Category: Life

The latest news about OfQuack (aka the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council) is not looking promising…

OfQuack was set up with the help of £900,000 of public money to try to give all sorts of AltMed quackery some kind of credence and legitimacy. It is backed by Prince Charles’s Foundation for Integrated Health and considering their other bastard child, Dodgy Originals, has just had to be bailed out the runes may not be falling in OfQuack’s favour!

Their failures have been highlighted by Le Canard Noir and the Lay Scientist in various blog posts. In Martin’s last post, he highlighted the problems with OfQuack’s last set of Board minutes and the pitiful numbers of quacks who have signed up since they opened shop in February.

Le Canard Noir has highlighted the way OfQuack re-wrote their press release, downsizing their estimate of numbers of members they were aiming for by the end of 2009. This started out at an ambitious 10,000, but was recently downsized to just 4,000. Even that looks a tad optimistic!

If they continue at their current rate, by the end of this year, they will have amassed just 986 followers, not even 10% of their initial target.

So far, they have averaged less than 20 registrations a week: to reach the dizzy heights of even 4,000, they would need to get to over 40 registrations a day!

Perhaps all is not lost, however. According to their buddies at the FIH, they hope to recruit cranial sacral practitioners, naturopaths, bowen practitioners, reiki practitioners and Alexander technique teachers by the end of this year.

Then again, 2010 may be a bumper year for them — assuming they’re still in business. They plan to bring micro-systems acupuncturists, hypnotherapists and professional healers into the regulatory fold. Thank goodness they aren’t letting the amateur healers in…

A varied assortment of Netbook news and utilities today.

First of all, let’s kick off with the oft-mentioned absence of the CD/DVD drive in Netbook. You can, of course, buy an external drive at about £40/£50, but when you’ve only paid about £250 for your Netbook, it can seem a steep investment.

If you’ve got a PC at home with a drive, however, you can put your Netbook on the same network and use it. I came across the instructions on a forum – pretty obvious now, but it hadn’t occurred to me to do this.

Next up, something for the Acer Aspire One owners. Kuki is a Linux build specifically for this machine. I’ve put it on a USB key, using UNetbootin, and it’s quite good, with everything seemingly working as it should do. However, I’m assuming that this “live” version probably expects to be working from a CD and, hence, appears to be “read only” – configuration changes aren’t being saved. You’d need to install to unlock its full potential – my plan is to use the Storage Expansion SD card slot and install it directly onto an SDHC card.

Definitely worth checking out.

Lastly, the award-winning Samsung NC10 is available from eBuyer for £268.79 (including free P&P). This has been on sale elsewhere recently at a cheaper price but, and crucially, these have turned out to be 3-cell battery versions, rather than the standard 7.5 hour 6 cell version.

Ben Betts, “core” member of the HT2 E-learning company, has done what many of us either do or think about doing. On his company blog he had a rant about his water cooler company, Powwow water.

His experience with their “customer service” is appalling but Powwow have been, erm, reluctant to talk to him about it.

After a large number of comments to his post, he did hear from them. Or rather the companies lawyer. Nice.

Anyway, his response has been a master-class to us all – in particular bloggers such as myself – on how to defend yourself in this situation.

It’s not over and I’m sure there will be follow-ups. I just hope it goes well for Ben.

Ahh, Watchdog. It’s good to have Anne back in a good, long show. Not sure about the results though – Rogue Traders forced messily into its schedule. And I won’t even begin on how condescending Anne was towards those PS3 owners… but I digest.

The highlight last night was the Rogue Traders spot. It targeted Adrian Pengelly, man who alleges that he can heal terminal cancer with his hands.

And, having read Ben Goldacre’s excellent book, Bad Science, I knew Matt Allwright was pointing out all the right things – the lack of clinical evidence and, in particular, that those saying they had been “healed” by Pengelly were also taking “traditional” treatments. It’s amazing how wrapped up his “patients” get in his mysticism, as they were seen defending him, saying that, yes, they had also had Chemotherapy, but it was his hands that had actually cured them. Amazing.

It was pointed out during the show that he was breaking the law by advertising his cancer healing abilities on his website, but I was disappointed that they didn’t pursue this further. I was going to check if this was still the case but his website appears to have disappeared.

Anyway, the Watchdog blog on the BBC site is a site to behold, as lots of angry Reiki Healers get very, very wound up. I won’t go through them all, but this is my personal favourite…

I think, your portrayl is utterly apauling, and as a Reiki Healer, I understand, that Spiritual Healing is not understood by people, who are shallow minded, and simply have no understanding, faith, or beleif.

So, nice one. If people don’t understand your particular brand of “alternative medicine” then they must be shallow minded. Good argument.

I hope, however, for the sake of their profession that most have a better grasp of English and, in particular, spelling, because otherwise it doesn’t say much for those Reiki Healers telling the rest of us how simple we are but struggle with a word such as “belief”.