Simon Singh heads up an ‘educational charity’ Sense About Science (SAS) that has been uncharitably tried to get WDDTY removed from the stores.  He is also co-author of the book, Trick or Treatment, but the only tricks I see in SAS’s campaign against us are dirty ones. Here are the 10 tricks that were employed against us.

Simon Singh heads up an ‘educational charity’ Sense About Science (SAS) that has been uncharitably tried to get WDDTY removed from the stores.  He is also co-author of the book, Trick or Treatment, but the only tricks I see in SAS’s campaign against us are dirty ones. Here are the 10 tricks that were employed against us. I tell you this to expose how little sense or science gets used in these types of smear campaigns and how they are being used against us and alternative medicine and its practitioners. 

1. Pretend to the press there is a ‘large campaign’ clamouring for stores to ban this magazine. (The  only people asking stores to stop stocking it are Simon Singh and several others – all members of SAS or a ‘sister’ organization, Nightingale Collaboration, also fronted by Singh.)

2. Misrepresent to the press that there have been ‘health scares’ (as the Times reported) or ‘claims that could prove fatal’ (Press Gazette).   WDDTY has never caused any health scare or made claims that could prove fatal.  By comparison, modern medicine would appear to be carrying out treatments that are proving fatal for its patients every day. According to the American Medical Association, as of about a decade ago, correctly prescribed drugs became at least the fourth leading cause of death in the West. 

3. Pretend there have been loads of complainers about WDDTY’s advertisements (the only complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority have been lodged by Singh’s Nightingale Collaboration).

4. Invent a fake threat  - that WDDTY's distributor is threatening to sue you - and place it in an online blog of the Guardian, another UK newspaper and listed supporter of Sense About Science.

5. Pretend that the stores are now listening to this campaign. Several of Singh’s supporters have implied that Waitrose have ‘stopped’ stocking us as a result of the campaign. Not true.  Waitrose just chose not to wholesale stock our magazine, but individual managers have the right to stock the magazine if there are requests for it. Some stores stock it; others don’t. None of this has anything to do with Singh’s campaign. If you want to buy it at Waitrose, contact your local store.

6. Attack the magazine by misrepresenting the content or headlines. Every claim about our content has been misrepresented.

7. Shoot the messengers – in this case seasoned scientific journalists of 40 plus years’ standing, and their much applauded books and articles (which are checked by science editors and science copyeditors prior to publication) by claiming they don’t know how to read and interpret scientific data.

8. Let loose a small group of disgruntled individuals, many with pseudonyms and nothing much else to do, to try to undermine credibility through puerile attacks on Twitter and FB (notice these people only visit our pages following an attack by Singh).

9. Attack the editorial panel of the magazine (such as Dr Michel Odent, the noted French surgeon and obstetrician, and foremost pioneer of the natural birth movement), or  Dr. John Mansfield, the noted allergist and past president of British Society for Allergy and Environmental Medicine, or Dr. Damien Downing, present president of the British Society for Ecological Medicine and editor of the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine, or Dr. Jean Monroe, medical director of the Breakspear Hospital, and numerous other highly qualified doctors and notable pioneers in the fields of nutritional and natural and integrative medicine.

10. Never, ever engage in grown-up debate of the actual issues raised: that numerous countries have banned Gardasil and many scientists are questioning the safety and efficacy of that vaccine;  or why it is that a reputable GP would not want her patients to take the MMR; or what can we learn from the buried evidence about vitamin C’s extraordinary healing properties that has come to light, or what else we should explore in cancer research since conventional medicine cures cancer only 12 per cent of the time.

Please share this with everyone you can and stop this kind of spurious attack on us, and on legitimate practitioners of alternative or integrative medicine, and voice your right to hear something besides pharmaceutically backed propaganda.