Coca Cola and the corporate charity, 'Sense about Science'

The Times has recently published two articles that highlights the way big corporations organise science so that it helps to sell their products. Basically, they buy it!

This particular story concerns Coca Cola, and evidence that confirms what many people have known for some time - that 'sugary' drinks are unhealthy for us. But it could be a story about any Big Food company, any Big Pharma company, or any big corporation with money to spend on ensuring 'science' agrees with their marketing campaigns. They all operate in the same way. And many people, who call themselves scientists, are prepared to sell their reputations for a big enough cheque!

The research evidence that triggered this situation was entitled "Estimated Global, Regional, and National Disease Burdens Related to Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption in 2010". The background of the research was described as follows:

     "Sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) are consumed globally and contribute to adiposity. However, the worldwide impact of SSBs on burdens of adiposity-related cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), cancers, and diabetes mellitus has not been assessed by nation, age, and sex."

It is interesting to read that a drink that has been consumed in huge amounts for over a century have never been tested for these diseases. It appears that Coca Cola has been prepared to sell drinks to us without ever knowing their impact on our health. Still, this is not unusual, certainly amongst Big Food and Big Pharma companies. So what did they discover?

     ".....  we found that in 2010, 184 000 deaths and 8.5 million DALYs worldwide were attributable to consumption of sugary beverages, with three-quarters of these burdens occurring in low- and middle-income countries and the highest proportional burdens among adults 20 to 44 years of age. These results indicate the need for population-based efforts to reduce SSB consumption throughout the world through effective health policies and targeted interventions directed at stemming obesity-related disease."

So this was not the sort of publicity Coca Cola wanted for its highly profitable products. They certainly did not want any action "to reduce SSB consumption throughout the world". Their drinks might be a threat to the health of those who consumed them. It might cause 184,00 deaths every year. But this research was a threat to their profits. So what would they do?

Thanks to the Times articles (unusual for a big media corporation to uncover the activities of a big food corporation) this is what appears to have happened in the UK.

Coca Cola paid money to 'Sense about Science'. SaS is a charity that claims "to work with scientists and members of the public to change public debates and to equip people to make sense of science and evidence." Laudable aims indeed! Their website goes on to state that they "chase down dodgy science and mobilise networks of scientists and community groups to counter it." Wonderful stuff!

However, the Times article, dated 9th October 2015, suggested something quite different is happening.

     "Coca-Cola is to publish details of all the scientific research it funds in the UK after an investigation by The Times uncovered that the company had spent millions of pounds to counter claims that its drinks help to cause obesity.

     "The newspaper reported that the soft drinks giant ... has financial links to more than a dozen British scientists, including government health advisers and others who cast doubt on the commonly accepted link between sugary drinks and the obesity crisis.

So let us be entirely clear about this. Coca Cola has spent millions to counter the claims of a research study, and to raise doubt about whether their drinks cause harm, and kill people. So who did Coca Cola use to 'cast doubt' on the links between sugary drinks and the obesity crisis? The Times article, dated 9th October 2015, informs us.

     "A British charity set up to promote evidence-based science received more than £20,000 from Coca-Cola and then questioned research that was critical of sugary drinks.

     "Sense About Science, which was set up in 2002 to “change public discussions about science and evidence”, has Simon Singh, the author and journalist, and Nick Ross, the broadcaster, on its board of trustees. The charity received £20,681 from the company between 2012 and 2013, it said. It disclosed Coca-Cola as a funder on its website but made no mention of the relationship in several instances when it published criticism of research into the negative...........?????????"

So SaS, this science charity with such laudable objectives, has cast doubt on the deaths caused by sugary drinks, but in doing so, they failed to reveal their financial links with Coca-Cola.

Simon Singh, Ben Goldacre and many of their lesser minions, such as Paul Morgan, regularly attack this blog when I criticise conventional medicine, and the science that is supposed to support it. Indeed, most of the critics of Homeopathy during the last 10 years are members of SaS, so perhaps this situation makes the aims of SaS clearer.

The pharmaceutical industry does not like homeopathy. It represents a safer and more effective medical therapy to conventional medicine, dominated as it is with pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines. So SaS attacks homeopathy in an effort to support its paymasters!

The Alliance for Natural Health appears to agree with this, and in its article on this affair, gives a measured opinion of this organisation.

     "Sense About Science is the charity with which anti-alternative medicine skeptics like Simon Singh and Ben Goldacre are associated, that claims to be independent yet often acts as a voice for Big Food, Pharma and Biotech."

ANH goes on to assess the importance of the Times articles. They are worth repeating here to underline the financial (as opposed to the alleged scientific) motivation of SaS, and its credibility as an opponent of homeopathy, and other alternative medicines.

     "..... Coca-Cola has poured millions of pounds into British scientific research and healthy-eating initiatives to counter claims that their sugary drink does, indeed, help to cause obesity." 

     "Coca-Cola has financial links to more than a dozen high profile, influential British scientists and government advisors. It would seem the main game plan has been to ensure they cast doubt on the commonly-accepted link, one supported by none other than the Harvard School of Public Health, between sugary drinks and the growing obesity crisis."

     "(Increased sugar consumption) kills up to 53,000 people a year and costs the NHS £5.1 billion annually."

     "The British Government rejected recent calls for a sugar tax on consumers despite support from the UK’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Dame Sally Davies ... (and) ...  the British Medical Association". 

The ANH article outlines the money Coca Cola has 'invested' in a variety of British organisations, including the British Nutrition Foundation, the National Obesity Forum, the British Dietetic Association, and many others. What they wanted from their 'investments' is not mentioned, but it might be surmised!

     "Coca-Cola representatives have met government officials and ministers more than 100 times over a period of 36 months between 2011 and 2014, that is nearly three times each month."

     "Coca-Cola hosts an annual parliamentary dinner." 

The ANH article also outlines some of the politicians and government advisors with known connections to Coca Cola, and some of the statements they have made. Are these position what they actually thought, or what they were paid to think and say?

     "When I correlated sugar consumption with obesity levels, there didn’t appear to be any relationship.”

“I do not regard links with both industry and the government as being in conflict. Both the public and industry are entitled to access the best advice available.”

The ANH article also notes that Coca Cola are also 'ceaselessly advertising'. As yet, the Advertising Standards Authority, has not questioned any of this advertising of a product that is clearly dangerous to our health! Perhaps that is because the evidence on which Coca Cola advertising is based is less than reliable!

     "On 31 December 2013, Spanish researchers found that scientific papers on sugary drinks that were sponsored by or had potential conflicts of interest with the food and drink industry, including Coca-Cola, were five times more likely to find no link with obesity than similar papers that were independently funded.

ANH mention one further important fact that is very important. If sugary drinks are harmful to health, why not drink the non-sugar versions. It is a false thought as the drinks using article sweeteners are probably much more harmful.

     "For anyone trying to lose weight, drinking soft drinks may be one of the worst things you can do – and that includes “diet’ or low calorie versions. The high sugar versions are by no means the only offenders. Nature magazine published research findings that show that artificial sweeteners like sucralose, aspartame and saccharin cause changes in the beneficial bacteria that live in the human gut and contribute in regulating our metabolism. These artificial sweeteners also reduce our body’s ability to process glucose. The side-effects conspire to play a significant role in raising the overall risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

Big Corporations are a threat not only to our health, but to our lifestyles, and indeed our freedoms. 

It is not just that they use their wealth, influence and power to provide us with products that harm us, whether this be sugary drinks, confectionary, processed foods, pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines, rogue bankers, or Volkswagen cars.

These powerful corporations control our politicians, our governments, and our media. Corporate corruption infiltrate organisations, including charities, patient support groups and the like, in order to ensure that the general public only hear what they want us to hear. Selling and profit are king. Honesty and truth are secondary considerations. We are just consumers, and it matters not how much we are harmed.

"What Doctors Don't Tell You" magazine is under attack - because doctor's don't want you to know!

Please would you note the date this blog was originally published! 

October 2013! 

Nearly 10 years ago!

Amazingly, after all this time, Blogger has now seen fit to censor it! It contains, I was told today (16th March 2023) "sensitive material"!

Please read it, and see if there is anything written here that is untrue. The WDDTY magazine is still being published, but the campaign to remove it from the shelves of newsagents was eventually successful. Which makes the latter part of the blog out-of-date! Read through it to find any 'hate' speech - you won't find any in this blog, or any other blog that I have written since 2009!

WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF CENSORSHIP; a censorship community that Blogger has apparently now joined.

I am disappointed, but not entirely surprised. Pharmaceutical medicine is to powerful, too wealthy to criticise. Big Pharma controls the mainstream media, and no doubt Blogger is now dancing to their tune.

I will not, and cannot change the content of this blog.

Within 10 minutes of challenging this decision by Blogger, the post has been reinstated.

However, the entire incident confirms that no-one can, or should, have any confidence about anything appertaining the conventional/pharmaceutical medicine; and that media organisations are now quite willing to breach our freedom of speech, and freedom of information - given enough 'incentive' to do so by the pharmaceutical industry.

I thank Blogger for reinstating this post; but have to inform them that I no longer trust them, and can no longer believe that they can be trusted to allow the public to be informed about the harm being caused to patients by conventional medicine.

The magazine "What Doctors Don't Tell you is coming under attack - for daring to tell us things doctors are refusing to tell us!

To prevent a magazine being sold by pressurising distributors not to sell it is a major threat to our freedom of speech, and in particular, to our health freedom.

Please read the article - it shows just how 'nasty' the conventional medical establishment has become, how opposed it is to safe, natural treatment, and the steps they will take to ensure their medical monopoly is maintained.

AND WHEN YOU GET TO THE END, PLEASE WRITE IN SUPPORT OF THE DISTRIBUTORS, AS REQUESTED.

The WDDTY wars: why they don’t want you to read all about it Two days ago we woke up to find ourselves and our magazine What Doctors Don’t Tell You the subject of a national scandal. On Tuesday October 1, the Times ran with an article about how there was a ‘call to ban’ our journal What Doctors Don’t Tell You over ‘health scares’. The original Times article alleged that a group of ‘experts’, including ‘scientists, doctors and patients’ were ‘condemning’ shops for carrying our magazine, The article also said that we’d claimed that vitamin C ‘cures’ HIV, that homeopathy could treat cancer, that we’d implied the cervical cancer vaccines has killed ‘hundreds’ of girls and that we’d told parents in our latest (October 2013) issues not to immunize their children with the MMR. The Wright Stuff on channel 5 quickly followed suit with a television debate, flashing up a picture of me, Five Live followed up with a television debate about our magazine.  By Thursday, when the Press Gazette were onto it, the headlines had escalated to:  ‘Warning that claims in alternative health mag could prove fatal.’ In all of the furore, not one of the newspapers, radio shows or television stations bothered to contact us, even to solicit a comment – which is Journalism 101 when you intend to run a story on someone, pro or con. It’s also apparent from the information published in The Times and in all the media following that not one journalist or broadcaster has read one single word we’ve written, particularly on the homeopathy story, and for very good reason: the article and the magazine containing it in fact have not yet been published. Here is what the Times said, and here is what we actually published: The Times stated: we said vitamin C cures HIV.   We had written: “US internist Robert Cathcart…devised an experiment with around 250 inpatients who tested positive for HIV.  In a letter to the editor of The Lancet, he wrote that his regime of giving oral doses of vitamin C close to “bowel tolerance” had “slowed, stopped or sometimes reversed for several years” the depletion of an HIV patient’s CD4+ cells. The Times says we tell parents not to immunize their children with the MMR. We interviewed – and simply quoted – a medical doctor called Dr Jayne Donegan, who had carried out her own research into the MMR, and concluded that a child with a strong immune system shouldn’t have the vaccine.  This was the considered view of Dr Donegan, not us. We were simply quoting her. The Times says we said that we implied that the cervical cancer vaccine has killed ‘hundreds’ of girls’.  We had said that, up to 2011, the American Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System had received notification of 68 deaths and 18,727 adverse reactions to the vaccine. The figure has now risen to 27,023 events. The Times said we referred to a study in India in which girls had died following the vaccine but had not mentioned that one girl had drowned and one died from a snake bite. We said that seven children died and 120 suffered debilitating side effects so bad that the trial was stopped following protests from parents, doctors, public health organizations and health networks.  The Times also omitted to mention that, in 2010, an official Indian government report discovered huge lapses in the study’s design, which resulted in gross under-reporting of serious side effects. The Times said that we ‘suggest homeopathy could cure cancer’.  In the ‘Coming Next Month’ column in our October issue we wrote the following (and this is all we wrote: ‘The US government has carried out impressive studies into homeopathy as a treatment for cancer, and a clinic is India is actually using it. We report on their findings about homeopathy as a cancer treatment.’ The Times story - and all the stories that follow -  are entirely the work of Simon Singh, and his organization Sense About Science, a protracted skirmish that’s been going on for about a year, ever since we went launched our magazine in September 2013.  Singh, you may know, is the self-proclaimed guardian of all things ‘scientific’ with the pharmaceutically backed organization he fronts, ‘Sense About Science’. Singh contacted our distributor, and then all our outlets (like Smiths and the supermarkets) and tried to persuade them to stop carrying us (they refused).  He then relentlessly pestered the Advertising Standards Association with complaints about our advertisers, to try to prevent them from advertising. Singh is also associated with the Nightingale Collaboration, a ragtag group who meet in a pub of the same name, also allegedly wedded to ‘true’ science. After our launch, dozens of anonymous trolls began writing hateful and fairly libellous stuff on our Facebook pages. Last autumn the Guardian ran an online story claiming that our distributor was threatening to ‘sue’ Singh (they are not and never have threatened, nor have we).  We also got ‘interviewed’ by a Glaswegian doctor named Margaret McCartney, also associated with Singh, who writes for the BMJ. Recently, a doctor called Dr. Matthew Lam began contacting supermarkets, and informing them that he was calling for complaints to be made to customer service teams at all the supermarkets who carry us.  He said he was spearheading this campaign with Singh, McCartney and Alan Henness of the Nightingale Collaboration. Please allow me to join the dots. Sense About Science publishes online as its sponsors the British Pharmaceutical Association, the official trade body for the UK’s drug companies.  Another one of its sponsors is The Guardian. The next interesting aspect of this episode is the sheer hypocrisy of News International, which published the original story about us. That company, which owns The Times, is owned by the Murdoch organization. The Murdoch organization also owns HarperCollins.  HarperCollins published three of my books, including a book entitled What Doctors Don’t Tell You, a culmination of many years of research for WDDTY the newsletter. Harper liked the book so much they published it twice, first in 1996 after paying a team of lawyers at Carter-Ruck, the UK’s top libel firm, to spend hundreds of hours of legal time carefully sifting through all of the scientific evidence supporting statements I made in the book to ensure the material was rock solid. It was only published after they were satisfied that every last statement was correct. WDDTY was a bestseller for Harper – so much so that they asked me to update it and published the new version in 2006.  It’s also been an international bestseller, currently in some 20 languages around the world. At one point, I was also a columnist for the Times and ran a story highly critical of the MMR vaccine. Besides being a demonstration of how shoddy journalism has become, what interests me about this episode is that it offers evidence of the enormous shift that has occurred in the press’s notion of its role in society. The Times seems to be suggesting that their role is to ‘protect’ the public by censoring information that departs from standard medical line. Determining what is fit for public consumption, or indeed how its readers should treat their illnesses, is emphatically not a newspaper’s job – ours or anyone else’s. Our job as journalists is simply to inform – to report the facts, even when they are inconvenient truths, as they are so often in medicine, particularly with such things as vaccines or alternative cancer therapy. For despite all the grandstanding and pink ribbons and prettily turned phrases, the fact remains that the whole of modern medicine’s arsenal against cancer  is both blatantly unscientific and ineffective.  When not manipulated, the bald statistics reveal that chemo only works 2 per cent of the time .The War on Cancer from the orthodox perspective is decisively being lost. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of people are being cured by other methods of cancer treatment. Millions of others who have cancer or whose loved ones have cancer want to know ways to treat cancer that are less dangerous and more effective. That qualifies as news, and it’s our duty as the press to report that.  It’s my job to deliver well researched information, and that’s supposed to be the Times’ job too. Several months ago, I met Patricia Ellsberg, the wife of Daniel Ellsberg.  Back when I was a student, deciding whether or not to be a journalist, Ellsberg, an employee of the CIA, came across hundreds of pages of documents revealing America’s shameful role in the Vietnam war. Ellsberg felt this was news and it was his duty to leak these papers to the New York Times.  The Times felt it was their duty to publish these revelations, these inconvenient truths.  Then President Nixon attempted to censor these leaks by attempting a legal embargo on The Times – a blatant attempt at government censorship. The Ellsbergs (faced with life imprisonment – was anybody ever so brave?) turned on a photocopy machine, made multiple copies and leaked the documents to the Washington Post. And when Nixon went after the Post, the Ellsbergs smuggled the papers to 17 other newspapers.  Not one paper blinked.  Not one paper decided this information wasn’t fit to print – or that the public needed to be ‘protected’ from a lying presidency. But these days, the press – far less ‘free,’ now largely owned by huge corporations, including in the pharmaceutical industry (Murdoch’s son was on the board of one such drug company) – has now become the party with powerful vested interests to protect. Today the press is the Richard Nixon of the piece. Back when the NY Times was publishing The Pentagon Papers and the Washington Post published the Watergate disclosures, newspapers wouldn’t be caught dead being associated with some industry backed body, especially one with the track record of carnage enjoyed by Big Pharma, as the Guardian now is. But today newspapers are haemorrhaging money, and so have to have industry backing and its consequent influence. The public, which wants the truth, knows this and rejects this industry public relations by boycotting newspapers.  Presently, the Guardian is losing £100,000 a day, and the Times is losing £80,000 a day.  People don’t believe newspapers anymore. They know they have to go elsewhere for their news. That’s why they come to publications like ours. As Deep Throat once told Woodward and Bernstein, when they were investigating Watergate:  If you want to find out the truth, just follow the money. If you’d like to support WDDTY and a free press, and you haven’t yet voiced your support of the stores for stocking the title, let the following Customer Service departments know: WH Smith Customer.Relations@WHSmith.co.uk Sainsbury’s customerservice@sainsburys.co.uk Tesco customer.service@tesco.co.uk And with the weekend coming up, show your support by buying a copy.  It’s available in Tesco, Sainsbury’s, WH Smiths, and over 8000 independent retail outlets. And you can subscribe through www.wddtysubscribe.com

Homeopathy heals, and Conventional Medicine does not like it

Homeopathy is constantly under attack, even though it has been used as a medical therapy for over 200 years, and it is currently growing in popularity throughout the world.

It is time that the reason for these attacks on homeopathy are properly investigated and fully understood by the mainstream media in the UK.

Most of these attacks are made by anti-homeopathy groups, and are part of a worldwide campaign. It is being orchestrated by people associated with groups like ‘Sense about Science’ (SAS) in the UK, and other similar or linked groups funded by the Pharmaceutical Industry.

(For SAS funding see http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/Sense_About_Science)

The real objection that SAS, and the Pharmaceutical Industry, has to homeopathy is that it has been, and continues to be, highly successful in treating people, with all kinds of ailments and diseases. After all, if the anti-homeopathy campaign is right in stating, ‘there is nothing in homeopathy’, or ‘there is not evidence to support homeopathy’ why do they bother attacking it?

Homeopathy is under attack because it is am effective medical therapy. Moreover, it has an additional benefit. It is entirely safe. This, of course, is in stark contrast to recent patient experiences with conventional pharmaceutical drugs, from Thalidomide, Benzodiazepines, HRT, Vioxx, Avandia, Reductil, Co-Proxamol, Prexige, Effexor, and many, many others.

The evidence supporting the effectiveness and safety of homeopathy is twofold.

1. The empirical evidence for homeopathy is now quite overwhelming. Many millions of patients, throughout the world, and for over two centuries, can testify to its effectiveness. Something of the range of people who have been treated by homeopathy through this time can be found in Dan Ullman’s book, “The Homeopathic Revolution: why famous people and cultural heroes choose homeopathy”, published in 2007. Homeopathy users have ranged from leading US and UK politicians, to composers and musicians, to artists and stage/film celebrities, to religious and spiritual leaders. And this is not to mention the millions of ordinary people who have chosen homeopathy for its effectiveness and safety.

The primary requirement of sick patients is to be treated effectively, and safely. 

Homeopathy has consistently passed this important test.

1. RCT Evidence. Those opposed to homeopathy regularly state that “there is no scientific proof” supporting homeopathy. Hitherto, this anti-homeopathic mantra appears to have been a widely believed. But it is entirely untrue. There are now nearly 250 randomised controlled tests which clearly demonstrate that homeopathy works, and often that it works better than placebo, and better than conventional drugs.

For a list of these scientific papers that support the effectiveness of homeopathy, go to

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B0b69JqzK_44MjUyMTVkZmItYzhiYS00YTVhLWE3MWMtMWUyMTM0MGI4Yjgw

or to

http://hpathy.com/homeopathy-scientific-research/research-in-homoeopathy/

Even the question of the mechanism through which homeopathy works seems to be close to having a genuine scientific explanation. Professor Luc Montaigner, the French virologist, and Nobel prize winner in 2008, stated (in an interview in the December issue of Science Magazine).

          "I can't say that homeopathy is right in everything. What I can say now is that the high dilutions are right. High dilutions of something are not nothing. They are water structures which mimic the original molecules."

Professor Montaigner has already published research showing that high dilutions contain nano-particles that emit electromagnetic waves from their DNA which can be measured, and have an effect. For more information about Montaigner’s work, which he is now pursuing at Jiaotong University in China, see the following:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-ullman/luc-montagnier-homeopathy-taken-seriously_b_814619.html

And, in response to his article in Science, Professor Josephson, of Cambridge University, wryly responded to the chronic ignorance of homeopathy (and that includes those planning the weekend anti-homeopathy demonstrations) saying, 

          "The idea that water can have a memory can be readily refuted by any one of a number of easily understood, invalid arguments."

This evidence in support of homeopathy might be uncomfortable news for its opponents, and the supporters of the conventional drugs industry. But it is important to recognise that their opposition is based on the success of homeopathy, and not its failure.

If homeopathy was failing its patients it would have died many years ago as homeopathy does not have, nor has it ever had, significant state support or funding.

Homeopathy is recognised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as the second most used healing modality in the world, and since it has much greater success and safety than the conventional toxic drug model, the pharmaceutical industry has decided to attack it, and establish groups like SAS to do so.

The Failures of Conventional Medicine

It is also clear that these attacks on homeopathy are based on the ongoing failures of the conventional drugs industry, a failure that has been sadly under-reported by the mainstream media in the UK. The attacks on homeopathy can therefore be seen as a smokescreen, to divert attention from the current problems of the pharmaceutical industry.

• A number of high profile conventional drugs have been regularly withdrawn by drug companies, because they have been found to be ineffective, or dangerous, or both.
• A number of drug companies have had to pay out multi-billion $ claims to patients who have been damaged by conventional drugs and vaccinations.
• In some cases, the courts have revealed that drug companies have failed to report, or actually lied about clinical trials that indicated that new drugs were potentially dangerous for patients.
• New drugs are now extremely expensive, stretching national health services throughout the western world to near breaking point.

So anti-homeopathy publicity arises from the fact that homeopathy is an effective and safe alternative to conventional, drug-based medicine; and that an increasing number of people are realising this.

Unfortunately it seems that SAS, and other opponents of homeopathy, are blinded by their own blinkered views and prejudices. And, of course, it is not mere coincidence that these views reflect those of the pharmaceutical industry, and the conventional medical establishment as a whole.

For homeopathy, this has always been so. To place current attacks on homeopathy into an historical context, please refer to Louise McLean’s article, ‘Why the constant attacks on homeopathy?’, at

http://www.homeopathyheals.me.uk/site/featured/427-why-the-constant-attacks-on-homeopathy

Why is Homeopathy under attack?

There is a new attack on homeopathy on the way. This is nothing new, perhaps, but it does raise the question 'Why?'.

The answer is relatively simple. So-called 'Quackbusters', and organisations like 'Sense about Science' speak for so-called 'scientific' medicine, based on Pharmaceutical drugs. They support hugely powerful vested interests, and they do so in the name of 'science'.

However, how scientific are they? Let us use an analogy to describe what they do. It is well known in the game of cricket that bowlers can get the cricket ball to 'swing' after it is bowled. Every cricketer knows this.

Good swing bowlers have learnt how to swing the ball, both ways, and use the technique to get batsmen out. A bad swing bowler would be someone who observed the swing, but stated that there was no scientific evidence to suggest why this should happen, and refuses to believe it could happen.

Good batsmen know that swing bowlers can swing the ball, and take this into account when playing the ball. A bad batsman would know that there is no scientific evidence to suggest that the ball will swing, and does not allow for it.

In a similar way, a good scientist is someone who observes the world, notices that for over 200 years people have got better after homeopathic treatment, and seeks to explain why this should be. A bad scientist, the denialists, like those in Sense and Science, just dismisses the evidence before their eyes.

Science, say the denialists, has no explanation that suggests homeopathy can work; therefore it cannot work, and does not work. Homeopathy is no more than placebo (even when animals are treated). Anyone who says that homeopathy has has worked for them are dismissed as deluded, or mad, or both.

Even when these denialists are presented with scientific evidence (and there is plenty of it), they dismiss it as 'inadequate' in some way. They ignore it. And they continue to repeat, ad nauseum - homeopathy does not work, because it cannot work.

Just ask the question. What if Newton, or Galileo, or Einstein had said this? We would have much less understanding of our world today. Good, perhaps, for the Pharmaceutical companies; bad for patients.