Nonsense diagnostic test used to diagnose non-existent problem

I keep a close eye on live blood analysis - it's been popular for a number of years in the UK and is closely linked with alkaline diets. Because of a number of misleading health claims made by several practitioners the Committee of Advertising Practice has published guidance on what advertisers can say about live blood testing.

"CAP is yet to see any evidence for the efficacy of this therapy which, without rigorous evidence to support it, should be advertised on an availability-only platform."

Not much as it happens. This is simply because there's no evidence it does anything useful so it would be a bad idea for anyone to claim that a useless test is useful, though it's fine to offer the test without making any claims - hence 'on an availability-only platform'.

While real medicine certainly does include looking at blood under a microscope the kind that is done by live blood analysts is the equivalent of a child playing with a toy oven. There are buttons you can turn or press and a door that can be opened, but you can't actually cook food on it.

Live blood analysts are led to believe that you can tell much more about someone's health by looking at their blood than you actually can. They pass this mistaken information onto their clients, believe that they can see things in the blood implying that there is something wrong with them and then sell them unnecessary supplements. With any luck the client will just be given some odd, but generally harmless dietary advice.

Recently I've noticed a number of tweets and articles implying that a live blood test provides evidence that 'smart meters' are damaging people's blood. This links in with a whole genre of misunderstanding about radiation, including the difference between ionising and non-ionising, but also failing to grasp that even if all wifi and electricity stopped tomorrow we'd still be getting a fair bit of natural (and ionising) radiation sleeting through us.

Unsurprisingly, this creation of an anxiety also allows people to sell a useless diagnostic test AND also sell tools that supposedly protect people from radiation. The 'extra' radiation is not harmful, the tools don't work and the diagnostic tests aren't diagnostic. There may be good reasons not to get a smart meter but effects on blood cells isn't one of them.

Further reading

• Live Blood Analysis – Observable Effects of RF/MW Radiation from ‘Smart’ Meter
• Twitter search for "live blood" smart meter
• What "What Doctors Don't Tell You" Don't Tell You on Electrosmog

Just found old draft blogpost: My day of woo

Tidying out a few old blog posts and came across this. It made me smile so am posting it.

Originally not posted on 10 June 2010.

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I once picked up a brochure for the Mind Body Spirit Festival which made me laugh so much I genuinely regret throwing it away. It had something about dolphin mysteries and also a workshop on spoon bending which included the instructions 'bring two teaspoons'.

Quite a few years ago I went along to the festival on what turned out to be a massive day of woo. I'd only intended for it to be a half day of woo with a morning of genetics being discussed, as a non-woo contrast. Unfortunately I failed to notice that the genetics discussion I'd signed up for was at Rudolf Steiner house...

The details are hazy but I went along imagining something like a Royal Institution lecture, perhaps even being recorded for radio, and realised my mistake as soon as I walked into a room with a small horse shoe of about 15 chairs. I was of a mind to make a dash for it but stuck it out.

There was a chap (Dean from Reading, hi if you're reading) sitting opposite me who was a fellow skeptic and whose eye I avoided for the entire event in case he set me off giggling.

All I can really remember was trying to rearrange my face not to appear too mocking when one of our small group raised the serious issue of creating a cloned human as whichever died first would get into heaven leaving the soul of the cloned human in real trouble.

At the tea break one woman who'd sat silently next to me for the event till that point announced she was leaving - not because she was made of tougher stuff than me and decided the woo was enough, but because she was extremely socially anxious and worried constantly that she'd just said something inappropriate. I felt a bit sorry for her in what's obviously a miserable plight but it really was a pretty odd morning.

Then I trotted along to the MBS Festival - the best and most sensible bit has to be the 'gong therapy'. I'm no idea if it's remotely therapeutic but the bowls and gongs do make a fantastic sound. More recently I enjoyed them, in an ostensibly non-therapeutic setting, at Longplayer in Camden. Here's a brief video I took, at TwitVid and an audioboo.

Edit: I'll have to try and find the audioboo now...

Bit disappointed that Greenwich Council's supporting community college woo

Picked up a copy of Greenwich Learns in Charlton House today and spotted that there are still adverts for courses in reiki, NLP and hand reflexology. I don't mind people selling charging for courses in these and making a spot of money out of it - why not? - but the fact that the Greenwich Council logo is on the front of Greenwich Learns makes me wonder if they're lending this sort of foolishness some sort of legitimacy, or even subsidising it. The information is certainly linked from their website.

A while back I wrote to one of the colleges involved but didn't hear back and didn't chase it up. I might have a bit of a think about this...


Greenwich Learns


Hand reflexology


NLP


Reiki

One reason why I don't have much time for psychometric questionnaires

I'm just looking at a document which has some questions on it that look a bit like psychometric woo to me. To be fair, it might not be an actual psychometric test but it seems that the format of the questions is similar, in that the questionnaire is full of unanswerable, illogical, overly specific questions.

" 1. I often criticise myself for failing to reach my own high standards."

If you always exceed your high standards do you answer 'no' because you don't, or don't need to, criticise yourself? How would the marker distinguish that answer from someone who routinely fails to reach their own high standards but doesn't criticise themselves, or does so less frequently?

Worse, what if the standards I set myself are really, really low and should be a lot higher? Perhaps I'm incompetent but don't know it.

"4. I dislike being interrupted."

Sometimes I do, if a deadline's looming and I'm focusing on something that requires full attention. Sometimes a break might be welcome, or even rcommended. Where is my "it depends" column?

Is there a way to categorise harm (eg from woo remedies)?

How do we categorise harm? 

(i) If I eat some bits of a yew or some iffy fungus I'll be very unwell - this is harm arising because the substance itself is toxic (clearly dose has some impact).

(ii) If I drink a lot of grapefruit or orange juice while taking certain statin drugs I'll reduce the rate at which my body clears the statin from my system, this might cause a problematic increase in the drug - this is harm arising from the grapefruit interacting with the enzyme that's meant to be clearing statins from the body (interactions).

(iii) If I buy some dodgy herbal pills from the internet they might contain prescription-only medicines that I don't know about. The real medicine could have been withdrawn from sale, or could interact with other prescribed meds that I might be taking or something else - this is harm arising from insufficient information and also a bit of (i) and (ii).

(iv) If I have a potentially serious health problem but choose to take treatment from an unconventional healer then by delaying getting appropriate treatment I may become very ill - this is harm arising from failure to act to preserve health.

There are probably other nuanced versions of these - I'm wondering if there's a recognised typology of harm, in the same way that you can have a Type I or Type II error in statistics.

If not, can we make some up ourselves?

Edit 31 August 2014
Just read an interesting post from Edzard Ernst looking more closely at the link between cardiac patients who are taking herbal remedies and their adherence to their prescribed medication. It looks like there may be a link (perhaps not surprising, though possibly not studied in depth before) and it seems that ther'e's a correlation between taking herbals and not taking prescribed medication appropriately. This could be dangerous and relates to (iv) in my imaginary taxonomy above.

A hitherto unknown risk of herbal medicine usage (31 August 2014) Edzard Ernst's blog

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A project I work on (CHI+MED - making medical devices safer) looks at many aspects of medical safety, including human factors and systems thinking in handling medical errors. Specifically this involves looking at ways of designing into the system or device ways of making unavoidable user error more noticeable so that people can recover from them.

The older 'blame culture' that's been prevalent in many healthcare systems has taken the view that error is because someone's done their job wrongly and the response has been to retrain them. If you've ever poured orange juice in your tea or forgot your umbrella you can see immediately that this isn't a helpful view to take. Human error is pervasive (hence inevitable) and only rarely will training (or worse, sacking and getting in new people) fix it. Much better to learn from error and bolster systems to protect against it.

To a certain extent Google does this everytime you mistype something and it says "did you mean?" and spellcheckers do something similar for Word documents. In both cases the system has a design function that acknowledges the possibility of mistyping and offers an alternative or solution. Similarly most keyboards have a delete key to let you undo and even pencils have an eraser on the end of them.

We've found a really nice way of talking about error that doesn't involve blame - the dumb things we do everyday tend to be quite funny and no-one really seems to mind poking fun at themselves for doing something silly. And lo and behold, the cognitive processes involved in making these everyday errors are pretty much identical to those often involved in medical error - so we can learn from them too - have a look at the #errordiary hashtag and the Errordiary website which explains more.