Edzard ernst simon singh biography

In , he was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea. His goal is to provide objective evidence, reliable information, and critical assessments which evidently does not endear him to everyone. Prof Ernst is not paid by anyone for his work on this blog and is not aware of having any conflicts of interest. Your email address. His blog is aimed mainly at: informing the public responsibly, stimulating critical thinking, preventing harm to vulnerable patients, amusing the reader.

Subscribe via email. Enter your email address to receive notifications of new blog posts by email. In a review for Nature , Toby Murcott described the book as "thoroughly researched and clearly written" where the authors, in discussing the available randomized clinical trials for each of four treatments, "make repeated claims that they provide the truth, and have even included this word in the title of every chapter.

The balance of evidence from randomized controlled trials supports their arguments, but the authors are not tendering a disprovable hypothesis. Harriet Hall , in reviewing Trick or Treatment , emphasized that Ernst's views were worthy of "special credibility" as he had previously prescribed homeopathic remedies and was supportive of alternative treatments that were proven to work.

Hall said Ernst "accepts claims about herbs that many of us reject" and has "demonstrated his ability to change his mind and follow the evidence. In a review of the book for Complementary Medicine Research , John Kapp said that although he did not agree with their conclusion, Ernst and Singh "deserve praise for bringing a vital subject to the attention of the public in a clear and readable way.

Writing for the British Journal of General Practice , Jeremy Swayne former dean of the Faculty of Homeopathy [ 13 ] said the book was "thorough and clever" and that it "provides excellent counsel about the shortcomings of CAM and there are many, if you take the whole nebulous field into consideration , and its susceptibility to popular and commercial exploitation.

But a recurring lack of truthfulness is the lack of the perspective that would have been provided by relating these to comparable problems in conventional medicine. Donald Marcus reviewed the book for The New England Journal of Medicine and found the writing to be "clear and vivid" with historical anecdotes that "provide a valuable perspective on the subject.

Writing for The Daily Telegraph , Katie Owen and Sally Cousins described the book as "a clearly written, scrupulously scientific examination of the health claims of key areas of alternative medicine: acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic therapy and herbal medicine. The results are stark. In no case, apart from in some limited ways in herbal medicine, do any of these 'therapies' work.

On the contrary, they can be life-threatening. The presiding judges commented that "this litigation has almost certainly had a chilling effect on public debate which might otherwise have assisted potential patients to make informed choices about the possible use of chiropractic". Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history.

Alternative Medicine AM is a huge industry but the lingering question has always been — does it actually work?

Edzard ernst simon singh biography

The goal of authors Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst is to provide a useful guide answering that question and more. Simon Singh is one of my favourite non-fiction writers and this is the third book of his that I have read. But medicine is not his speciality. Both are trained scientists but neither has worked for the pharmaceutical industry nor profited from AM.

Trick or Treatment consists of six chapters. The first introduces the scientific method as it applies to medical science. The final chapter deals with remaining issues and plots the way forward. It may be unfair of me to attribute too much of this book to Simon Singh but I am more familiar with his writing. One of the things I like about him is that he teaches science like history.

He shows the origin of ideas and how they have evolved over time. The authors use the first chapter to show the early steps in the development of evidence-based medicine. Evidence-based medicine seems obvious to us now but it did not really take hold until the mid-twentieth century and was not even properly defined until It is also easy to forget how bad conventional medicine CM was not that long ago.

Patients had to endure bloodletting, intestinal purging, vomiting, sweating and blistering, which generally stressed an already weakened body. On top of this, patients would receive large doses of medications, such as mercury and arsenic, which scientists now know to be highly toxic. The extreme bloodletting suffered by George Washington, as described in Chapter 1, is a prime example of heroic medicine and its harmful impact on a patient.

The authors begin by sharing in parallel the history of the demise of an established treatment — bloodletting — and the rise of a new treatment — vitamin C. Important lessons from this chapter include the importance of publishing your findings, independent replication, designing trials to randomise and remove other factors and keeping an open mind.

There is also the difficulty in overcoming scepticism and entrenched ideas. But the authors know not to overwhelm the reader with the scientific method from the start at the cost of delaying progress onto the books core topics. In the acupuncture chapter, they introduce one of the key issues in any assessment of AM or CM — the placebo effect.

As well as telling the history of the discovery of the placebo effect and theories of its cause, they also share the history of how it has been mitigated in research — namely, the development of the blinded clinical trial. Also included in the acupuncture chapter is an assessment of the World Health Organisation WHO report on acupuncture leading to a discussion on another key development — systematic review.

While the homeopathy chapter discusses a type of systematic review — the meta-analysis. In retrospect, I see this move as a smart ploy by the University to keep me sweet and prevent me from going to the press. Nobody of high repute would have found this acceptable, and thus the only good candidate was not even tempted to accept the position. He retired in , two years ahead of his official retirement.

It focuses on Charles's interest in alternative medicine, with a critical assessment of his views. I do have considerable doubts that Charles will be a good King his reign might even be the end of the monarchy , and I did help the republican cause on several occasions but I never formally joined any such group in general, I am not a joiner of parties, clubs or interest groups.

In a May Annals of Internal Medicine publication, Ernst detailed the Nazi "cleansing" of the University of Vienna medical faculty that allowed the "medical atrocities" of Nazi human experimentation. In , Ernst was one of two recipients of the John Maddox Prize , sponsored jointly by Sense about Science and Nature , for courage in standing up for science.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. German academic physician and researcher born Wiesbaden , Germany. Edzard Ernst's voice. Early life [ edit ]. Training and early career [ edit ]. Work in complementary medicine [ edit ].

Smallwood Report [ edit ]. Main article: Smallwood Report. Trick or Treatment [ edit ]. More Harm Than Good? Early retirement from Exeter [ edit ]. Other work and recognition [ edit ]. Books [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. The Guardian. Retrieved 1 December Retrieved 1 May Archived from the original on 27 April Retrieved 23 April