Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17533

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Smith R
An old battle: England’s libel laws versus scientific debate
BMJ 2010 Mar 10; 340:c1227
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/340/mar10_2/c1227

Abstract:

The question of whether England’s libel laws are restricting scientific debate is currently high on the agenda because of prominent cases. Peter Wilmshurst, a Shrewsbury cardiologist, is being sued by a Boston company over his comments on a trial in which he participated. Simon Singh, the science writer, has a case against him brought by chiropractors, and Ben Goldacre, a doctor and author of the best selling Bad Science, is being repeatedly threatened.

Those unfamiliar with England’s libel laws might thus think that this is a new phenomenon. In fact libel obstructing scientific debate is a longstanding problem, and the BMJ was involved in one of the longest running libel cases in legal history.1

The BMJ published a study in May 1969 that showed that patients given the intravenous drug methohexitone had various abnormal physiological responses.2 These responses may have explained why some patients had died while being anaesthetised . . .

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909