Should your first blog be driven by bile?

I am not a blogger. That's to say I've never felt the need to blog. I never thought I had enough to say that was important enough. The most important things of my life are ordinary and average. I have a lovely wife and two great young kids, a job I enjoy and a good life. These keep me very busy. But here I am for the first time and it's because I read something today that genuinely disgusted me. Actually shocked me, despite my belief that I'm fairly hard to shock. It was this: http://bit.ly/aJuyMN (thanks to @rhysmorgan via @penguingalaxy).

I'm a recent signup on Twitter and although I've been interested in skeptical matters for many years, Twitter gives a sense of urgency that I now realise I had been lacking. That disgusting series of posts started less that a week ago.

Since becoming a father I've found it impossible to avoid fearing the worst for my children from time to time and I can only attempt to empathise with the truly horrific situation that this mother is in. I can easily imagine why a parent in that situation would try anything to save their child, no matter how irrational it may seem. To me, this only adds to my disgust that the response she had was to be told that she was responsible for his death if she didn't immediately stop all treatment based on thousands of man years of work, evidence, trials and the gradually incremental nature of scientifically based medicine, in favour of, and I still pause in disbelief to say this, cottage cheese, yoghurt and linseed oil (flax seed to the Americans).

Now I'm not naive enough to think that I could change these people's minds. However it's made me think about what skepticism can hope to achieve and if all I could ever hope to do would be to make one person be slightly more thoughtful about what these people and any anyone else like them are doing, I'd consider the time spent here completely worthwhile. Plus if I decide to do this again then it can only help to start with an analysis of such an easy target as Health Wyze.

So, I'd like to pick apart some of their content a little. First and foremost, faith. These people are religious. Fine. I'm not, but fine. Their website may indeed be "Powered by God's Medicine" as they claim. This does not excuse an unwillingness to acknowledge scientific method and historical facts. What bothers me most about their wielding of religion is the aggression:

You are planning to willingly submit your own child to their dangerous and ineffective sorcery, and yet you expect a miracle to fix what you are unwilling to fix yourself?  Will God really help you if you refuse to have faith, and refuse to help your child, or must you learn the hard way like 99% of the people?

What a truly Christian attitude. Apparently their God demands no doubt. Nor even an entirely understandable desperate search for anything that may help this seriously ill child.

Back to those historical facts. Their apparent heroine Johanna Budwig, the inventor of the "Budwig protocol" of cottage cheese and linseed oil, may or may not have been Nobel nominated six times, I don't know, but neither do they, since Nobel nominations are always kept secret for 50 years after the award[1]. Aspartame was not banned by the FDA in 1980. Approval was delayed whilst evidence that it causes brain tumours in rats was investigated and proven dubious and irrelevant to humans[2]. Amish communities do suffer from autism[3]. Needless to say, their statements lack citation to support them.

They appear to be believers in a number of conspiracy theories. Most notable to them is the 'big pharma' nonsense based on the assumption that every pharmaceutical firm and, presumably, most if not all of their employees, all the peer reviewers of every medical journal, the American government and all the world's journalists have managed to keep secret for at least 50 years a system of ignoring cures, promoting ineffective and unnecessary medicine and actually causing disease. Cancer, Swine flu, HPV, SIDS, Thiomersal, you name it, they'll include it. They also have personal links to at least one other similarly evidence lacking conspiracy website - ae911truth.org.

Finally I'd like to end on a more positive note by highlighting the presumably unrecognised irony in their comments about another group referring to themselves as Health Wyze:

We have no desire to be associated with these "spiritual energy" healers, who are less than a stone's throw away from open witchcraft.  At best, it is faith healing minus the faith; but we doubt this is a best case scenario. Unfortunately, heathenistic people have overrun and infected natural medicine.

There's really nothing I can add to that. I'll just back away slowly...

[1] http://nobelprize.org/nomination/nomination_facts.html
[2] http://archive.gao.gov/d28t5/133460.pdf
[3] http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/Seizures/2954