Category Archives: Government

Government, Health, Medical, Research, Science, Society

Why is a medical body giving accreditation to homeopathic medicine? It’s unscientific…

HOMEOPATHIC MEDICINE

Recently, it was announced that all homeopathic practitioners can now opt to be vetted by the Professional Standards Authority (PSA).

As a result practitioners on the Society of Homeopaths’ register will be able to display the Accredited Voluntary Register (AVR) quality mark, a sign that they belong to a register which meets the robust standards of the PSA.

The PSA is a governmental body with two main duties. The first is to oversee the nine regulators of legally-defined medical practitioners – organisations such as the General Dental Council, the General Medical Council and the Nursing and Midwifery Council. Its second duty, however, is to assess the bodies which oversee those professions which aren’t considered ‘real’ medicine such as the British Acupuncture Council, or the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy. The PSA’s role here is to ensure that these bodies are meeting their own standards in areas such as education, training, management and the process of how complaints are handled. These are ‘voluntary registers’, and are essentially a form of industry self-regulation.

This dual role on part of the PSA is controversial, as its stated goal is to ‘promote the health, safety and wellbeing of users of health and social care services and the public’. Critics point out that these objectives appear to be contradicted by the endorsement of medical treatments which have never been proven to be more effective than the placebo effect in a clinical trial.

Homeopaths that are registered with the Society of Homeopaths, and who meet its qualifications, are now allowed to use the AVR quality mark signifying that they meet the PSA’s ‘robust standards’. This could mean using the symbol in an advert, or it could mean displaying it on homeopathic products. But this might mean the public buying something which they believe is medicine, but which is actually just an expensive bottle of ordinary water with an AVR mark on it.

Evidence suggests that homeopathy is an ineffective treatment for all health conditions and is no better than a placebo, and is a pseudoscience. It is classified as a complementary or alternative medicine, which, unlike conventional evidence-based medicine, relies on the premises that ‘like cures like’ (one where a substance that causes a specific symptom is also meant to alleviate that symptom) and that ‘ultra-dilution’ of something in water increases its potency. Both of these claims contradict fundamental aspects of modern medical science.

Homeopathic remedies are used as ‘cures’ for a wide range of conditions – such as mental health issues, asthma, diabetes and hay fever. While many patients have reported that they work, there is no evidence to show that these treatments are effective in any way beyond the established effectiveness of the placebo effect. Indeed, the Faculty of Homeopathy website even highlights itself that, up to the end of 2013, out of 188 research studies in homeopathy, nearly 60 per cent were either found to be inconclusive or presented a negative result. The PSA’s decision to give homeopathic practitioners a stamp of approval is, therefore, potentially conveying a dangerous or misleading message.

The PSA’s own stance on the issue is that it doesn’t exist to pass judgement on the effectiveness of any kind of medical treatment, be it dentistry or Freudian psychoanalysis – it’s just there to make sure that, if someone’s practicing in one of these fields, they’re meeting the standards that the body representing that field demands.

The PSA’s own standards for accreditation states:

‘The PSA recognises that not all disciplines are underpinned by evidence of proven therapeutic value. Some disciplines are subject to controlled randomised trials, others are based on qualitative evidence. Some rely on anecdotes. Nevertheless, these disciplines are legal and the public choose to use them. The Authority requires organisations to make this clear to the public so that they may make informed decisions.’

Yet this is the problem. The PSA’s task is to make sure that people are making ‘informed decisions’ about what they’re choosing when it comes to medical treatment. But the thing that gives the work of many of the voluntary register organisations, like the Society of Homeopaths, their legitimacy is the ARV quality mark. Something’s wrong with the system if a medical regulatory body is holding neurosurgeons and homeopaths to the same standard of proof, and telling the public that they’re equally trustworthy.

Standard
Britain, Climate Change, Environment, Global warming, Government, Medical, Politics, Science, Society

BMJ says global warming should be declared a public health emergency…

GLOBAL WARMING

Intro: The BMJ, a top medical journal, has been accused by critics of being ‘alarmist’ as it joins the green agenda…

A leading medical journal has warned that global warming is a ‘public health emergency’ that will cause thousands of deaths worldwide.

The BMJ claims that the ‘mayhem’ it will inflict on future generations will make deaths from the ebola outbreak ‘pale into insignificance’.

In an unusual move, the journal has set aside 11 pages of this week’s issue to warn doctors of the dire consequences of global warming – without any obvious relevance to medicine.

Critics described the article as ‘alarmist’ and ‘desperate’.

But in a separate commentary, the BMJ’s editor Dr Fiona Godlee defends the piece by saying doctors must understand the problem if they are to help tackle it. It is not the first time the publication – formerly known as the British Medical Journal – and its editor have spoken out on such a highly charged issue.

In July, it carried a piece calling for doctors to be allowed to help the terminally ill to die – prompting concern among medics.

In her most recent comments, Dr Godlee warns that seven million people die worldwide every year due to pollution and this will only increase if greenhouse gas emissions – which cause global warming – rise further. She points out that reducing these emissions by walking rather than using the car will have added benefits of reducing obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

And she calls on the World Health Organisation (WHO) to declare the issue a public health emergency – putting it on a par with the current ebola outbreak in West Africa which has claimed 3,000 lives since February.

‘Deaths from ebola infection, tragic and frightening though they are, will pale into insignificance when compared with the mayhem we can expect for our children and grandchildren if the world does nothing to check its carbon emissions.

‘And action is needed now,’ the article concludes.

Last year, experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the average global temperature had risen by 0.5C in 50 years. They predicted that over the next century temperatures will increase by 3C causing a rise in sea levels, flooding, disease outbreaks and, as a result, mass migration of refugees. Politicians are striving to reach an international agreement by December next year on legally-binding targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It would aim to limit global warming to just 2C, and will replace the Kyoto Protocol which came into effect in 2005.

However the last attempt at a deal, at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, ended in disaster, and many politicians are worried about a similar result this time.

Dr Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Forum, a think-tank founded by the climate-change denier and former Chancellor Lord Lawson, accused the BMJ report of being needlessly alarmist.

He said: ‘The World Health Organisation would become a global laughing stock if they were to follow the ridiculously over-the-top demands of a green alarmist editor. There is a real disconnect between what they are saying and the reality.’

He added that the article was ‘just desperate’, saying: ‘The smaller the chance of an international agreement, the more desperate they get.’

Standard
Britain, Foreign Affairs, Government, Iran, Iraq, Islamic State, Middle East, Politics, United Nations, United States

The Iranian foe has suddenly become a crucial ally…

IRAN

Not since the Shah was replaced by Ayatollah Khomeini’s hardline Islamic theocracy in 1979 has a British prime minister met with an Iranian leader.

Truly, this week was an historic encounter as David Cameron made entreaties to the enemy and met Hassan Rouhani at the UN General Assembly in New York.

This, it should be remembered, is a country that has sponsored terrorism against the West on myriad occasions, has frequently declared that Israel should be wiped from the map , and was infamously labelled – along with Iraq under Saddam Hussein and North Korea – a member of the ‘Axis of Evil’ by George W Bush. Its nuclear ambitions so terrify Western leaders that they have imposed sanctions that have devastated Iran’s oil exports and revenues.

But times change, and now the West needs Iran, regarding it as a potential ally in the fight against Islamic State (IS).

Iran has reached out, too. Ever since Rouhani replaced his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in August 2013, he has been trying to bring Iran back in from the cold.

Ahmadinejad’s bellicose anti-Western rhetoric during the eight years of his rule ensured the country’s deepening isolation on the international stage.

And while Rouhani may be a plausible figure, the regime’s religious hardliners are still uniformly grim, imposing their moral puritanism on a young, vibrant and educated population which, behind the scenes, enjoys partying, illicit drinking and casual sex.

Last year Iran executed 624 people for various offences, some of them publicly strangled as they were hoisted aloft by large mechanical cranes. Torture is commonplace and stoning seen as just punishment.

Yet Cameron was clearly in the mood for conciliation and his diplomatic offensive throws up a number of questions. Why would Iran want to help the West in its fight against IS? And what kind of concessions would the Iranians demand in return for discreetly siding with the coalition of Western and Arab countries now launching air strikes on IS’s headquarters in the Syrian city of Raqqa?

There is no doubt that Iran wants to see the back of IS. Its Shia-led regime considers Iraq and Syria as allies – both are also governed by Shia Muslims. The brutal butchers of IS are all extreme Sunni Muslims, deadly rivals of the Shia, and Iran rightly believes them to be a dangerously destabilising force in the Middle East.

Officially Iran is not part of the efforts to degrade and destroy IS – America is still seen as the great evil by its hardliners and theocrats who will not countenance US troops back in Iraq.

Covertly, however, the country’s head of ‘subversive warfare’ – the 56-year-old General Qassem Suleimani, supremo of the elite Iranian Quds force – is already working alongside his US counterpart General Michael Bednarek in Baghdad’s Green Zone.

Members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are also hidden among the sizeable Shia militias defending the holiest Shia shrines in Iraq such as Karbala and Najaf, while Iran has warned IS to stay away from its borders.

To consider whether Iran can help defeat IS, we have to examine the force they would be taking on.

Obama has made an analogy between IS and an insufferable disease that is spreading like a plaque. By 2010, Western and Iraqi special forces had eliminated all but 10 per cent of Al-Qaeda in Iraq as a result of capturing or assassinating their operatives.

But that 10 per cent metastasised into IS under their ruthless leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who decided to exploit the civil war in Syria as a source of recruitment, funding and territory. Two thirds of its 30,000-strong army now lurks there.

Intelligence agencies have largely failed to detect how this army organised from its Syria base a systematic assassination campaign of Iraqi army and police chiefs, or a series of spectacular prison breaks, including one at the notorious Abu Ghraib jail where Iraqi prisoners were tortured by their Western captors.

****

Few noticed how in January IS fought off an Iraqi army force of several divisions trying to recapture the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Long before they captured Mosul last month, IS was raking in some £5million a month through nightly extortion in this huge city.

The IS leadership consists of hardened Al-Qaeda veterans, but the tactical sophistication derives from a group of former generals who served under Saddam Hussein.

They have used Iraq’s modern road network to bring to bear their core spearhead of about 3,000 men, who soften up targets with vehicle-borne suicide bombers wiping out command and control centres. Social media bring fear and terror to a Shia-dominated Iraqi national army, whose corrupt officers have stolen their soldiers’ pay.

Soldiers then become demoralised that simply flee or desert, or are murdered. IS are also formidable in defence. They blow up bridges and unleash controlled floods to hamper counter-attacking forces, while using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to defend approaches in the way regular armies would use mines.

Worse still, IS anticipates their enemies. They knew Obama’s air-strikes on Raqqa were coming, and will have moved their command and control centres to outlying regions and villages. They thwart the West’s recruitment of moderate Sunni rebels. IS’s online multilingual magazine Dabiq (The Ark) suggests neutralising any attempts to turn the local Sunni tribes against them by co-opting them into their own administration – and it’s a tactic that has worked effectively.

Syria’s President Assad – with his sponsor Iran’s tacit approval – was notified in advance of the air strikes, and warned that his entire air defence system would be obliterated if he objected. But why should Assad object anyway, if his most deadly opponents are being eliminated?

Yet, as previous recent conflicts have shown, air strikes alone will not be enough. Ground troops will have to be involved. Which is why Obama, who can at least rely on the help of Kurdish Pesmerga forces and durable elements of the Iraqi army, is now pumping £300million into a new force of ‘moderate’ secular-minded Syrian tribes, 5,000 of whom will be rapidly trained in Saudi Arabia?

This throws up its own problems. The moderates have been fighting against IS alongside another extremist group Jabhat al-Nusra – which was itself targeted by US airstrikes this week because of fears they were accessories to planned terrorist attacks.

Throw in the Iranians, and the confusion over loyalties becomes even greater. Many of the Sunni moderates Obama is trying to woo consider Iran’s Shia regime a greater enemy than IS. This means it would be impossible for Iranian troops to engage overtly in Iraq or Syria – it would incite fury among the Sunni in those countries.

Cameron’s talks with Rouhani have been tantamount to a negotiator’s minefield. Cameron will want him to stop backing Assad but Rouhani will never concede to giving up on such a long-standing Shia ally.

Rouhani will want to persuade the West to relax sanctions in return for help against IS. Any movement, though, to accommodate Iran’s nuclear programme could infuriate Israel. And Israel, if provoked, could destroy the West/Arab coalition.

But despite the enormous geopolitical difficulties and complexities, Cameron is right to engage with Rouhani.

We cannot be in any doubt. IS presents an existential threat to the entire region and must be tackled and beaten. And Iran is such a major player that it is far better to try to enlist its help and keep its president onside than to continue to treat it as a pariah.

See also:

Supplementary

MD Twitter timeline – entries made 25 Sept 2014:

. For the first time the U.S. has used its precision based F-22 Raptor Stealth Fighter.

. The F-22 contains over 30 radar receivers which are able to warn of threats from 250 miles away.

. The armaments of the F-22 are stored internally. This provides its stealth capability, and helps greatly with its aerodynamics.

. The F-22 is armed with JDAM (The Joint Direct Attack Munition). This is a GPS guidance system with a range of up to *___ * miles.

. The F-22’s radar changes frequency more than 1,000 times per second. This confuses enemy tracking systems.

. Khorasan, a little-known Al-Qaeda affiliate, have become a prime target for U.S. air strikes in northern Syria.

. Other U.S. aircraft used in attacking ISIL positions include its B-1 bombers, F-15E attack warplanes, F-16 fighters, F/A-18 Super Hornets and two types of drone aircraft.

. The U.S. has also fired Tomahawk cruise missiles from destroyers in the Red Sea and the northern Persian Gulf. The ships involved are the USS Arleigh Burke and the USS Philippine.

Standard