Synogenes.com

It has always been popular amongst religious people to claim that atheists have no source of their moral values, that atheists are by definition immoral.

Qualiasoup has an excellent video presentation which exposes this argument in all its glory and like all the other Qualiasoup videos, this one is highly recommended.

Many people will be staggered at the news that a so-called College of Medicine is to set up following the ignominious demise of the Prince of Wales' Foundation for Integrated Health in May this year amidst fraud and money-laundering charges.

Four of the ex-directors or fellows of the disgraced Trust are directors of the new college although none of them have been charged with the previous fraud. George Gray, the charity's finance director has been charged with theft of £253,000.

The registration documents of the new college are available on David Colquhoun's website.

One of the aims of the new organisation (I can't bring myself to call it a college) is "7.4 establish an evidence base for integrated health and for individual complementary modalities;" which basically means looking for evidence in support of alternative medicine theories.

In science, we start from the data, from observation and measurement, from real phenomena and only once we have evidence of the existence of the phenomena, do we start to theorise about them, to look for explanations for them.

But these guys prefer to do it back-to-front. Start with the assumption that it works, then go trawling for something that they can pass off as evidence. That's a scandalous way to treat medicine and medical science and it has nothing to do with an honest assessment of the efficacy of the treatment.

One of those modalities they talk about is homeopathy, discredited over and over by detailed scientific evaluation for more than a century. There is not a shred of evidence that it has any efficacy at all and there are countless evidenced reasons why it cannot work. Not only is it a stupid theory, but the practitioners themselves have consistently failed to provide any evidence of efficacy. How then can it be considered any kind of treatment, any sort of medical modality.

Evidence based on anecdote is not evidence. A college of medicine that has nothing to do with medicine and isn't a college but a commercial promoter of Woo, is not a college of medicine.