Homeopaths and legal threats

One of the best features of The Guardian is its ruthlessness with the advocates of pseudoscience. Much credit goes in particular to Ben Goldacre, who writes the paper's weekly "Bad Science" column and whose website (which I shall add to my links) goes under the same name. Being a doctor, he is sensitive to the abuse of the terminology of medicine by the practitioners of complementary (i.e. unscientific) treatments and other mumbo-jumbo. Earlier this year I linked to an outstanding piece he wrote about a lady who styles herself Dr Gillian McKeith. If you didn't read it at the time, do so now; it will enrich and entertain. It notes, among other things, that Ms McKeith "goes after people, and nastily" - which is to say, she is of litigious inclination, even with regard to humble bloggers.

Libel law and free speech on the Web is a subject of interest to me, for reasons I've expounded several times and will be returning to frequently. English libel law as it stands is unreasonably restrictive with regard to comment on the Web. It encourages, as rational behaviour, the removal of material by the hosts of a website regardless of the merits of a complaint. Ben has drawn my attention to a recent example that he has republished on his website:

Let’s imagine that we live in an exotic parallel universe where I am able to use an amusing but trivial news event to illustrate a wider cultural and intellectual issue. Dr Andy Lewis runs a website called Quackometer: he criticised the Society of Homeopaths (Europe ’s largest professional organisation of homeopaths) in no uncertain terms.

In his opinion, and he amassed some examples: they do not enforce their own “Code of Practice” (you’re not even allowed to imply you can cure a named disease!) it is a figleaf; and they fail to censure their members over dangerous claims. His chosen example was the Newsnight malaria sting which you might remember: an undercover investigator went to see some homeopaths, and was given homeopathic pills to protect against this fatal disease, by quacks who denigrated medical options and failed to give basic “holistic” advice on things like bite protection. I agree with Dr Lewis: in my opinion their approach was cavalier and dangerous.

Did the SoH engage with these criticisms? Reflect on them? Challenge and rebut them? No. They sent a threatening legal letter. Did this threatening legal letter say what was wrong with Dr Lewis’s post? No. It wasn’t even sent to him, it was sent to his hosting company Netcetera, demanding they take his page down. He contacted the SoH, very politely (I mean incredibly politely, read it here), to ask them what the problems were with his comments. No response.

Instead their lawyers sent another angry letter to his hosting company, who of course cannot investigate this in full, are strictly speaking liable, and so – good call - the page was taken down. Corporate conspiracy silences the little man: except of course his piece has now been replicated a hundred times across the internet by an army of smirking bloggers.

Well, good for Dr Lewis and the smirking bloggers. But two disturbing issues are highlighted by this episode. First, it confirms my observation that host companies for websites have little option but to take down material as soon as they receive a complaint about supposed libel. (Like Ben, I have no criticism to make of Netcetera in this case. It is deplorable that the company is in this position, but it is not a quandry of Netcetera's making.) This is a serious check on the free flow of ideas and information. Secondly, what sort of "science" is homeopathy that it relies on legal threats sooner than engage with medically qualified criticism? It is, of course, this sort of "science".