bob sterman wrote: ↑Tue Jan 23, 2024 4:03 pm
The ME Association are not happy...
https://meassociation.org.uk/2024/01/di ... -damaging/
Editorially, the BBC has made a grave decision in allowing a product to seem that, coupled with various wellness practises, it could somehow cure an illness, without scientific backing.
And (sorry for the source) but someone has made a complaint to the ASA....
Dragons' Den entrepreneur who was the first to get 6 offers for device that 'cured' her ME is reported to advertising standards for 'selling snake oil' as doctors slam BBC show for 'misleading desperate patients'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/arti ... ients.html
The illegality of making unevidenced claims of cure was the first thought that occurred to me. So I re-read the BBC news article carefully, to look for anything that might be such a claim. And I went and looked at her website, with the same aim. I came away with the impression that there were no claims of cure, in the legal sense. So she and the BBC had stayed the right side of the legal line.
I think the BBC know very well about this. I have carefully read a number of BBC news articles where there was such a risk, and decided they know just how to write such an article, to report on it, without ever indicating credence for claims that another person might have made, or indeed suggesting that such a claim might have been made, when legally it hasn't been.
There is a big market in woo and wellness bollocks. And there has been a big push in the past by ASA and local trading standards to prevent illegal claims of cure. So I think it is pretty well known that you mustn't make illegal claims of cure, and when I look at woo-sellers marketing materials from time to time they are generally careful to stay the right side of the line. So woo-sellers remain in business. Because even without claiming cure, they create feelings that they tap into.
And I think that is wrong too, because it works and does mislead some people. My own wife is attracted by "natural cures" and there's no point debating the point with her. I saw my late mother-in-law's husband spending a lot of money he didn't have on fake herbal cures, to try and cure his wife, which was very sad, because she, for all her problems, knew that was bollocks.
But it isn't illegal to do that, and it's how the woo-sellers stay in business. And I think that is what the ME society is saying. In the linked article on their website, they don't make an accusation of illegal unevidenced claim of cure. Apparently they have also made a complaint to the ASA, according to the Daily Mail, and may be that's true. I'm not sure that will be sustained, on the basis of the materials I have seen - though I'm not going to go to the lengths of actually watching an extract of Dragon's Den, as for me that is far too intolerably unwatchable.
But I can see that the ME society have a very fair and important point to make, and making an ASA complaint would be part of how they publicise that, even if in practice there isn't anything sufficiently concrete for such a complaint to be sustained.
