Has Tibet protester’s blog been altered?

Several articles have appeared in the newspapers today containing suggestions that the blog of a British protester (who was part of a group that unfurled Free Tibet flags outside the Olympic stadium) has been altered to read more sympathetically towords the Chinese authorities. The Guardian’s article is here, and the Telegraph’s is here.

The “blog” in question seems in fact to be an account by one of the protesters, Lucy Fairbrother, of a trip she made to Tibet written for the website What About Tibet?. No date is given in the article, but the link to it from the site’s “travel” section says 2004.

The Guardian and the Telegraph both quote Lucy’s “family” as the source of the allegations of blog tampering. The Guardian says

“The posting, A Short Stay in Tibet, begins with a description of life there and turns into a polemic against China, but appears to have been clumsily changed to read more sympathetically. It reads: “I admit that I have been under much influence of militant Free Tibet organisations back home. What China is doing now, and what China HAS done, are so different, and I am angry with myself for not realising the distinction before now.”

Extract from ‘A Short Stay in Tibet’

Her mother, Linda, a TV journalist, said: “This certainly sounds unlike anything Lucy would have written. I saw the original and I certainly have no memory of anything like that figuring in it. It doesn’t sound like her phraseology. She read classics, she writes beautifully and this doesn’t sound at all like her style, quite apart from her sentiments. I would imagine it’s been done today. Students for a Free Tibet have in the past had tampering with their own internal emails.”"

If the Chinese authorities really have tampered with the article, then they have also altered its appearance in  Google’s cache (dated as having been indexed on 4th July, long before the protest took place), and also in the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine, which gives a date of indexing of 19th October 2006. If true, this is evidence of a big conspiracy – the Chinese authorities have agents or sleepers in Google’s offices, and also in those of the organisation that runs the Wayback machine.

My prediction, however, is that somewhere along the line, someone’s got mixed up, and that no alterations have been made. Neither the Guardian nor the Telegraph mentions that they checked the cached versions of the article. I wonder if they did? If it does turn out to be a mistake, will either of them publish a retraction?

Homeopathic hospitals in trouble – where will doctors refer their bogus patients?

In the last century or so, since medical science really got off the ground, one would have been forgiven for thinking that the setting up and funding of homeopathic hospitals by the NHS was the medical establishment’s answer to the perenially nagging question “What shall we do with all our bogus patients?”

In fact, it would be unfair to thus stigmatise the many (genuine) sufferers of chronic and medically inexplicable conditions who are presently finding relief from their ailments at the hands of physicians at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, one of four in the UK funded and run by the NHS. Nevertheless, the fact remains that there is no good evidence that homeopathic remedies work any better than a placebo, as several of the respected (and financially independent) Cochrane reviews of scientific trials will attest. This is putting the Royal London under increasing pressure from a government looking to save funds and from the actions of sceptical GP’s who are referring fewer and fewer patients.

The Daily Mail, a veteran campaigner for the right of the downtrodden middle classes to partake of the nostrum of their choice, has risen magnificently to the challenge. It has published a review of its own, although sadly not as scientific as those offered by the Cochrane collaboration. In fact the Mail’s review addresses the prejudices of its readers rather than the evidence, of which there is none – at least not of the sort that Mail readers want to hear. For the review consists of interviews with ten patients at the hospital, who each describe their condition and the treatments they had before trying homeopathic remedies, and bears fine witness to the fact that the plural of anecdote is not data.

The article leads into the interviews with the words

“… according to the journal Homeopathy, among those receiving these remedies, 60 per cent say their health improved after treatment.”

This statement may be true, but cannot constitute evidence for the effectiveness of homeopathy as a treatment, because no comparison has been done between people receiving homeopathy and people who have received plain water, or sugar pills, or whatever the preparation is for the condition. The ten interviews constitute no evidence at all of the efficacy of homeopathy or any other treatment, not just because they are anecdotes from people with conditions which are known to vary in severity and even get better on their own, but also because they too do not constitute a fair comparison. Here is one of them:

“Samuel began suffering from severe eczema on his lower legs when he was three. Our GP had prescribed diprobase, an emollient and hydrocortisone cream but we felt uneasy about using steroid cream on him at such a young age as it thins the skin.

We’ve been coming here for about a year to see Dr Lenhart who prescribed Five Flower Cream, a moisturiser containing Bach Flower Essences, to rub on in the morning, and calendula (marigold) beeswax ointment in the evening.

Samuel takes a couple of sulphur pills daily for his general condition and twice a week he has anti-allergy pills. He takes flax seed oil and omega-3 oil pills which are also anti-inflammatory and his skin has been wonderful ever since.

Now we come back every three to four months for a check-up. I teach science and I know people such as Professor Richard Dawkins claim that homeopathy doesn’t work. I usually love his work – but from our own experience I have to disagree with him.”

Most alarming is the last paragraph. Surely it is incumbent upon a science teacher to know how science works, yet here we have one who seems to be asserting that his own experience counts as evidence that homeopathy works; or maybe that wasn’t what he was saying, perhaps he was saying that regardless of the evidence he had to disagree with Dawkins because of his own experience. This would be even worse, but perhaps he was just misquoted.

Whatever happened, it doesn’t explain why a person supposedly familiar with the workings of science is not able to check for himself that hydrocortisone only thins the skin if used improperly, or against the advice of one’s doctor; or why a zoologist like Richard Dawkins should know more than any other person about the efficacy or otherwise of homeopathy.