Goldacre, McKeith, Kittens and Desperation

I have been meaning to link to this excellent article on the desperation that many people feel in attempting to get a diagnosis for vague but nonetheless annoying symptoms. The ongoing recipe testing (see posts passim) denied me the time to do so.

I am prompted to resurrect it by the fuss across the blogosphere created by Ben Goldacre’s slating of Gillian McKeith. He does not pull his punches: his kitten has been “awarded” the same “PhD” as McKeith.

Stephen Pollard also notes an earlier, subtler article by the aptly named Rachel Cooke, which finishes with a flourish that is more relevant to our topic:

This isn’t down to all the bad science (though that is wearying enough). No, the real problem with her is that she is so anti-life. Food is about history, and culture, and ritual. But not for her the artisan cheese-maker, or the fifth-generation baker, or the man with an ancient vine. Many of the foods she recommends are not even indigenous to these islands; flying them here literally costs the earth. Most of all, though, it bothers me that there is so little that is celebratory – or even vaguely pleasurable – about her regimes.

Drawing these threads together, I think there are two points to note:

1) Prior to the diagnosis of allergies (of more or less any sort), people can be prey to all sorts of alternative remedies of possibly dubious efficacy. If you can’t replicate the results in a clinically rigorous double-blind trial, you may well be looking at a placebo effect.

2) After a diagnosis, you shouldn’t have to live like a monk. The whole point of the diagnosis is to enable to you to get your life back, not to have it taken away again by some other means.

That’s what this book is for: food that works for food allergy sufferers that EVERYONE will enjoy.