STAB Stops

Edited from Arrse:

“STAB stabbing OK. STAB stops. Unload. Make STAB Ready. STAB stabbing OK. STAB stops. Unload. Wait 17 years……

STAB fails to load. On closer inspection, TA appears to be shagged. Return STAB to stores until the country unfucks itself.“

I had rather naively assumed that the reason my TA (Territorial Army) unit had cut down on training was because of a local ‘administrative error’, overrunning their budget.

But no, it seems the government/MoD has decided to withdraw funds for training anything except direct operations.

Now, the TA runs, roughly, as a way of drawing on a segment of the population that doesn’t want to make the military a career, but can still contribute to operations. This might be as fill in to fighting forces, or more valuably as specialists such as drivers or medics. With recent long-term large-scale operations, this draw and rotation is quite heavy, but continues to draw those who can and want to contribute but still maintain another, main, career.

People like me

Part time activities create and require commitment. If you can’t practice one activity, you tend to move to something else – and as you do, you commit to them, the social contacts, the skills. The old ones fade. It becomes a hurdle to moving back to the old one when it becomes available again.

This means that when – or if – the TA restarts, there is no core left to pass on not just technical skills but attitudes and experience.

Background training provides a core skillset to launch from for operational training. Years of TA experience do not equate to years of regular training, but are far superior to a few months of pre-deployment training for newcomers.

It’s not as if STABs are useless

And even those who don’t deploy provide people to train with. If, out of any group of TA soldiers, only a few mobilise, the others provide the bulk to run usefully sized exercises; without them you just don’t get the scale of training. Even for those that don’t intend to deploy initially, circumstances change. And they are also available for the more extreme remit of the TA: national emergency.

It might be another training model would work. The pay is an important compensation for the time away from family and friends, but there’s still opportunity for those of us who don’t need that to train. But that’s not the way the organisation is able to operate.

At a stroke, the current government appears to have saved a tiny tiny part of the budget at the expense of mid term capability – capability that the next government will have to cope with. It appears a deliberate act of espionage on not just the next government (Labour must expect to lose the election) but the resources our fighting forces can draw on.

(A more considered post by my old CO)

The Equality Mistrust

Inequality within a society, we are sold, results in all sorts of Bad Things such as more and greater violence, poorer health, and more alcohol problems.

At first sight this would seem a bit odd. Marginal, subsistance societies where everyone is equally and awfully poor have infamously low life expectancy and high infant mortality rates. As a society’s wealth increases its health increases, and we can see this crudely with GapMinder; both over time and over space, richer societies show no obvious general trend to be any less ‘equal’ than poorer ones (in fact possibly maybe a bit the opposite), and do show an obvious trend to be healthier:

The Equality Trust

Still, the Equality Trust (“Because more equal societies work better for everyone”) are trying to make a case that ‘at some point’ – which just happens to be now in the UK and other western worlds – we can stop working on progress and instead focus on being fair. Because there are some indications that rich societies that are less ‘equal’ are also less healthy, more violent, etc:

And if you click on that you can look at various other handy graphs.

Lots of skeptical alarm bells ring: there are no units on some of the graph axis, so what are the scales? There are few dates. Countries appear on some graphs and not others. And there’s the general background that “unfairness is bad, mkay?“

In fact all that these graphs tell us is that some countries are quite consistent. The USA tops out as the least equal and most nasty, Singapore as the most equal and most nice, Japan as both equal and nice. It seems quite probable that there is something else at work here, such as differences in cultural approaches to wealth and health and social responsibility and so on.

Still, they Trust claim that “Compelling new evidence shows that large income inequalities within societies damage the social fabric and quality of life for everyone”. Presumably the well-established evidence that more income improves the quality of life is now old and optional.

Physical health vs inequality

So let’s have a look at a sample of their evidence. The paper on the first page in their evidence page, by Wilkinson and Pickett, Income inequality and population health: a review and explanation of the evidence has a title that tugs at those barely stilled skeptical alarm bells again: they are setting out to show something, not investigate. A reason to be skeptical, but not to disregard.

The abstract simply counts papers that they’ve found. There’s no indication of any methods to compensate for positive publication bias, or indeed any ordinary collection bias. They just went looking for papers, and found 155.

They then count papers and bin them according to ’supporting’, ‘unsupporting’ and ‘partially supporting’. There’s no indication of scaling or weighting factors. So a paper that looks at one factor in a specific environment is either ’supportive’ or ‘unsupportive’. A paper that considers more complex relationships is likely to find a bit of both, and so will be ‘partially supportive’. If you throw those inconvenient complicated relationships away, and look at just the simple positive findings vs the negative findings, then it should be completely unsurprising that 70% are positive, simply due to publication bias (though a ’supportive’ positive finding is not necessarily the same as a positive result that biases publications).

It’s not at all right, on the basis of that review, to conclude that the literature shows even a link (let alone a causal link) between inequality and Bad Things. In the paper they go a bit deeper than that, but not by much. The studies included were from three previous reviews, electronic searches and informal contacts, thereby introducing various collection bias.

Self-enforced relationships

There’s an interesting circular argument on page 4: Wilkinson (in another paper) points out that communities across larger areas show more correlation between poor health and inequality. He argues that this is because people can see further across differences in that community, and so see more inequality, and we should measure across wide areas to capture this. By then showing that studies of communities across larger areas return such correlation, he thinks he bears out his argument that was formed as a possible explanation for this observation…

Smilarly at the bottom is an even more circuitous argument: Inequality relates to health as a measure of the social distances which are responsible for class differences in health (ie, the social distance here is measured in healthiness). Lo and behold, if you measure those social inequalities in that particular way, you will get differences in health. Lo further and behold more, the greater those social inequalities are measured to be, the greater the differences in health. Which is what you defined it as being in the first place.

On Page 7 they assume that income ‘inequality’ is the reason why Mr Average Black in the US has four times the income of Mr Costa Rican but a lifespan shorter by nine years, and ignore a host of other social factors.

Finally – at least as finally as I got to – was that “the relationship between income inequality and homicide shows beyond doubt that inequality has powerful psychosocial and behavioural effects” (my emphasis). This is not only very poor science (correlation does not show anything beyond doubt, certainly not cause), but is also wrong: this paper (“Income Inequality, Poverty, and Homicide across Nations “) says homicide depends on absolute wealth, not equality. Although this one (“Income inequality and homicide rates in Canada and the United States“) says otherwise.

Some speculation & Some other evidence

We should in fact expect to find “fairness” as some kind of indicator, or proxy, for health. When comparing countries with similar average income, a greater spread probably means the poor are poorer and the rich are richer. The poorer then will have more of the illnesses associated with poverty, while the richer benefit from much smaller improvements in health, and so countries with a greater spread in income will have worse overall health compared to others with the same overall wealth.

All we are seeing is the diminishing returns of increasing wealth on increasing health. It’s not the inequality that causes health and crime, it’s that less equality probably shows the presence of poorer people, who have worse health and often more crime.

A proper way to measure whether societies are ‘doing the right thing’ is to compare like with like. How are those who earn $1000/month “buying power” in the US comparing with those who earn $1000/month “buying power” in Nigeria, or Singapore, or the UK? As a society gets richer – and supposedly less equal – how do the people in the bottom quartile do as it does so?

If we take a look at gapminder, and compare the Gini ‘inequality index’ with life expectancy or infant mortality (do press Play to avoid being diverted by particular years), then you can see that there’s very little correlation in general between inequality and poor health:

Similarly compare the “Income share by the lowest 20%” with life expectancy and there’s little correlation.

Only very specific years show the correlations the Equality (Mis)Trust claim, and are quickly swamped by other effects as time goes on. In fact, we can pick the year 2000 and show that richer societies are more equal:

What is more clear is the way that different parts of the world tend to sit in similar areas of the graphs. Cultural attitudes again perhaps.

What were they thinking?!

So why does this poor analysis turn up as ‘evidence’? Well the language seems a bit of a give away:

“Because more equal societies work better for everyone”

“Compelling new evidence shows that large income inequalities within societies damage the social fabric and quality of life for everyone”

“Great inequality is the scourge of modern societies”

This is the “It’s not fair” brigade dabbling in a bit of pretend science to bolster their dogma. Anyone turning up with that old mantra and a clutch of citations to prove it is going to have a lorryload of skepticism dumped on them.

Their case avoids comparisons with poor countries by assuming that ‘now we are rich and healthy’ we can take stock and think about doing things differently. But if we compare only the rich countries, the relationship is not as obvious or as large as they claim, which raises questions again about the scales of the axis used:

Even so, only most of us are whole, rich and healthy, and it’s not clear quite how rich we could be. In 50 years time, say, with free personal fusion power, no physical disabilities, no cancer, a healthy lifespan of 120 years and personal jetpacks (at last!) we might look back with pity at the relative poverty and disease-ridden state we are in now.

All the same we have some features that absolutely poor states don’t, including a relatively carefree life. We don’t start with the spectre of externally-caused starvation and death hanging over our shoulders, which tends to produce a work ethic dedicated to improving life, a sort of ‘eye on the horizon’ and a drive to work to get richer and safer.

Instead we can support whole communities of ‘idle’; that is, we can afford to pay people to do nothing, and it’s infamously depressing and frustrating to be part of those communities, and famously hard to get out of them.

It may be that we should look at the outliers in those graphs and examine potential causes; Scandanavians for example attempt to ensure full employment rather than compensate for unemployment via the dole, and that may be how they assure better equality and better health.

Wealth makes health

But in the meantime, the idea that greater inequality may sometimes be a proxy or indicator for the presence of lower absolute wealth in a society is trivial, and should not divert us from working to make everyone richer.

In particular, we must be wary of any argument that to reduce Bad Things or increase happiness, we could reduce the inequality by, say, limiting the income of the richer part of society, rather than by increasing the wealth of the poorer. As we can see above, health improves with wealth. The only happiness that such policy improves are of those who have no interest or ability to become rich, at the expense of all those who have, including the poor who are working to become rich.

The evidence remains, as can be seen above, that people living in an unfair rich society are much better off than those living in a fair poor one.

Humans Don’t Do Science

“Science”, we are frequently and rightly told, relies on being open about what it is doing and how, on welcoming informed criticism, on being willing to drop discredited ideas, on experimenting to test theories to try and break them, and generally progresses by proving existing ideas are not (quite) correct.

(This assumes a modern somewhat subverted meaning of ’science’ which will purple the pedants, but it will do for now. As will this:)

‘Scientists’ are those who do the research that brings us more and better science.

The implication then, is that as science needs the above to work, and scientists do science, therefore scientists are open, willing to drop their concepts when discredited, welcome informed criticism, and so on.

Wot tosh.

Humans eh?

Scientists are human, and so are as selfish, greedy, proud, sociable, sensitive, prejudiced, noble, dislikable, charming, arrogant when given half a chance, and generally as emotionally involved as other humans. And some scientists seem to be unaware that this breaks the requirements to ‘do science well’.

It should surprise nobody that people get emotionally involved in their work, especially if it requires a lot of effort, some specialised skills, and the results look good and are valued. This applies to most of us, and it applies just as well to a scientist who has developed a respected theory. Nobody welcomes criticism of work they are proud of.

Reputations are based on theories and ideas too, not directly on rigour in the workplace. Newton is remembered for his observations of motion (and a mythical accident for discovering them), not because of his work practices.

Similarly sometimes a huuuge amount of time, effort and money and reputation is invested in developing certain concepts, and few people can be objective when assessing their own life’s work. Skills and knowledge are accumulated and not willingly abandoned. Dark matter, neutrinos, the search for the Higgs Boson, for example, are all current research programmes that might turn out to be a complete waste of time, but there is a tremendous momentum in pursuing those particular concepts.

And so sometimes there are quite large communities of people that are emotionally invested in certain concepts. Since funds are often limited, these communities can be quite large proportions of the overall field (The CERN experiments suck up quite a lot of the physics community’s funds). If we ask certain slices of the research community what the ‘consensus’ is on a topic, the results are biased by the various investments of these communities.

Iterative Steps

Of course the key here is that we are looking at research, where we are investigating things we don’t know very well. As soon as we run a proper experiment to test the theory, then the people-yness of those involved becomes nearly irrelevent.

In the meantime we can perhaps rely on the ‘iterative’ nature of science; that we can count on the overall continual reviews to eventually correct mistakes and improve on theories. This, though, is not a set of incremental improvements, where we gradually work our way closer to the ‘truth’ in the manner of many mathematical iterations. Some models have to be completely abandoned, not just improved on.

Such a messy approach is perhaps fine for general research, but is insufficient if we need to act upon it. In some cases (such as education, climate change, materials to build bridges, buildings and airplanes) we need to assess what we actually know, and know now, from amongst all the people-y assumptions and reputations and opinions.

Being Scientific

One of the key aspects of really scientific disciplines, including ones outwith research, is that we remove the people-yness of those involved as much as possible.

For example, we record all the data and methods (“audit”) because we expect to make mistakes, and so we need to be able to go back and check every step.

We let others have access to this (“full disclosure“) because, again, we expect to make mistakes, and so we need to let other people check every step. It also helps to compensate for some of the ordinary people problems; if you know the details of your work are going to be scrutinised by all and sundry, you tend to be much more careful with that work, and much more careful with drawing conclusions from it.

We run formal assessment reviews to check methods, data sources, and citations.

Where possible, experiments are designed to remove ordinary personal biases, such as the ‘double blind trials’ used to test whether medical treatments work.

These extra tasks are tracked and checked and recorded, to make sure they are done.

Except that we don’t even do all these very well. It’s expensive, and it diverts effort from the task (even if it improves the quality of knowledge overall), and so we tend to bypass them when we can. It only tends to be properly implemented where we need very very high levels of confidence, such as medicine and bridges, buildings and airplanes, and are willing to pay for it.

It’s an odd leftover from the past that we don’t require the same rigour for informing public policy, such as in education, re-employment, and major environmental impacts.

And when scientists from some of the more ‘careless’ disciplines hold forth, we ought to consider carefully whether their views have been as openly, rigorously and systematically checked as they imply – or even believe themselves.

(“The Golem: What you should know about science” is a much more thorough take on the above)

Cautiously Approaching the Precautionary Approach

Following a post about the appalling Precautionary Principle, some folks said I was a bit harsh and that I had constructed an extreme version of it that it was never meant to be.

I’ve not been given an alternative definition, but all the same let’s have a look at a softer ‘Precautionary Approach’. In this case we’ll consider it in its fuzziest nicest: that we should not do dangerous things, and that if something might (but plausibly might) be dangerous, then the people who want to do it should prove it safe before they start.

All well and good it seems. This is the mellow, relaxed and comfortable “better safe than sorry” or “look before you leap”. It means people have to prove stuff is safe before they start doing it. And what can be wrong with that?

Well it’s wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong as follows:

• It considers only direct harm.
• It includes the potential for possible harm, even with little or no supporting evidence
• Proof lies with the advocates
• It makes the decision for you

It considers only direct harm

Most activities include quite definite harm. These are traded against the benefits of doing, or indeed the harms of not doing: if I am being chased by a veloceraptor, I am not going to pause and look to see what’s on the other side of the log I’m about to leap. There is a much higher certainty of danger in not doing, than in doing.

When it comes to more complicated activities, like building a factory or a hospital, we have definite harm: the land occupied will destroy wildlife, it will require energy, roads. On the other hand we will have the things the factory makes, the lives saved by the hospital, the employment. There are costs and benefits too from the houses, shops, recreation activities, schools, hospitals and factories needed by the workforce.

And the same effects will appear harmful to some and beneficial to others. Sheep grazing keeps the heather down. If you replace sheep with some other local industry, then the heather can run riot; this is good for the heather, but not so good for the moorland. Creatures that like living in heather will thrive, at the expense of those that like moorland. Are you a fan of heather or moorland?

Caution is not free. The continued ban on GM crops affects the wealthy very little, who can afford the warm, cuddly feeling of ‘protecting the environment’ at the expense of a little more wealth. That same ban, even if justified, is cold, heartless and cruel to those living on the edge of starvation, who die very young, who are always hungry, diseased and frail.

It includes the potential for risk of harm

Most activities carry some risks that they might cause harm. With the precautionary approach, we’re not only interested in the ‘known risks’, but the ‘unknown risks’.

There is no indication of quite how much possible risk is important; any “plausible” cause is sufficient. So for example the initial studies that drew a “link” between the MMR vaccine and autism are sufficient to “take precautions”. There was no actual evidence of risk of harm (the single study that started the scare had no significant value in the existing evidence), but there was enough to indicate the potential of such a risk.

And that’s enough. Being generally precautious provides no help in evaluating the possible risk of harm, and so it all rather depends on the emotions and enthusiasms of those applying the approach. If you are scared or highly reluctant to use modern medicine, then the above tenuous link between MMR vaccine and autism is enough to “take precautions”, and keep your children safe from such injections. This exposes your children to the harm of not taking the vaccine, but that’s not part of the consideration.

So we end up making decisions based on lack of evidence; based on ‘fantasy’ where we can dig out any possible plausible danger and use it as if it was actual danger. You might as well make decisions based on the plausible possibility that aliens live in clouds.

Proof lies with the advocate

This is not necessarily part of being generally precautious, but it seems to come with the Precautionary Principle: If you want something, you prove it’s completely safe.

Which has two problems:

(1) It’s rarely possible to prove that anything is completely safe. Lots of clever people have looked for links between the MMR vaccine and autism and found nothing, but maybe that’s just because they haven’t found the right thing yet. Maybe there are other dangers. And so anyone ‘being precautious’ can do do so for ever, happy in the knowledge that, because they’re using the important-sounding “Precautionary Principle”, they are doing the Right Thing.

(2) Expecting someone with a vested interest (who wants to build the factory, vaccinate children against MMR) to be fair about the evidence they present is a bit naive. Or rather, it’s a way of maintaing the Precaution, no matter what evidence is presented. Because you can’t trust it, obviously, it’s from the evil capitalists who want to build the factory, or evil drugs companies who want to make money from vaccine injections.

It makes the decision for you. Or not

Evidence and analysis inform our decisions, but should not make them. Sometimes the decision is obvious based on that information but sometimes it is not.

The precautionary approach provides a way of shortcutting all that palavar, and tells you not to do something if it might be dangerous. Yet it contradicts itself: it will tell you opposite things depending on how you apply it to the same problem.

For example: “Do I get up tomorrow?” The precautious approach tells you that because there are many possible (and known) harms in doing so, you should not. Yet “Do I stay in bed all day?” also has many possible (and known) harms in doing so and the precautious approach tells you that you should not.

Instead you have to choose when to use it, and choose which way to phrase your same question in order for it to ‘work’, and that’s the giveaway that it’s not a useful scientific approach. It’s a way of providing a pseudo-scientific cover over an emotional approach.

So if we look at opponents of wind farms, nuclear power, road bypasses, new shops, and so on, we sometimes see people who find just possibilities of potential harm, and seem to think that this by itself is enough to call a halt.

The Reckless Approach

Taking the same approach in the opposite direction exposes the lack of evidence, reason and analysis behind the Precautionary Approach.

The Reckless Approach says that “if there is any potential benefit to the action, we should act”.

And if we apply this approach to any ideas, we can quickly see that we’ll end up doing lots of really rather dangerous things.

Risk Analysis

The way we really – and sometimes even scientifically – decide whether to do something is to weigh up the costs against the benefits, including the uncertainties which are usually given as risks (potential costs or harms) and potential benefits.

This might be brief and scrappy – as we run from the veloceraptor, we have to make snap judgements made on very little, but often very important, information. This is a long running issue in the military (the snap judgements, not the veloceraptors) where life and death decisions need to be made on little and uncertain information.

For the more complicated issues involved in environmental impacts, impact assessments are well established, if not entirely straightforward.

Which is perhaps the problem; carrying out a proper assessment is complicated, and involves making difficult decisions in weighing the various effects against others. How do you weigh, for example, the many benefits of faster, cheaper travel provided by a bypass with the deaths to cute furry animals? To the permanent loss of certain habitats?

But doing anything else is insufficient. To pick and choose amongst the effects of an action and wave only those around, as if they force only one possible decision, is not rational, scientific or even moral.

(See also Risky Business, Adam Curtis on the Precautionary Principle, SIRC on Beware The Precautionary Principle, Precautionary Principle, Evidence Based Belief, EU Commission’s Communication on Precautionary Principle)

Simon Singh: Libel vs Fact

There are a lot of very clever people out there already closely watching the rather dubious activities of the alternative medicine crowd, so I tend to leave that subject alone.

Occasionally though there’s an opportunity to use the subversive power of even occasionally visited sites like this to Do Good.

Simon Singh wrote an article on the dangers of believing in a particular fantasy medicine (chiropractic therapy) and was then sued by the British Chiropractic Association for calling their treatments ‘bogus’. More details at Jack of Kent, New Scientist’s Comment don’t criticise or we’ll sue, or in fact just google Simon Singh.

Quite spectacularly, he appears to be losing the case.

So in retaliation, Sense About Science have asked people to spread the article around. And as it makes for good reading, here it is, somewhat edited from the original Guardian article:

Beware the Spinal Trap
Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results – and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that ‘99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae’. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

In fact, Palmer’s first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact some still possess quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything, including helping treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying – even though there is not a jot of evidence.

I can confidently label these assertions as utter nonsense because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

But what about chiropractic in the context of treating back problems? Manipulating the spine can cure some problems, but results are mixed. To be fair, conventional approaches, such as physiotherapy, also struggle to treat back problems with any consistency. Nevertheless, conventional therapy is still preferable because of the serious dangers associated with chiropractic.

In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.

More worryingly, the hallmark technique of the chiropractor, known as high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust, carries much more significant risks. This involves pushing joints beyond their natural range of motion by applying a short, sharp force. Although this is a safe procedure for most patients, others can suffer dislocations and fractures.

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: ‘Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck.’

This case is not unique. In Canada alone there have been several other women who have died after receiving chiropractic therapy, and Edzard Ernst has identified about 700 cases of serious complications among the medical literature. This should be a major concern for health officials, particularly as under-reporting will mean that the actual number of cases is much higher. If spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.

Simon Singh is a science writer in London and the co-author, with Edzard Ernst, of “Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial”.

The allegedly defamatory sentences, removed from the above, were:

“The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.”

In particular, the word ‘bogus’ is being treated with a lot more scrutiny than you’d normally expect from such a casual term.

Original article I think is here