The Privilege meme

I picked this up from the Singing Librarian, and decided that it was an interesting quiz to do.  Charlotte and Z have done it too.

It was devised by PhD students at Indiana State University - Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, and Stacy Ploskonka. If you participate, they ask that you please acknowledge their copyright.

My parents were what’s now termed asset rich and cash poor. We lived surprisingly frugally in a great big house so we looked flash on little cash, and it’s left me slightly uneasy about privilege ever since. That, and the combination of being raised by women who spoke like Celia Johnson while growing up surrounded by the inverted snobbery of the 60s and 70s. I notice that today’s young hackerati are perfectly comfortable describing themselves as “middle class kids”, but I still feel slightly embarrassed and uneasy about it.

1. Father went to college.
2. Father finished college.

Sandhurst counts, presumably.

3. Mother went to college.
4. Mother finished college.

She was told she hadn’t studied hard enough to return for her second year, which left her with no good argument to put for me when I… Oh, never mind.

5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.

Well, my sister’s a solicitor and I’m stepping out with a doctor.  Oh, and my father-in-law was a university lecturer. I have to conclude that we’re as professional and middle class as all get out. So, despite the Americanisms, yeah, I guess.

6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home.

Had more than 5,000 books in my childhood home, though I doubt it was up to 50,000. As Scout says in To Kill a Mockingbird: “I did not love to read; you do not love to breathe”.

9. Were read children’s books by a parent.

Until I was over 18, graduating from Winnie the Pooh through to Jane Austin.  One of the formative experiences of my life.

10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18.

Private lessons I assume - my parents very sweetly paid for piano lessons and riding lessons.  Pigs were more likely to fly than I was ever likely to play the piano, and ponies and pony-girls just intimidated me, so it was a lovely gesture but a complete waste.

11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18.

No.  The failure of the piano lessons and riding lessons probably put them off.

12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.

I don’t know what or who “people who dress and talk like me” are, and I never watch tv anyway.  Um. My family could have stepped out of an Agatha Christie in many respects (those Celia Johnson voices) or Morse, or the Midsummer Murders even. Is being a murderer with be-a-u-tifully en-unc-i-at-ed vowels a positive representation or a negative one?  You decide.

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.

No freaking way.  Credit cards for teenagers?  No. Absolutely not. My parents had more than enough problems preventing their own costs from turning into debts to give us little debt-lets of our own.

14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs.
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs.

Local Education Authority Grant.  I didn’t realise at the time how lucky I was.

16. Went to a private high school.

Er.  Yes. It was pants though. A very nice school for the sweet but unintellectual daughters of doctors. Loathed it. Still get flashbacks.

17. Went to summer camp.

Mmm. Opera camp. Just typing it makes me blink in amazement.

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18.

Nah.

19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels.

Do guest-houses and pubs in English and Scottish seaside towns count as “hotels”?  They do, don’t they.  In fact my parents were pretty frugal with regards to summer holidays, and we tended to lig off family and friends who lived nearer the coast than we did.

20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.

Hah! No. None of it was.  It was either second hand (school uniforms) hand-me downs (I had two big sisters) or home made.

21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them.

Surely a 10 year old Fiat 127 doesn’t count?

22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.

But all painted by relatives. Pretty good, some of it, though.

23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.

I’m not sure what this means.  We were a three generation household, grandparents, parents and kids.

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home.

Mmmm.

25. You had your own room as a child.

Mmmm.

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course

28. Had your own TV in your room in high school.

I can remember being shocked by people who had TVs in their rooms at uni.

29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college.

30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.

I’d never even been abroad before I was 16. In fact the first time I went to Europe I was 28 or so and married.

31. Went on a cruise with your family.
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.

33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.

Oddly enough, they didn’t, but that was more a matter of their own philistinism than anything else.  I think it was “educational” and so they delegated it to the school to do that. My Ma read a lot of pretty middle-brow stuff, and that was it.

34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family.

I remember once, aged 5, being held in front of an open internal door and being told that I could feel the heat coming out of the room (I couldn’t) and that I should learn to shut doors. I also remember having baths by candlelight because of a mixture of powercuts and fuel prices.  I remember frost on the inside of the windows, though that was only one winter. I do remember lying in bed for an hour because it was too cold for me to want to get up. I may not have known how much the bills were, but I was very aware that fuel costs money, and still am.  I cannot leave a light on in an empty room to this day.

So 16 yeses out of 34.  I was raised and educated with middle class values but my parents were surprisingly uncultured: lots of books, but no trips to the theatre, art galleries, museums or concerts.  Privately educated, but definitely on the cheap.   There wasn’t, as I said, a lot of spare cash to go round.  However, I am irredeemably middle class. I’m nervous around plumbers and comfortable with lawyers, and I guess that proves it completely.

Oh well.

The infinit’th monkey

Why do people get so aeriated about the question of who wrote Shakespeare? I’ve been listening to the Shakespeare-on-ipod podcasts (website / iTunes) and finding them increasingly unsettling.  Which is, surely, rather odd?  What does it matter who wrote the plays?  What matters is the plays themselves.  You’d think.

It does matter, though.  The traditional version is that a relatively uneducated midlander walked to London some time towards the end of the 16th century and, once there, he fell in with a rag-tail bunch of players and hustlers and wrote poetry of such startling humanity and expressiveness that it tops anything anyone else has ever written, anywhere.  Ever.  (Personally I find the plays bloody hard work, and only manageable on stage performed by really good players, but there you go).

The traditional version is demotic.  The Bard was of the people.  He was one of us.  The infinit’th monkey.  So the argument which says that whoever wrote the plays and sonnets must have been better educated, more aristocratic, had more political access and been better travelled than Shakespeare, is an argument which means that Shakespeare is no longer Everyman.  He’s no longer one of Us.  He’s one of Them.

I think the fact that it’s a conspiracy theory in doublet and hose is a side issue even though conspiracy theories are designed to be unsettling.  We like certainties, us monkeys.  If we didn’t, then we’d accept the answer “nobody knows” and conspiracy theories wouldn’t gain any credence.

You see, the dispute over who wrote the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare is about History, and evidence, and whether or not there’s enough of it to know for sure that a thing happened or didn’t happen. Its not just about the 16th and 17th centuries, it’s about History as a whole.  There’s the unsettling implication that most historical “facts” are merely hypotheses and ones which cannot be tested at that.

What history and science have in common is their reliance on evidence; but there’s no direct evidence to tell us who wrote the plays and sonnets and no possible experimental test.   What’s important isn’t who wrote the plays and sonnets, it’s that there isn’t enough evidence to answer the question.  This suggests that just about anything you learned in a history lesson could have been made up.  Now that’s subversive.  It’s also probably true, which makes it spectacularly unsettling.

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If you want to know more, then Wikipedia has an accessible and well written entry on the dispute, and several on William Shakespeare himself.  By contrast, the Shakespeare-on-ipod podcasts focus on the pros of de Vere and the cons of “Shaksper”: unfortunately Mark Anderson argues from incredulity - he cannot believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, he fails to mention anything that counters his argument and doesn’t admit that he’s speculating.  By contrast, the Shakespeare Authorship site is more credible because it’s much clearer about the limitations of the evidence.  What recently re-ignited my curiosity about the subject was the (reduced) summary of the authorship question by the Reduced Shakespare Company.

Emily’s EcoJustice Challenge - are you up for it?

I tumbled across Emily’s EcoJustice Challenge when reading Charlotte’s blog. Please read Emily’s whole post, in the meantime, I’m cutting to the chase and quoting verbatim.

So, here is how this challenge will work. The first step is for anyone who wants to participate to pass the link onto at least five other people (or even if you don’t plan to participate, if you like the idea, please pass it on). If you have a blog of your own, this can easily be accomplished merely by linking to this site in a post on your own blog. Below is a list of things you can choose to do. Once every quarter between now and April 21, 2009, I will add to this list. Your challenge is to choose something from this list, to experiment with it, and to post about it here. Or, if you’d rather not post, that’s fine. You can just choose what you want and leave comments on this blog. You can choose to implement as many or as few from the list as you would like. You can choose to stick with one (or more) for an entire quarter, or you can mix and match (one — or more — this month, a different one next month, etc.). My hope is that by the end of the year, at least one item from the whole list will have become a way of life for you and your family. And if you’re already doing some or all of these things, come up with others you want to do, share them with us, and post on them instead.

To join the blog as a posting member, please send an email to: ecojustice08 AT gmail DOT com with your user name and the email address you’d like to use for the purposes of this blog. I will add you to the list of users. Also, please post on your own blog, if you have one. That’s it. And now, here are your choices for this quarter:

1. Choose one day a week in which you will not use your car at all (barring a major emergency, like having to drive your spouse/child to the hospital for stitches). Before you immediately dismiss this one, because you have to drive to and from work every day, please think about it. Is there no one with whom you could carpool two days a week? If so, the day you’re not driving would be the perfect day not to use your car at all.

2. Choose one “black out night” per week. All lights and all electrical appliances are off by 7:30 p.m. and don’t go on again until the next morning. What will you do without lights, television, your computer? Well, the weather’s getting nice where many of us live. Sit out on the porch/deck and tell stories. Read by candle light. Write letters by candle light. Play games by candle light. You know, people did this sort of thing for thousands of years. My guess is that if you have kids, this will be an exciting and fun challenge for them.

3. Choose two days a week in which you are only going to eat organic and/or locally-grown food. Do you know that inorganic farming is one of the best examples of evolution that we’ve got going these days? All the pesticides that have been used to grow our food have helped to create “super bugs” who are becoming more and more resistant to our chemicals. We’re definitely losing this battle in more ways than one. Talk to the people at your local farmer’s markets. Many of them are growing their food organically anyway; they just aren’t certified, because it’s a difficult and expensive process to be so. Buying locally, of course, cuts down on the oil used to transport food long distances.

4. If you need to go anywhere that’s within a 2-mile round trip radius of your home, walk or bike. Where might this be? The first place that springs to mind for me is your children’s school bus stop. Perhaps the post office is close to your home. The library? For me, it’s both the post office and the bank. If you’re super lucky, maybe you have a farmer’s market that’s close by. Or maybe you don’t live close enough to anything, but you do work close by to that deli, say, where you always drive to pick up lunch.

5. Read that challenging book about the environment that you’ve been putting off reading, you know the one you don’t want to read, because it might make you a little uncomfortable (e.g. The World without Us, Diet for a Small Planet, Affluenza). Read it. Post about it. Maybe implement an idea or two based on what you’ve read.

6. Buy only those things sold in recyclable packaging and make sure you recycle that packaging.

None of it should be too hard, right?

But all of it really is hard, isn’t it?

I’m going for the two options I’m already nearly doing, I’m afraid, which are the organic and local veg and recycling the packaging.  But since I’m already 3/4ths of the way there with those two, I’m also going to go for the lights-out option one day a week because it’s summer and it should be easy.   The thing that would make the biggest difference is if I wangled a transfer and worked in t’city, because I could get there by public transport.  Hmmm.  Small steps, I think, for the time being.

Much missed

About 6 months ago I signed up to the I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue newsletter, planning to attend a recording next time Humph and the crew stopped off a motorway with a 6 in it.  Then last week I got an email saying that the next season of ISIHAC had been postponed because Humph was ill.  It seems the spam mail of destiny, etc.

Here, In tribute to one of the funniest, filthiest, cleverest of gentleman-broadcasters is an illicit recording made earlier this year.  Thanks to the person who posted it, and thanks to Humph, for so much sly good humour over the years.

I didn’t know I’d miss him quite so much.  Monday nights will never be the same.

Choosing art

I had the interesting experience of selecting paintings for an exhibition the other day.  I work for a Great Big Company and the local council contacted various Groups in the Community to ask for volunteers to pick paintings for a Peoples’ Choice exhibition.  (It’s Blairite, but is it Art?)  So I said “that’ll be me then” and volunteered.

There were seven or so of us, and we were given an enormous catalogue of the paintings in public ownership in the county, and told to pick three each and state our reasons.  (The catalogue turned out to be fascinating and desirable in its own right and, since it’s available from Amazon, I’ve just bought myself a copy.  Damn.) The chap was a curator at one of the local museums or art galleries and he encouraged us to be simple and direct in our reasons, giving examples of things that other groups such as school children had said.

Three?

Bugger.

It would have been easy to consult with others and pick a whole exhibition of social history, or local faces, or even specifically non-local work, but it was much, much harder to pick just three.

I resisted choosing damaged pictures just because they were damaged which gives them an added layer of meaning in my pretentious world.  I resisted picking the local views because that was all a bit too obvious.  I resisted two enormous and gloomy portraits of a grimly smug victorian couple which I wanted to pick on the ground that - hey look, these people are so freaking different from people today.

I discovered that when push came to shove I preferred portraits, which was rather depressing.  My brow is higher than that, surely?   I did steer myself away from just picking portraits and resisted the option to show off by going entirely for abstracts.

It was an interesting insight into the world of the curator and the choices involved in putting together an exhibition.  I’ve bought myself a copy of the catalogue of the county’s art collection, and I’m looking forward to the exhibition.  I should love it.  What better way could there be to arrive at an eclectic mix?

Just going outside

In what world does someone who dies of illness or in an accident leave their job “voluntarily”?  Suicides yes, if you push the logic that far.  But if I choke on a carrot in the canteen I haven’t left this vale of tears of my own free will, now have I?

However, I’d be classed as a “voluntary leaver” by most HR statisticians.

Phffah!

Large employers like to keep track of all sorts of things including the number of people they hire, the number of people who “don’t work out” in the first year, and the number of people who leave even though the company would prefer to keep them.  The “involuntary leavers” represent errors of judgement on the part of the people hiring them, and you can see the sense of tracking those numbers.  “Voluntary leavers” on the other hand are the people the employer will be put to the inconvenience of replacing because they have been offered a better job elsewhere, decided to return to full-time education, or left to set up in business for themselves.  Or selfishly gone and died.  Without giving notice.  Where’s their team spirit? (I exaggerate for cheap effect).

What the employer is tracking with these figures is the employer’s wish or intention (volition) not that of the employee.  But HR being the sweet and fluffy discipline it is, it doesn’t spell it out as crudely as that.  Ho no. How much nicer to pretend that what you are measuring is what your employees want.  The caring face of statistics.

War is peace.  Love is hate.  People are our greatest asset. The dead are voluntary leavers.

Who needs thought when you’ve got jargon

A friend of mine who knows my weakness for jargon and my aspirations to critical thinking sent me a couple of texts the other day which he’d garnered from his work.

Purpose
The WhizzyDooDad is designed to provide customers with a variety of resources that, when used as part of a learning program that incorporates learning courses, will effectively apply professional competencies and reinforce learning content from those courses.

Desired Outcomes

• Application of e-learning to real business situations and needs
• Increased competency and productivity through the application of new skills and knowledge
• Leveraged investment made in learning and classroom training
• Increased use of learning/training programs
• Projects or initiatives can be related to and/or integrated with a blended solution.
• Learners have increased potential for actualizing new skills and behaviours “on the job”.
• Learners take on new roles as facilitators and/or observers of skill transfer
• Promotion of a learning environment/culture.

I’ll spare you the rest; I’ll even spare you my sarcastic analysis.  You’re intelligent.  You can supply your own.

My friend rewrote the thing entirely, without any reference to the original. Here’s an excerpt from the new version:

The introduction of WhizyyDooDad means that those of us who work in the department can easily find someone to give practical advice on whether or not an app [ie a software application - AB] is the best choice for a particular task. It also makes it  easy to find out what apps we already use and save money by choosing the ones we already have licenses for, instead of going out and buying something entirely new which does the same thing. We are no longer limited by what we know as individuals and in our local teams - we all share our knowledge.

The second paragraph isn’t particularly elegant, it still includes jargon and the last sentence is fluff, but it is at least clear fluff.

When I pointed out that the two texts say completely different things - the first talks about customers and training courses and the second talks about finding experts and reducing license costs - he shrugged, so far as you can shrug on Instant Messenger. “That’s what happens when you substitute jargon for thought”, he said. Which is a fair point well made. It is still one hell of a leap from Text A to Text B.

Quacktitioners III - a little bit of ‘me’ time

Oh dear, this isn’t going to be popular. And the reason it isn’t going to be popular is because I’m suggesting that women go to alternative practitioners for the same reason that men go to sex workers - for rest and relaxation or, as the women’s magazines call it, “a little bit of ‘me’ time”. Hear me out before you dismiss me as salacious or simplistic: it’s a conclusion it’s taken me a couple of years to arrive at and it’s one I’d like to test in debate.

When we ask “what do alternative therapists offer that doctors don’t” the simplest answer is “45 minutes of undivided attention”. There are plenty of other answers the most worrying of which is “hope”, but this post is not about desperate searches for a reprieve from a death sentence, it’s about healthy people who go time and again to alternative practitioners. I know what they’re like. I’m one of them.

In my time I’ve spent thousands on alternative therapists.  I’ve had pins stuck in my flesh, candles balanced on my ears and my aura captured in photographs.  I’ve had my chackras re-aligned, the state of my gut diagnosed by the strength in my arms and been annointed with everything from marigolds to onions.  One osteopath refused to chant over me on the grounds that “it’s a bit too shamanic for Cheltenham” but he was willing to do it in Stroud. Make of that what you will.

It was all money fantastically well spent even though none of it cured anything, though the shamanic osteopath did free up a neck muscle which had gone into spasm. But I got a bargain every time, because what I was really buying was 45 minutes of uncritical attention.

Men go to sex workers for this, though in their case they want orgasms rather than attention, but then they’re from Mars. Vive la différence.

So here is my two pronged observation:

• Firstly, that what pays alternative therapists’ rent and rates is a predominantly feminine need for someone else’s considered attention and non-threatening touch
• And secondly that men tend to sexualise sensations, and women tend to de-sexualise them, and alternative therapists and beauty therapists offer some decidedly odd services in a women-friendly way

If you’re not sure about my second point, ask yourself why it is that if men want a massage or colonic irrigation or to be wrapped in cling-film or put in a sensory deprivation tank it’s sexual and they look around on the scene or go to a sex worker, but if women want any of those things it’s beauty treatment and they go to a health spa?

Please think about this for a while because it’s probably one of those things that you’ve taken for granted for so long that you’ve never realised just how strange it is. Yes, I know that health spas will happily take a man’s money and wrap him in mud and cling-film, but let’s face it, men who really want this sensation see it as a form of bondage (it’s called “mummification”) and find other fetishists or go to some highly specialised sex workers. And equally, if having your insides washed out with warm water is your thang, then women want Enya playing in the background and the gentle aromas of neroli and ylang ylang floating in the air and men, um, don’t.

But think how peculiar this is. Same physical sensation interpreted in very different ways. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s very odd and very interesting.

So, what do we do with this observation? I dunno, and there isn’t room here for my thoughts and speculations on the subject. But if the medical profession is serious about casting a harshly critical light on to alternative therapies, then it should consider what it is that people are buying, and if you ask me, it’s attention.

Personally, I think that the alternative practitioners are providing a service as necessary and helpful to society as the service provided by prostitutes, and while I’m certainly in favour of regulation, I don’t think banning either helps.

Quactitioners II - The mystery of medical history

The Jobbing Doctor has an excellent quote on his blog:

One reason why medical history is not much taught in medical schools is that so much of it is an embarrassment - Lewis Thomas (1992)

Thomas put his finger firmly on one of the problems with the debate between scientific medicine and alternative medicine: scientific medicine’s reluctance to face the fact that in the bad old days doctors were as ignorant and dangerous as anyone else. This is counterbalanced by the fact that alternative practitioners are reluctant to accept that modern evidence-based medicine is safe. Established orthodoxy has moved on and the rebels haven’t, and this is causing wires to be crossed.

It would assist the argument enormously if medicine owned up to its embarrassing history, and then disowned it, staking its claim to be the truly revolutionary movement and the real alternative to the dangerous practices of the past.

You’ve seen the full version of this grid before. However that was a 20th and 21st century version. This version shows the situation in the 19th century when there was little science, and practice was based on observation and experience rather than trials.

Despite this, medics and sceptics frequently talk and write as if there have always been two separate paths - scientific medicine (good), and alternative medicine (bad), and I’m not convinced of this.

18th and early 19th century doctors were a dangerous bunch, as ignorant and hopeful as the herbalists and homoeopaths but with a fondness for powerful drugs, and frequently with an arrogant attitude. They killed millions of new mothers by giving them “child-bed fever” because they didn’t know that infection can be communicated by touch. They’d treat just about anything by drawing blood. Their favourite medicine was calomel which induced vomiting and acted as a laxative because it’s toxic. Their patients became addicted to opium in the form of laudanum. (When a showed a draft of this to a young doctor he pointed out that his predecessors used to massage women to orgasm to cure “hysteria”. It’s not called “doctors and nurses” for nothing). Dodgy sexual practices aside, it was no wonder that Samuel Hahnemann and Edward Bach devised gentler alternatives, even if the reason these alternatives did no harm was because they did no good.

So, if doctors were as ignorant as other practitioners in the 18th and early 19th centuries, what has changed? And what hasn’t?

The big change of course is that medicine now works. It cures diseases and in the main it doesn’t kill people. We now benefit from antibiotics, immunisation and increased standards of public health, not to mention treatments for everything from athlete’s foot to cancer. And all as a result of acute observation, empirical testing, double-blind clinical trials, and a widely-published and peer-reviewed evidence-base. The roll-call of conditions which are a thing of the past is awesome, and medicine has done away with these in the last 100 years or so.

By contrast, not much has changed in the practice of alternative therapies. This is partly because “traditional” is “good”, and partly because clinical trials are expensive and will either show that the interventions are not very effective (herbalism) or not effective at all (homoeopathy). Ben Goldacre rightly criticises homoeopaths for their lack of self-criticism and for treating their founder’s approach as dogma, and they most certainly aren’t the only ones. He contrasts this complacency and stasis with the continuous questioning of the scientific approach and the constantly moving medical frontier.

Another thing that hasn’t changed is the rhetoric of the alternativists. They still talk about medicine as if its practices were as dangerous and untested as they were in the 18th and 19th centuries. There are a whole bunch of reasons for this, including the difficulties the lay person has with medical science because of the poor quality of science education in our schools, the challenges in creating and interpreting drug trials (listen to R4’s excellent edition of More or Less on the subject), and the confusion that understandably arises about where and why to draw the line between things science can be certain about and things it can’t. Oh, and demonising doctors is good for business, of course.

But has the rhetoric of the doctors changed either? The science has, and the outcomes of the science most certainly have, but has the rhetoric? (I genuinely don’t know).

I’m asking because, as I said right at the beginning of this piece, if modern medicine admitted its murky past, it would make it much easier for us all to point out that the alternative practitioners are still living in it.

Quactitioners I - Sincerely WooWoo

Ben Goldacre’s recent Radio 4 programme seeks to place current food faddists (I assume he’s thinking of Gillian McKeith and Ian Marber) in the long tradition of American snake oil salesmen and mountebanks.  His programme discusses the history of these travelling showmen and also of food faddists turned businessmen such as Kellogg, Graham and the seller of Hadacol.  It’s a good programme, and I recommend  it.

However, it’s disingenuous of him to let his listeners infer that there are only two kinds of people providing health services - scientists and quacks.  He’s not alone: most of the sceptical commentators out there make a clear distinction between the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, the disinterested practitioners of empirical science and the cynical and opportunistic pedlars of sugar-pills.  In fairness to Ben Goldacre, he’s more a much more subtle thinker than that, but even he tends to simplify the message to make it easy to convey.

It seems to me that there is no neat correlation between sincerity and science, and that it’s more useful if we consider that there might be four categories of people offering to help us with our health.

To make things snappy, I’m calling them the Good Doctors, the Celebrity Surgeons, the Profiteering Quacks and the Sincere WooWoos.

1. The Good Doctors are scientifically-minded as well as scientifically-trained, they are men and women of integrity who frequently work in shitty areas and research shitty diseases
2. The Celebrity Surgeons specialise in “diseases of the rich”, as Tom Lehrer put it and can be found practising perfectly good plastic surgery in Florida and dentistry in Harley Street.  Big Pharma can come into this category of profit-motivated scientists.
3. The Profiteering Quacks are the ones Goldacre really dislikes - they don’t let truth, logic or inadequate training stand in the way of getting tv deals and book deals and products on shelves - they know it makes cents.
   And finally:
4. The Sincere WooWoos are good people let down by a lack of critical thinking. They are troubled by modern medicine, particularly the cynical and profitable kind, so they they train as homoeopaths or acupuncturists or naturopaths, and then the Hawthorne effect and the Placebo effect builds them an anecdotal evidence base which reinforces their sincere belief in their success

The problem is that the debate ends up at cross purposes.  Too many sceptics restrict their criticism to the profiteering quacks without addressing the question of what is troubling about modern medical and surgical practice.  And likewise, far too many alternative practitioners throw out the baby of medical science with the bathwater of the profit-motive.

People like Ben Goldacre and John Diamond rightly argue that Profiteering Quacks are dangerous and leech on the vulnerable and insecure simply to make money out of them.  But those of us who defend science and evidence-based medicine need to accept that the group that I have flippantly categorised as “Celebrity Surgeons” do exactly the same thing, the only difference being that their interventions which are frequently unnecessary do in fact work - think of Jordan’s boobs and Michael Jackson’s nose if you doubt what I’m saying.

It isn’t enough to attack the woolly-thinking which leads trusting people to accept alternative practices like acupuncture and homoeopathy, we must also understand what it is about these practices which attract patients and practitioners, and what it is about “scientific” or “western” practices” which repel them.

Good Reading:

Bad Science - Ben Goldacre’s blog in the Guardian - eg his column about Gillian McKeith
Snake Oil - John Diamond’s searing criticism of alternative practitioners

Good Listening:

Skeptoid - a weekly 10 minute dose of evidence-based good sence
Bad Science - Ben Goldacre’s infrequent podcasts