Posts filed under 'The Letters'
With surprising punctuality, those dear ladies from Monadith despatched the following email on Friday in response to our requests for hard scientific evidence to support their claims about bioresonance
Dear Mrs XXXX
In connection with our visit in your company I would like to express how grateful I am that you gave me the opportunity to introduce our Quit Smoking programm to your employees.
As I was asked by your employees to provide further information about our way of treatment I am enclosing two websides you can visit:
http://www.monadith.com.pl/literatura where you can find a list of available literature and www.regumed.de , webside of producer.
I would appreciate if you would be so kind and forward this information to your colleagues. If you require more details, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Kind Regards
Beata Milczarek
Monadith Ltd.
6 Royal Quay
tel. 0151 707 9874
0790 388 4622
This is disappointing, as I was hoping for something I could sink my teeth into, rather than a list of obscure references. I’ll have a dig through to see if there’s anything I can get my hands on, but this looks like the end of the line for our Monadith saga.
March 12th, 2007
As a lowly data monkey who spends a third of his life in the offices of a large multinational, I’m not subjected to half as much email spam and unfunny forwards as I deserve. Which made it all the more surprising when I received an offer to QUIT SMOKING in a mass email from the office manager.
Continue Reading March 6th, 2007
Sometimes you just know they won’t reply.
Dear Scott’s of Stow,
I recently came across your catalogue whilst browsing the web. I was surprised to see that you sell suitcases that, according the description, are “Lighter Than Air”. This leads me to ask three questions:
1) As the items are lighter than air, are you prepared to waive the shipping cost?
2) Do the items have any special storage instructions, e.g., will they need to be tied down?
3) I noticed the dimensions of the cases seem to be slightly off. At 5.7kg, the “large family case” will need to be approximately 2.5m x 1.6m x 1.1m to live up to its name. This is almost 40 times the stated size. Can you confirm this?
I look forward to your reply.
Frank Swain
December 15th, 2006
Continuing on from my harrying of Alex Wong and the Strath® cats, it think it is time to take on those crackpot studies that sully the good name of food supplements. Enter Dr Peter W. Joller, author of no less than eight different studies on wonder-elixir Strath®. Let’s stop to look at “Influenza and colds in winter: Prophylaxis with a herbal yeast preparation in comparison with influenza vaccination”, which appeared in, yes, you guessed it, the Swiss Journal of Integrative Medicine.
Continue Reading December 7th, 2006
Regular readers of SciencePunk will remember my skirmish with MM Networks over their wonder-drug / food supplement Swiss Health Tonic “Strath®”. I was just coming round to their way of thinking when I received this email from the Strath® head office (CC’d to a bunch of other Strath® bigwigs):
Continue Reading December 1st, 2006
Now, Ecover is a brand close to my heart. No one is making them use recycled cardboard in their packaging, or avoid the use of persistent chemicals like chlorine, they just do. It’s what they’re all about. But science, my friends, has made me a stony man, and all bad science is fair game. There’s no favouritism to be found here.
Continue Reading November 22nd, 2006
Like the determined bloodhound of truth with its nostrils filled with the stench of pseudoscience, WoE tracks quarry from the pages of Carpe Diem to MM Products, home of the famous Swiss Herbal Yeast Tonic, Bio-Strath®. The connection is one Stefan R. Becker, doctor and media consultant, proprietor of the Swiss Journal of Integrative Medicine. Found by WoE singing the praises of kombucha tea, Dr Becker is now found expounding the virtues of Bio-Strath, a sort of real-life gummi bear juice. Clearly Switzerland has no need for antibiotics, vaccines, or other frivolities of modern medicine with a wonder-drug like Bio-Strath on the shelves. Thus, with a heavy heart, I bring the twentieth century to MM Networks.
Continue Reading November 8th, 2006
And so begins the Carpe Diem saga. Most of the letter is self explanatory, but you should know the background. Firstly, I sent this email a long time ago and got no reply. Then I received a newsletter from CD (thanking me for subscribing to it – the cheek!) so I decided to get hardcore and ring up Carpe Diem. This meant discovering that Carpe Diem was founded by none other than Dietrich Mateschitz, who brought us Red Bull. So it comes as no surprise to find that although Carpe Diem is based in Austria, it is distributed through the UK by… …Red Bull! Now, Rachel Warren didn’t answer my email (and Carpe Diem only provide an Austrian no.), so I wonder if calling up the UK Red Bull office and asking for Rachel Warren will get me anywhere…
Continue Reading November 6th, 2006
Finding dodgy science is a bit like having “spider-sense”. I look at something seemingly innocuous and an alarm goes off in my head, and it might take me twenty minutes to find it, but I know there’ll be some pseudo-scientific nonsense if I just keep looking. Thus it was with Dr Niko Tiliopoulos and his equations. The goldmine of bad science that is the Carpe Diem webpage threw up the article: “Carpe Diem has teamed up with well-being expert Penny Hunking and willpower psychologist Niko Tiliopoulos to produce the definitive guide to sticking to resolutions.”. Sure enough, it was there, and before long the following email was sent.
Continue Reading November 2nd, 2006
Ben Goldacre’s boast of a £30 power lead was quickly trumped by a jar of magic pebbles ($129), a clock that boosts your sound and video systems ($199), and, best of all, a £500 crocodile clip. Bear in mind though, that this is a Quantum (crocodile) Clip, which has the power to instantly convert any object pressed against it to a state of “compatible morphic resonance” via a complex quantum particle energy stream.
Continue Reading October 31st, 2006
Dear Mr Scott,
I recently passed my practical driving test and, as a result, received my copy of Drive On, the magazine for new drivers. I read it, and thoroughly enjoyed it.
However, I have a question regarding the article entitled “Don’t Risk It” (p37). In this, the VASCAR is introduced, a handy device that relieves policemen and women from the tiresome chore of dividing distance by time, by calculating a vehicle’s speed from the time it takes to travel a known distance.
Given that the VASCAR is little more than a pocket calculator, do you believe that it is not picked up by radar-detecting devices because:
a) it has advanced micro-processors (as Drive On states)
OR:
b) it does not use radar technology.
Also, I would be indebted to you if you could tell me whether you would consider this glaring error:
a) a minor fault
b) a serious fault
c) a dangerous fault
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Regards,
Frank Swain
After being held up to the excruciatingly high standards of the DSA, I felt I was more than justified in pointing this error out. Surely the men and women at the DSA would be grateful (after all, they didn’t even have to pay me £35 to point this out). Nope. No reply, and they’re suspiciously difficult to contact. In the absence of a rebuttal I’ll have to assume they couldn’t back up this pseudoscientific crap. (Me, 1. DSA, 0.)
October 27th, 2006
I admit it, my aversion to flaky women’s magazines and the Daily Mail means I don’t get a steady supply of bad science. Sometimes I just type pseudo-scientific nonsense into Google and see what comes up. Which isn’t all that different to buying the Daily Mail. A lot of companies claimed “chemical-free” products, but SWISS WATER win the award for basing an entire PR campaign on bad science.
Continue Reading October 25th, 2006
Now, those of you who are regular War On Error readers probably remember the sad case of Dr Niko Tiliopoulos and his crazy formulas. So imagine my joy when Dr Nathan Efron foolishly released the “results” of his “research” on the Beer Goggle Effect to BBC News Online. An equation to calculate the effect of a colloquialism? Surely not….
Continue Reading October 19th, 2006
Dear Roberton’s,
I recently purchased a 454g jar of your Strawberry Jam, which is as delicious now as I remember it was as a child. I noticed that on the front of the label was a banner informing me that there was 63g of sugar per 100g of jam in Robertson’s Strawberry Jam.
Continue Reading October 6th, 2006
Here’s where it all began. I sent this to Dr Ben Goldacre at the Guardian, and what do you know, he published it!
Continue Reading February 6th, 2006