QMUL sells quackery: The Correspondence

Edit (Mar 13): Just got a very nice reply from Charlotte. Says she was busy last week, but would like to meet in person to discuss this at some point. I'll try to arrange a meeting for sometime next week and report back here.

I wrote about this at the weekend. QMUL  sells homeopathy, and actively advertises it in the reception of the gym. I don't think they should, and would like to find out why they do.
So, on Monday, I sent the email below to Charlotte Kendrick, the manager of QMotion, who I was advised by Simon Levey was probably the person to contact about this. In retrospect, I regret the tone of the email. It is both unnecessarily confrontational and overbearingly condescending (as well as quite officious). I haven't yet had a reply, but I'm not altogether surprised. I've also sent the following message today, requesting a reply in slightly more temperate language:

Today's message:

Dear Charlotte,

I'd like to apologise for the tone of my last email: it was unnecessarily confrontational, especially as I have no idea how much involvement you personally had with the decision to allow homeopaths to use university facilities. However, this is an important issue that I feel quite strongly about, and I would appreciate a reply. If you're not the person I should be contacting about this, please let me know who is, and I'll start bothering them instead.

yours,
    JOHN

Monday's (heat of the moment) message. Note the particularly cringe-y "I don't mean to be patronising" - it's almost completely impossible to either say or write those words without a. being patronising and b. sounding like a dick. (even if I did genuinely mean them).

Dear Charlotte,

I am a member of the QMotion gym, and a PhD student in the maths department at Queen Mary University. I was somewhat surprised, and frankly quite disappointed, when I noticed the other day that QMotion allows a homeopath to use their treatment rooms once a week, and actively advertises homeopathy as a 'safe and gentle form of complimentary (sic) medicine' which 'can be used to treat most diseases'. Homeopathy is an anti-scientific and ineffective medicine, which has been shown time and time again to perform no better than a placebo in randomised controlled trials (I'm more than willing to provide citations for this if you need them). I don't think that QMotion should be encouraging its use and I was told that you were probably the person to contact about this.

I suggest that the relationship between QMotion and Surrey Homeopathy for Health be ended as soon as possible, and if this is not to be done, would at least like an explanation as to why you (or whoever is in charge of these decisions) consider it appropriate to continue to associate the name of the Student Union (and by extension the University) with a treatment which has absolutely no credible theory to support it and no evidence whatever for its efficacy.

yours,
    JOHN FABEN

PS - I don't mean to be patronising, but in my experience many people simply aren't aware of quite how ridiculous the rationale behind homeopathy is. In case you're one of those people, here's a good explanation (written by Matt Parker, who also works in the maths department) http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2010/01/homeopathy-by-the-mindboggling-numbers.html

PPS - I have already written about this on my blog (http://eucalculia.blogspot.com) and will probably post some/all of any reply you send me there. Hope you don't have a problem with this.

QMUL sells quackery

Just noticed this one my way out of the gym today:

Homeopathy is a safe and natural form of complementary medicine, which has helped many people suffering from all varieties of ailments to regain and retain their health and wellbeing. The Homeopath will look at each patient individually in an attempt to discover the core reasons for their problem and choose specific remedies to change the soil within the person from which the disease stems.

Now, I'm not entirely sure who gets to decide what services are and aren't offered at QMotion - I imagine it's probably owned by the Students Union, and I'm currently trying to figure out who I should complain to. I don't see how the university can possibly justify advertising medicine which just doesn't work. I'm mostly too shocked about this to write anything particularly incisive right now (and anyone reading this is fully aware that homeopathy just doesn't work anyway), but I am genuinely going to try my best to figure out who I should complain to, and how to get these people out of the university-owned gym.

Incidentally, they claim to 'treat' IBS, hayfever, and a long list of other named diseases on the literature that's available inside the gym (and on this page, they appear to be specifically claiming to be able to cure them). I thought homeopaths were banned from claiming to cure specific diseases?

Bloody Mary at the SE Frisbee Regionals

I played in the South Eastern University Regionals Ulitmate Fribsee tournament last weekend for the Queen Mary "Bloody Mary" team. I woke up on Monday morning more sore than I can ever remember being, but had a great time, and I've decided to write "the report" for the weekend. It's pretty long, so I've put most of it below the fold: if you don't want to read that far, here's a summary: we finished 10th, out of 23, after being seeded 23rd, with only 6 players, finished second in a 3 pint challenge, and partied at least as hard as any of the other teams. All in all, a pretty awesome weekend.

Incidentally, this is all pretty much steam-of-consciousness, and I can't be bothered to edit it, so please forgive any typos/spelling errors/factual inaccuracies/blatant lies. Names have *not* been changed to protect the innocent!

Click here to read the rest

Click here to read the rest

Circumlocutory Collocations: The Dot Matrix Train Describer Board

The sign at Monument station on my way home last night said this:

Because of a failure the Dot Matrix Train Describer Board is showing incorrect information. Please check the front of the train for its correct destination.

This sign annoyed me for two reasons. First: "Because of a failure". That's right up there with "due to a delay, the train on platform 6 is running late". Thanks, but if you're just going to give a contentless explanation for the failure, why give any explanation at all?

Second, "Dot Matrix Train Describer Board". It genuinely took me a good few seconds to realise what the sign was talking about. I've simply never heard of a "Dot Matrix Train Describer Board" - and I'm not sure why I need to, surely they could have written the sign in English, rather than jargonese?

This sign was handwritten. Someone actually went to the trouble of writing out "Dot Matrix Train Describer Board" (I'm getting bored, and I've only had to type it). It's a sort of anti-nerdview. Whoever wrote the sign almost certainly wasn't aware that "Dot Matrix" refers simply to the fact that the board is pixellated, or that "Train Describer Board" is a horrible circumlocution. They probably thought Dot Matrix was a brand name (that's the only feasible reason I can think of why someone would bother to include it: feel free to suggest others).

The thing is, this must happen *all the time* - could TFL not have a generally accepted plain English phrase for referring to "Dot Matrix Train Describer Boards"? "Information Screens"? "Platform Displays"? Surely there's *something* better than "Dot Matrix Train Describer Board"?

We officially have a 2-tier legal system

I find it somewhat difficult to believe that this is for real. Shamso Miah broke another man's jaw over a dispute in a bank queue. He was let off because...

Ms Booth told Miah that violence had to be taken seriously, but said she would suspend his prison sentence because he was a religious person and had not been in trouble before.

She added: "You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behaviour."

I think I said this yesterday but: seriously? Compare "You are a freemason, and you know this is not acceptable behaviour", "You went to St Johns, and you know this is not acceptable behaviour"...

The "not been in trouble before" part is relevant, and is the *only* part of that sentence that is relevant. As far as I'm aware (from doing a little reading some while ago) religious conviction is essentially completely independent of propensity to commit crimes. Cherie Booth, presumably, has read some more recent research.

Irritating Quote of the Week

From a really, really irritating Sensodyne advert, in which some pretty pictures demonstrate toothpaste sealing up holes in teeth, comes one of the most worryingly illiterate sentences I've heard in quite a long time:

We've clinically proven it works, but we really know it works because people keep coming back time and time again.

Seriously? They have the gall to put someone in a white coat in their advert then come out with such utter nonsense? I wish I had sensitive teeth so I could refuse to by Sensodyne on principal.

Just 4357 days later...

The Lancet has finally admitted that the MMR "study" published by Andrew Wakefield is a load of bullcrap, and withdrawn it. I can't quite understand why this wasn't done, say, 4000 days ago, when everyone knew the study was a load of bull, and the wakefield had a vested interest in claiming that MMR was causing autism.

At the moment it's still available on the website. I wonder if they'll actually take it down, or at least put a flag saying "we no longer believe this, it was a load of crap, and we shouldn't have published it in the first place.