry. Given that WDDTY sets itself contra 'Big Pharma' it would seem they'd want to be involved with something that's allied to their goals, however I suspect it will be a while before there's any 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' type of rapprochement.

A number of people have posted information to WDDTY's Facebook page about the AllTrials campaign although all of these messages appear to have been promptly removed and those posting the information have also been blocked. I did try to post information there but had already been blocked (and yes, I was polite in my disagreements), so blogged about it instead back in October.

Still, it's good news that they've now decided to highlight the aims of the campaign even if they've been a smidge untransparent about its origins, it's a start I suppose.

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(1) OK quite a lot
While there's some good sense in the magazine this is spoiled by an awful lot of very poor advice floating around in a marinade of ambiently bad advice. There's been a tendency also to overplay fairly small studies and not really put them into contex, which can be very misleading. On top of that several of the companies advertising in the magazine have made some claims that were not quite as they should be. Consequently there have been a number of complaints made to the Advertising Standards Authority upheld and recorded as adjudications on their website.

The editors have also behaved quite unusually when people have asked for evidence or pointed out discrepancies.

They've also claimed that skeptics are trying to 'ban' the magazine (I'm not aware of anyone who's actually called for that, if they have it's certainly not been picked up and campaigned on). Everyone's perfectly happy that the magazine should be printed, it's been published for 20 years for subscribers after all, but doctors / scientists / skeptic bloggers etc are concerned at it being given a prominent place in supermarkets, a kind of endorsement. I don't want it banned, I just don't want it sold in supermarkets.

Annoyingly, and I think misleadingly, the promotional material that WDDTY have been putting out about their magazine uses this claim that people are trying to ban the magazine. I think that's a bit cheeky.

(2) This is a 'do not link' link. Amusingly WDDTY's editor, Lynne McTaggart, has claimed that skeptic bloggers use this form of linking to do SEO damage to the magazine. The link cannot do that, it merely doesn't add any extra 'google juice' to the link. Whenever a site links to another site that's recorded by search engines* as the first site recommending the second. Using a neutral link means there's no recommendation, but equally there's no damage.

*Or at least has been recorded in that way in the past, search engines are changeable beasts.

WDDTY 'exposes' the ASA but slightly misses the point I think

Since I've been blocked from the "What Doctors Don't Tell You" Facebook page I can't comment there and I doubt they'd publish a letter from me so I'm posting it here. I'm still smarting a little bit from the ban to be honest as I don't think I could have been any more polite while disagreeing with someone - I pointed out that people who are critical of WDDTY might not be 'Big Pharma shills' (after all, I'm not).

Of course my blog is indexed in Google (nothing unique to me, most blogs are and Blogger is owned by Google) so this text may well show up when people search for WDDTY-related material in a way it probably wouldn't if I'd posted it on Facebook. So swings and roundabouts.

I've had a look at the December edition of this magazine and was disappointed though not surprised by the WDDTY Opinion Piece on the Advertising Standards Authority. I think bits of it are wrong, but bits of it are also encouraging people to focus on the wrong battle. In addition to the ASA there's a lot that a knowledgeable, motivated, collaborative and snarky bunch of bloggers can do and have done to try and tackle misleading advertising claims.

If you spot any mistakes in my arguments below please let me know, thanks.

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Dear WDDTY

There seems to be some confusion in your opinion piece on the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) and its role. Since the pharmaceutical industry is not allowed to advertise directly to the public in the UK the ASA does not rule on any of its marketing material. The PMCPA (Prescription Medicines Code of Practice Authority) is the body that makes sure that pharma companies are operating within the ABPI's (Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry) code - if drug advertising (found in the medical not general literature) is misleading then the PMCPA can take action against it. The ASA instead ensures that marketing material is compliant with the CAP (Committee of Advertising Practice) code.

In both cases the two agencies are paid for by the industries that they regulate, so I don't think the ASA is paid for by pharma companies. Undoubtedly some pharma companies have a non-prescription only medicine wing that they might advertise to the public so I'll accept that there might be some money from them.

I am more concerned that the tone of the article suggests to readers that the ASA is getting a bit above itself and can be ignored. I'm not sure that this is helpful to any of your readers who are making health claims without robust evidence because they may not realise what happens if someone reports them to the ASA.

I've probably reported only around 30 adverts or marketing items to the ASA. In one or two cases the ASA disagreed with me and felt there was no case to answer, a few more have been resolved informally but rather a lot have resulted in an adjudication in 'my' favour. To be honest I'd have preferred that the organisations involved just amended their pages when first asked, and saved themselves and the ASA the bother.

Within this relatively small, compared with other skeptic bloggers, number of complaints I have had a pretty high success* rate and this is what I've learned from going through the process several times.

*I think it's important to say that my definition of success is a misleading claim being removed or modified and not just someone getting told off. I'd be lying though if I said I hadn't also enjoyed some of the worst cases being told off.

A complaint is made to the ASA
Initially the ASA will probably contact the organisation / marketer and ask them to amend any misleading claims. Even if they do so promptly the ASA will still list this on their website as an 'informally resolved' case - i.e. the mere act of me reporting a website tends to result in their trading name being listed on the ASA (this is why I'd prefer to have a quiet word with the marketer first but this rarely goes well).

Marketer decides to defend their claims
If they decide to challenge the ASA by providing evidence then the ASA will deliberate further and make an adjudication. Either it will go in the marketer's favour (not upheld) or it won't (upheld) but again in either scenario the case will be listed on the ASA's website on its own separate page and will likely be tweeted.

Marketer told to amend claims, marketer doesn't
If, after an adjudication is upheld, the marketer still doesn't amend the claims then the ASA may add them to its list of non-compliant online advertisers. It can also work with search engines to remove paid-for advertising and take out an advert itself about the misleading claims. In parallel with this there's a high chance that it will be tweeted and blogged about and may even make it to the mainstream press. The ASA has recently (as of 21 November 2013) strengthened its relationship with Trading Standards and if the claims are still problematic then the ASA can refer the marketer to Trading Standards. At that point things could well become rather serious as Trading Standards can bring a case against them to court which is likely to result in a fine or (rarely) a prison sentence.

Bloggers and newspapers might publicise this further
Again, in parallel, there will probably be some blogging and possibly mainstream news articles about this which can damage search results (when people look for information or a company website they will find information pointing out that the company has been making misleading claims).

'Using' the ASA
To say that Simon Singh and the Nightingale Collaboration 'use' the ASA is a bit silly, since that is the body that deals specifically with misleading consumer advertising. Though on a much smaller scale you could also say that I 'use' the ASA to persuade marketers to make their claims more reasonable.

In some cases I report people to Trading Standards, sometimes to the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority. More recently I have reported some marketers to the CHNC (Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council) for misleading claims, where that marketer is registered with that professional body. The CHNC has suggested that its members should follow ASA / CAP guidelines.

Credit where it's due
Simon Perry devised the Fishbarrel tool which is a plugin for Chrome. However if readers of the Nightingale Collaboration's newsletter want to take part in a particular claim they rarely submit complaints to the ASA precisely for the reason of not swamping them. The Nightingale Collaboration usually asks readers to share relevant examples with them, and then they submit a master complaint - this is more efficient.

Don't get bogged down with just evidence - medical governance is important too
The ASA isn't just interested in evidence (robust evidence please, not these feeble little studies that show a small positive effect) but also what types of conditions people are talking about. There are a number of serious conditions that require the care of appropriately qualified doctors and if a website or leaflet is claiming to treat people with those conditions, but doesn't have a doctor on-site, then this is problematic - irrespective of the quality of any evidence.

Be careful what you wish for
Dismantling the ASA will not stop bloggers from reporting misleading trading claims to Trading Standards or other regulatory agencies. It also won't stop them writing about misleading claims, and in terms of search engine results that may be the bigger problem for those who rely on online reputation. I certainly can't imagine things would be much better for sellers of alternative medicine if the government began regulating it directly.

More strangeness to come from 'What Doctors Don't Tell You'

Being not very good at setting health information in its proper context and struggling with critically appraising medical articles is one thing but conspiracy theories are a new strange for WDDTY. I spotted this earlier today.

I'm scratching my head a bit at this one to be honest. Most of the computer-related glitches mentioned can just as easily be explained by successful phishing attempts (where you click on a rogue site that looks like a genuine one, it asks for your password, you supply it and your password is used to open and compromise your real account). These are commonplace on Twitter for example - often a compromised account is used to send a message with a link in it to that person's friends... who click on it, hand over their password... and so on.

In fact it's so common that Twitter has pretty much blocked people from sending links* via Direct Messages. It also provides information on what to do if your account's been compromised https://support.twitter.com/articles/31796-my-account-has-been-compromised#

Most 'hacking' is probably 'phishing' as far as I'm aware.

Visiting iffy websites (unwittingly, when clicking on a link from a friend whose account's been compromised) could also explain the viruses.

I've never heard of any skeptic collecting someone's data but fair enough I really don't know what this refers to. Any website with Google Analytics collects some information about every visitor (time of visit, length of visit, type of web browser, what keywords they used to search Google to reach the site) - this is commonly used on pretty much ALL websites and hasn't got anything to do with skepticism. The opportunities to use this for 'evil purposes' are pretty limited to be honest.

I've been burgled, the burglar left a pair of socks - the Police were fairly puzzled too. Since burglary is not a rare crime and not particularly associated with skepticism my assumption is that the burglars were ordinary burglars and not in the pay of Big Pharma. I wonder if the gold watches were dropped in error by the burglars who'd pinched them from another property.

We skeptics should certainly try not to be rude though, no disagreement there. It's perfectly possible to disagree and remain on civil terms, although people calling us thieves doesn't make it easy.

*It's possible that this is a glitch though.

Tally of Facebook posts and press releases by WDDTY about The Times' articles

The last time The Times wrote an article about the magazine WDDTY (What Doctors Don't Tell You) they emitted numerous emails to their subscribers and published Facebook wall posts about it, to the point that I almost began to lose count.

Not this time though, I'm getting in early and totting them up. If I've missed any I'm sure someone will let me know.

1 November 2013 
At 13:31 WDDTY add this to their Facebook wall STILL TRYING TO BAN US discussing the fact that there would be a new article about them in The Times.

2 November 2013
The Times publishes its second article about the magazine, prompting WDDTY to post, at 20:58, another post called THE ELEPHANT STOMPS ON THE FLEA AGAIN FOR GOOD MEASURE

3 November 2013
Published at approximarely half past nine: WHY THE TIMES REPEATED THE SAME ATTACK ON WDDTY

4 November 2013
At around 8.30pm one of the editors of the magazine (Lynne McTaggart) published a post on her blog about Medical McCarthyism and cross-posted it to Facebook with the caps-lock-y title HAVE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER. . .TAKEN HOMEOPATHY? (this counts as posted once really I think, let's not be unreasonable). It's an odd sampling method.

Ms McTaggart repeats the claim that WDDTY has never said that homeopathy cures cancer - hmm, 'opinion is divided' on that one.

5 November 2013
A link was published to a post on the 'Adverse Reactions' blog on WDDTY's community section, called The Inconvenient Truth (there's a very interesting comment from a Dr, I hope it isn't deleted, which incidentally calls for WDDTY to sign the All Trials petition, as many others (including me) have).

6 November 2013
This morning Lynne McTaggart published THE REAL PSEUDOSCIENCE HERE on her own Facebook page.

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Previous press releases from WDDTY, in October 2013

• Our Word
• What the Times didn't tell you 
• The WDDTY wars 
• Subscribe before we are banned

WDDTY on Type 2 diabetes - not actually dreadful but could be a bit better

Plenty of people have been taking a keen interest in the magazine 'What Doctors Don't Tell You' lately. It positions itself as a health magazine but the advice within it has been shown repeatedly to be unhealthy and often dangerous. Sometimes the information in it is flat out wrong, other times it isn't particularly wrong, perhaps just a  bit preliminary, but that bit of information is given much more weight than is warranted.

I thought I'd take a look at the current issue (November 2013) and see what they had to say about Type 2 diabetes, having previously implied in a headline that you could sunbathe it away (a rather glib approach to the otherwise interesting relationship between Vitamin D and health). I'm afraid you can't sunbathe Type 2 diabetes away.

In this issue I found three main 'things' that mention diabetes, one about intermittent fasting, one about getting more sleep and one frankly loopy one about electricity.

The first two fall into the category of being genuinely interesting information but an awful lot is missed out meaning that it's not clear to readers what they should do with it. The third is plain old silliness and just lets someone spout nonsense for a bit while hinting at products you can buy to detect or solve the non-existent problem.

On page 12 - Fasting improves heart health
Although, given the magazine's title, I can imagine they're reluctant to add this sensible phrase the one thing that's missing from this piece is "speak to your doctor (or a proper dietitian) about any drastic changes you want to make to your diet". I don't think it's particularly controversial to add that, after all people are free to ignore it. I suppose they do say it in their liability statement on page 3 though.

LIABILITY STATEMENT
While every care is taken in
preparing this material, the publishers
cannot accept any responsibility
for any damage or harm
caused by any treatment, advice
or information contained in this
publication. You should consult
a qualified practitioner before
undertaking any treatment.

They are reporting on a review, published in the British Journal of Diabetes & Vascular Disease, of several studies looking at calorie restriction and intermittent fasting and its effects on cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The picture shown in the magazine has a plate with a small potato, bit of broccoli and a tomato on it - hopefully this is not provided as a 'serving suggestion'.

Intermittent fasting is a bit less arduous than the 600 calorie semi-starvation diet recently trialled which was widely reported as having 'reversed' Type 2 diabetes. I think it's important to note that the 11 people in that trial were relatively young (late 40s early 50s), had had Type 2 diabetes for just a few years and had HbA1c values of 'rather elevated' rather than 'yikes'. I wrote about this paper when it was published. As such they may not be representative of the wider population of people with Type 2 diabetes. Also, when we're talking about reversing diabetes I want to know more about the effects on long-term complications.

Having said that I think this research is interesting but reporting on it without offering any guidance as to how people might implement it seems a bit cavalier. Let's hope people reading it don't 'down forks' and go hungry.

I'm not medically or dietetically trained so I can't give any useful advice either, beyond go and talk to someone competent (be wary if they're a nutritionist, anyone can say they're that and there's an awful lot of bad practice in the nutrition world).

• Intermittent fasting: a dietary intervention for prevention of diabetes and cardiovascular disease? British Journal of Diabetes & Vascular Disease March/April 2013 vol. 13 no. 2 68-72

On page 14 - A lie in helps prevent diabetes
I'd have added 'Type 2' to the title but the rest of the short piece does make it clear. I don't think anyone's going to argue with the idea that getting enough sleep is A Good Thing but the article implies that getting a lie-in at the weekend can undo a week of poor sleep. I'm not sure that that's actually true but I suppose it's better than nothing.

The article also references a study of 19 healthy young men whose insulin response improved after a good night's sleep. I'm not sure that the physiological responses to sleep of these chaps can tell us much about what's going on in someone older and less healthy and who perhaps has other metabolic issues. But fair enough, more sleep is better than insufficient sleep. The article references "The Endocrine Society’s 95th annual meeting, San Francisco, June 18, 2013" but it's not clear if it was a preliminary poster presentation or just something someone said.

On page 60 - Unhealthy rays - is really where they go to town with poor information

"Starting with this issue, we are launching a monthly column on the effects of ‘dirty’ electricity on health and how to protect yourself against it" - utter guff.

They go on...

As Milham once put it: “There is a high likelihood that most of the twentieth century ‘diseases of civilization’, including cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and suicide, are not caused by lifestyle alone, but by certain physical aspects of electricity itself.”1 How can a leading doctor make such a claim?

:-o is pretty much how my face looked after reading that. I wonder if having electricity also means you're more likely to stay up late, reading by electrically-powered lights (we've just seen that getting less sleep is a bad thing) or perhaps watching an electrically-powered television in a sedentary manner. Or maybe the sort of lifestyle that lets people acquire electricity is the sort of lifestyle that increases the likelihood of certain health problems. I'm not sure I'd leap to the conclusion that the electricity itself was the cause. 

They also blether on about wifi - fortunately this nonsense has already been comprehensively debunked in a post on Electrosmog in the amusingly titled blog "What 'What Doctors Don't Tell You' Don't Tell You".

Speaking of which, after reading Josephine Jones article on the fact that a number of the doctors involved in the WDDTY editorial panel aren't actually doctors I was moved to ask...

@_JosephineJones So... What Doctors Don't Tell You includes not telling you that their doctors aren't doctors? They're so meta ;) #WDDTY
— Jo Brodie (@JoBrodie) October 11, 2013

Dear #WDDTY and supporters - please sign the #AllTrials petition if you've not already done so, thank you

Further down is the explanation of why I've posted this on my blog and not on WDDTY's Facebook page (I did try, honest).

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Has WDDTY and its supporters signed the #AllTrials petition? If so - hooray, if not might I persuade you?

While the petition is organised by Ben Goldacre, the BMJ (British Medical Journal) and Sense About Science - wait, come back! :) - which I can only imagine might annoy you, I'm hoping the fact that it is actually asking pharmaceutical companies to make available ALL of their clinical trial data (not just the good bits) might cheer you up no end. This is a petition that has already annoyed some pharmaceutical companies, so for that reason alone I hope you might sign it :)

Some of the drug companies have acknowledged the need for a cultural change but others have said they don't want to hand over their data and that it is 'commercially sensitive' - it might well be, but patient safety is more important http://www.alltrials.net/2013/2338/

We might disagree on many things but I hope we can all agree that more information, and not being allowed to hide unfavourable information about drugs, tends to be 'a good thing'.

More on the petition here http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2013/08/12/a-call-to-action-from-alltrials/

The AllTrials website http://www.alltrials.net/about/ and they are also on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/alltrials

You are not harming the reputation of WDDTY or alternative therapists, or benefitting skeptic bloggers, or The Times, by signing this petition. It is quite a separate thing, aimed at ensuring pharma can't hide the data it might want to keep hidden.

Thank you, Jo

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Edit seconds after posting...

Here's Ben Goldacre, author of the book Bad Pharma (which is, y'know, critical of some of pharma's practices) writing about why he wrote that book: "I wrote this book because we need to fix a set of problems that have been allowed to persist in my own profession – medicine – for far too long."

This is why I get a bit miffed when people say skeptic / science / health bloggers are in the pay of Big Pharma. No!

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Earlier today I received a tweet from whoever's running the @_wddty (What Doctors Don't Tell You) account asking me to "please go to our fb page for replies and statements. Twitter is not meant to be used for giving arguments."

While I'm not entirely in agreement that there are any proscriptions on Twitter's use (I've had some amazing and good-natured arguments on there over the years, sometimes quite productive and I've regularly changed my mind about things) I concede their point. If you've been away from Twitter for a few hours and come back to a bunch of tweets (the other day I found myself copied in on 19 tweets that were really just a conversation between two other people) it's a bit ennervating. Also I don't think that WDDTY have a dedicated responsive social media presence (they may want to have a bit of a think about that though).

So I'm actually fine with interacting with them on Facebook if that's their preference, however I just tried to post the text above on their page and received this unloving message. Possibly I've been blocked from commenting as other skeptic blogger types have found. It could be a glitch though - none of my (reasonably friendly and not all that impolite, I thought) messages showed up the other day and I had assumed I was blocked, only to find them reappear an hour or so later.

Edit: 20 November 2013
Although it happened a couple of weeks ago I have now been blocked from commenting on WDDTY's Facebook page and some (all?) of my previous comments appear to have been removed.

Clearly the wall is WDDTY's space to use as it pleases and it's perfectly within its rights to block me. What I found disheartening was that all of my posts there were civil, had I been rude or spamming - well fair enough, more fool me and that sort of behaviour should lead to someone being blocked. But WDDTY is simply removing the voices of polite disagreement which I think is a shame. Oddly there were some other, quite robust, comments from skeptics - not quite rude but not pulling any punches - and these remained for longer than mine. Perhaps I am just jealous ;)

WDDTY, homeopathy, cancer and vaccines - well it's an odd way of going about things

It's always a bit mean, in an argument, to bring up things like "well you said..." but in the case of What Doctors Don't Tell You I am going to do precisely that. I'm a bit miffed with them at the moment, partly because they have a poor selection process for the adverts in their magazine (many have been sanctioned by the Advertising Standards Authority for being misleading), partly because some of their health advice is poor (not all of it I hasten to add) and partly because they persist in accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being in the pay of 'big pharma' and part of some cabal of people whose only joy in life is spoiling their fun.

Their recent difficulties arose when someone spotted that the teaser in the current issue (October) was going to be talking about cancer and homeopathy in the following November issue (out in a few weeks). Homeopathy is straight-up nonsense and no responsible health magazine should be talking about it, other than to recommend people avoid spending (wasting) money on it. The other problem is that the magazine is going to be talking about alternative (or complementary, if you prefer) treatments for cancer. Because of the Cancer Act of 1939 you have to be a bit careful what you imply in terms of treatments, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

If I could be convinced that the magazine's intention is to suggest things like homeopathy alongside conventional treatment I'd probably not bleat very much. Still a waste of money but as long as someone's getting real medicine then the extra chat they get with a homeopath or the placebo effect from the pills is OK with me.

Sadly WDDTY have a tendency to frame everything that comes from regular medicine as being a bit suspect, providing information about alternatives to real treatments. The magazine's name implies that doctors keep information from their patients, or don't have the latest information.

Even the Daily Mail, which can occasionally be fairly horrendous in its health information, doesn't treat doctors as self-interested employees of pharmaceutical companies so while I'd not lose sleep if they ran out of ink I can put up with their paper being sold everywhere.

A brief timeline
1. The Times recently ran a story (1 October) suggesting that WDDTY had implied that "homeopathy could treat cancer" and that "the cervical cancer vaccine has killed hundreds of girls". Here is the full quote taken from The Times' site (most of the article is behind a paywall):

"Experts are calling on high street shops to stop selling a magazine that claims that vitamin C cures HIV, suggests homeopathy could treat cancer and implies that the cervical cancer vaccine has killed hundreds of girls."

2. WDDTY was annoyed by this, feeling that The Times had wrongly attributed statements to the magazine which hadn't bee made and that, in addition, the author of the article (Tom Whipple) had failed to get in touch with magazine staff for their comment on the story (Tom Whipple makes it pretty clear that he did and eventually WDDTY conceded that he had tried).

It is now 7 October and I think WDDTY have published at least four separate press releases within three days complaining about The Times and the campaign to have the magazine removed from high street shops and supermarkets.

• Subscribe before we are banned (1 October 2013)
• What the Times didn't tell you (1 October 2013) 
• Our Word (1 October 2013)
• The WDDTY wars (3 October 2013)  

3. WDDTY also produced a video with Positive TV in which someone asks them if they said that homeopathy could treat cancer or that the HPV vaccine killed girls - to which they respond forcefully that they did not, and that they were merely reporting on others' research.

Thrill as the #WDDTY duo are gently bowled soft, pillowy questions in this hard-hitting interview http://t.co/pjzCpDLHnJ
— Rob (@PencilBloke) October 7, 2013

They also addressed the accusations on Facebook and threw a few insults towards Sense About Science, the Nightingale Collaboration and skeptic bloggers. 

They have been at great pains to state on Twitter, Facebook, on YouTube videos and in press releases / emails to their subscribers that they have never said that homeopathy might cure cancer or that the HPV vaccine might kill people who have it.

I disagree!! I think they've said precisely that.

Here they are saying, in the headline, that the HPV vaccine has killed hundreds of girls (to be fair the article is a bit vaguer but why go and say it in the headline?!).

‘Safe’ HPV vaccine kills up to 1,700 young girls

Here's a screenshot...

and here they are saying that homeopathy can be used to 'treat' or 'reverse' cancer - I concede that they have not used the word cure, but nor have they been sufficiently careful to ensure that anyone reading (particularly someone vulnerable) couldn't draw that conclusion. Harrumph!

.@The_Angry_Nurse @COMAGazines @_JosephineJones @_wddty pic.twitter.com/jSZRiEMtjD
— Alan Henness (@zeno001) October 5, 2013

the headline "Much more than placebo: Homeopathy reverses cancer" rather suggests that homeopathy is a solution for cancer and other text within the body of the article (published September 2013 October 2012) implies the same:

"Several homeopathic remedies are as effective as powerful chemotherapy, according to clinical trials, and thousands of cancer cases are being reversed by homeopathy alone." - this specifically implies that homeopathy is equally effective as chemotherapy, and that it might be used as a standalone treatment.

So this discussion on the use of homeopathy is not about its use as a complementary (and therefore harmless when running alongside real medicine) treatment, it is being suggested as an alternative.

I don't think anyone's died or been injured yet from reading or following the advice in this magazine but I hope you'd agree that it's not very good and the way they've framed it is a bit worrying. We know, from an amazing collection at What's the Harm?, that plenty of people do die or are injured from bad advice though - http://whatstheharm.net/