The views of Dick Taverne, member of the UK’s House of Lords, are well known to many of us who have natural leaning to things natural. He has, for example, rallied long and hard to promote genetically modified (GM) foods, while campaigning vociferously against natural medicine. He has been a member of both the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats, was Financial Secretary to the Treasury under Harold Wilson’s Labour government, and has served on the House of Lords’ Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee. Crucially, he founded the arch-skeptic organisation Sense About Science in 2002 and remains its Chairman.
In our experience, Sense About Science is neither sensible nor particularly interested iin objective science. It is one of the loudest voices among the skeptic movement, which is well-known for misusing science to serve a corporate agenda.
Now, Lord Taverne has raised a question in the House of Lords that runs like this: “To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to discourage United Kingdom universities from offering Bachelor of Science degrees for courses in alternative medicines such as aromatherapy, reflexology and Chinese medicine.”
Have you picked your jaw up from the floor yet? Yes, a peer of the realm thinks it appropriate that the state should intervene to prevent universities from teaching the courses they choose. Soviet Commissars could not have put it better! This is all from someone who has no training in science. His conflation of Chinese medicine, a tradition which stretches back centuries and which is one of the fastest-growing healthcare modalities in the world, with aromatherapy and reflexology, which have been somewhat less studied, can only be deliberate. It is a tactic as old as the hills, and fortunately, it seems, the other peers in the debate did not fall for it, in the main.
Read the full debate.
Do you think someone who heads up an organization as un-objective, biased, and anti-natural medicine as Sense About Science, should be trying to put pressure on universities to close down course in natural medicine?
Do you think it’s just possible that the timing of this attack might be carefully planned to coincide with the increased regulatory pressure against Chinese and Indian medicine that’s apparent as we approach the date of full implementation of the EU’s Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directive in May 2011?
ANH-Europe homepage ANH
Comments
your voice counts
24 December 2010 at 2:37 pm
I think you are a bit late. Over the last few years a large number of universities have shut down such courses for themselves. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, it became possible to reveal what was taught on the courses. Often it turned out not only to be untrue, but downright dangerous. Faced with the embarrassment of these revelations, universities such as Salford and Central Lancashire shut down all their courses in "alternative medicine". Even the University of Westminster (famed for its teaching that amethysts emit high Yin energy") closed its homeopathy course.
28 December 2010 at 1:35 am
It is disgusting the way alternative medicine is being treated in the UK and Europe. I think the orthodox medical schools should be shut down, now we'd see some real improvement in public health! Whats more dangerous than drugs and surgeries?
The Nonsense About Science group are another hate-mongering anti-nature denier group that is partly responsible for the medical dark ages we live in. And they will end science if their not rid of.
Do not lose hope anyone! We may live in a dark ages full of barbaric and outdated treatments like chemotherapy, but we will ultimately win because the new science and coming nature golden age awaits! Free energy, real cures, coexisting with nature, and a new science based on a abundance paradigm and not the outmoded reductionist viewpoint will win!
31 December 2010 at 12:10 pm
What is perhaps even more important is that these rules and regulation that are being imposed attack our personal freedom not only in the health care field but in our lives in general. They are symbolic of the attitude of the petty dictators who know what is right for everyone and have such closed minds that they represent the modern form of the Spanish inquisition.
The rich will always be able to buy what they want and a black market will spring up as individuals find ways of circumventing the rules. Will it mean imprisonment for those who dare to think for themselves by trying to keep healthy their way?
How can any one person really know what is right medically for the complexities of another human beings health? If we are honest we must admit that with every medicine there is a suggestion of trial and error and health is or should be the personal responsibility of the individual concerned. To deprive us of that is to condemn us to the principles governing the lives of battery hens..
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