Wednesday 17 June 2015

Cancer Quackery in Birmingham

Brian Clement is speaking at the Buddhist Centre this weekend. If you don’t know him he is the director of the Hippocrates Health Institution in Florida and peddles all kind of quackery from enemas to naturopathic diets and a whole load more. The claims that he makes for his cures are extreme and in this country possibly even illegal given the ruling of the Cancer Act which forbids people to claim that they can cure cancer.

Yet claim this he does and has done, to the point of persuading a family to halt the curative chemotherapy that had a good chance of beating the leukaemia that their daughters had. The effect of this was all too predictable and all too disastrous. A very full account of much of what is known about Brian Clement can be found over at Science Based Medicine.

Brian Clement has law suits outstanding against him, he uses the title Doctor, despite having no professional medical qualifications and he claims to be able to cure cancer. He makes a lot of money from people’s illness and offers them spurious remedies and unproven and unsuccessful curatives for what can be very serious conditions.

Other venues on this speaking tour have cancelled his events in light of the concerns that people have. There is only a short time before he is due to talk but if you think that Brian shouldn’t be spreading his misinformation in Birmingham you could contact the Buddhist Centre and let them know, it’s very possible that they are not aware of the extent of Brian’s claims and may be as concerned as we are. You might also want to tell trading standards or the local MP what you think about his assertion to be able to conquer cancer.


This blog post was written by Patrick Redmond one of the organisers of Birmingham Skeptics in the Pub

3 comments:

  1. I'm trying to get word to my colleagues at the Brum Buddhist Centre to ask them to cancel the event.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've just added my voice to my friends at the Birmingham Buddhist Centre:
    "Hi folks,
    I’m writing to add my voice to Jayarava’s request that you think again about letting the Centre to Brian Clements. He peddles a lot of nonsense which is reason enough not to have him but some of his nonsense is likely dangerous. You can find out more here :

    http://brumskeptics.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/cancer-quackery-in-birmingham.html

    Don’t know if it’s still possible to cancel the event without any financial penalty on the Centre. If it’s not possible to cancel, then can I suggest that you donate any income from the booking to Cancer Research.

    Kind regards,

    Kulaprabha

    ReplyDelete