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...

---

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.

I've thanked Tesco for taking #WDDTY off its shelves

The magazine What Doctors Don't Tell You is available to purchase from their website and various other outlets throughout the UK and even abroad. It's an extremely easy magazine to get hold of, though I'm not sure why you'd want to once you understand what's in it.

It's written in an engaging narrative style and suggests that there's information out there that can help you with your health, but that doctors are keeping quiet about it - either because they don't understand it or are deliberately hiding it so that they can make more money from mainstream treatments. There's a whiff of  conspiracy theory about it but what particularly annoys me is the way it handles evidence and information.

If, when working as a science info officer at a medical charity, I'd taken the same attitude to evidence that some of the magazine's content has done I'd expect colleagues and my boss to have had a quiet word. It's all too easy to come across Medline abstracts that agree with your ideas but "in science we have to count the misses as well as the hits"⁽¹⁾ and you need to consider a wider range of evidence and put things in context.

It's extremely unusual that all the information you need to make sense of a study / paper can be found from just reading it (even in full) - you may need some prior knowledge about the health condition, or study design, to know how much weight to give it. You may need to read other documents to find out more, and ask people for their thoughts (you might have missed something). Critical appraisal can be a fun and collaborative thing.

There have been a number of things in the magazine that seem to be very wrong (and on one notable occasion the author of at least one study⁽²⁾ has stated that the magazine has drawn incorrect conclusions about the work). We all make mistakes and since I work in the area of human error (@chi_med) I can't be too snooty about that, however there seems to be an absence of 'errata'⁽³⁾ (the bit where publishers print what was previously wrong and what the corrected version should say).

Following a long exchange of emails and tweets asking several supermarkets to stop selling it Tesco has apparently soft-announced (by contacting complainants rather than press releasing anything, I believe) that it will no longer be stocking the magazine. Hooray.

I was quick enough to bleat so have sent them a thank you note, which is below.

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Good evening

I'm delighted to learn that you've decided to stop stocking the magazine What Doctors Don't Tell You. It's full of silly ideas mixed in with some sensible stuff (in my opinion this makes it all the worse as it cloaks itself by having just enough sense in it not to trigger too much amazement) but sadly the silly ideas are also potentially rather dangerous.

Implying that sunbathing can help manage diabetes (through increases in Vitamin D in the skin when exposed to the sun) is an odd take on the relationship between Vitamin D and glucose levels. Suggesting that homeopathy can help treat cancer is really quite bonkers.

Had they stuck to vague advice about eating your greens and made their medical disclaimer a bit more obvious I might not have taken against the magazine but a few of us have looked at it in some depth and have serious concerns with its content.

Thank you for taking it off your shelves. Now, is there any chance you might give the Daily Mail the heave-ho while you're at it ;-) They're usually OK on science but often pretty dire on health stuff.

Best wishes,
Jo

@JoBrodie----

(1) I'm sure loads of people have said it but I associate it with an amusing talk by Michael Shermer.
(2) Ctrl+F / search for Sun et al
(3) Well gosh! They've only gone and corrected something. Apparently the recipe was meant to say tomahto but ended up saying tomayto so they've addressed that serious problem ;)

Uh oh! I hope this doesn't become a habit: a correction in the latest issue of #WDDTY pic.twitter.com/GS4sdMoUzE
— Alan Henness (@zeno001) June 27, 2014

Note for the hard of thinking: asking a major supermarket to stop stocking a magazine has nothing at all to do with the freedom to publish or say something, which is what is generally understood by the phrase 'freedom of speech'. Or at least that's how I understand it but you're welcome to correct me, but ill-thought through comments will be deleted :)

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 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

The liability statement in "What Doctors Don't Tell You" is kinda fun #wddty

"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." Source: What Doctors Don't Tell You, October 2012, p3 (bottom left, blue panel)

This seems like a perfectly sensible liability statement / disclaimer. It just made me chuckle given their seeming mistrust of the medical profession.

I wonder why they've hidden the statement at the bottom left of a panel in which they've put all the editorial information... rather than placing this somewhere more prominent. Probably every magazine does this but since they're keen to give people good health  advice you think they'd want readers to see that warning.

Sensible person takes photo... :-)

@jobrodie Just for the lazier among us... #WDDTY twitter.com/BsSkeptics/sta…
— David James (@BsSkeptics) October 4, 2012

The picture has stopped showing up but can be seen in the link below - don't seem to be able to get an embed code for this link though, so can't embed it here.

https://twitter.com/StortSkeptic/status/253862603527426049/photo/1