AMERICAN COMBATANT “The Enemy Lies Within”
http://www.Myspace.Com/Americancombatant_movie

ABLE DANGER “The Truth is Darker Than You Think”
http://www.abledangerthemovie.com

Sorry, “retired” was shorthand. I tend to assume that everyone knows these things, but of course they don’t. These days, the university system in the UK has got so bad, that the only time most people can do serious research is when they have “retired” and are freed from admin, teaching etc. One of my friends at Imperial is doing his best work now that he is “retired”.

On acupuncture, Barker Bausell’s Snake Oil Science is masterly. The evidence is really now rather strong that there is little or no difference between ‘real’ acupuncture and sham.

You are right that herbal medicine, unlike homeopathy, is not absurd. The problem is that only a very small fraction of it has been tested, and that the extracts are unstandardised. That means that most herbalism consists of giving to sick patients an unknown dose of a substance of unknown efficacy and unknown safety. That does not seem to me to be a very good idea.

This raises the question of why it was decided to hold the trial before the inquest. Surely the traditional practice of holding the inquest first makes far more sense. First determine whether a crime may have been committed; then, if you think there was a crime, set out to find out who committed it.

It seems to me that everything that has been done since de Menezes’ death can best (perhaps only) be explained on the basis of a cover-up. The authorities, surely, have been trying to square the circle - to avoid the necessity of finding one or more police officers guilty of crimes. That would certainly be a bad outcome. Unfortunately, although bad it would have been the best available. What has actually happened must inevitably undermine everyone’s faith in the authorities, the police, and the administration of justice in the UK.

Incidentally, I rather like your blog.

I am sorry your comment got held up - if I don’t hold up new email addresses the first time they are used, the blog gets flooded with spam. Future comments should go through immediately.

Before too long I will finish Ben’s book and give a rather more detailed analysis of what he says. So far I have only dipped into his blog periodically over the last year or so and found it fairly irritating.

Of course, I agree with much of what he says, homeopathy has to be pure placebo, and many other parts of alternative medicine are worse. But I still think he is fundamentally unscientific!

Well, I have written about Ben Goldacre several times before, eg at http://trustyservant.com/archives/137

The problem is that he is not an advocate for science, he is an advocate for mainstream Western medicine, which is not quite the same thing. He also seems - like many “scientists” - to be fairly unscientific in his approach, and Kuhn seems to have passed him by completely.

Popper did science a grave disservice. The oversimplified “make a hypothesis, test it” stuff is not how science actually works. Any competent theorist can always adjust any theory to fit any evidence. In practice, deciding when to change theories is a difficult judgment.

Take, for example, the Medawar and Matzinger paradigms for the immune system.