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Since its founding nearly 13 years ago, The Huffington Post has relied heavily on unpaid contributors, whose ranks included aspiring writers, citizen journalists and celebrities from the Rolodex of the site’s co-founder Arianna Huffington.

...On Thursday, it said it was immediately dissolving its self-publishing contributors platform — which has mushroomed to include 100,000 writers — in what is perhaps the most significant break from the past under its editor in chief, Lydia Polgreen...

(Recently) a contributor with the byline Waqas KH published an article about Felix Sater, an associate of President Trump, that he had been paid to post. The site has since deleted the article.

My Belfast buddy Dean Sterling Jones does tough original reporting at his blog, Shooting The Messenger.

Dean invited me to edit his latest item -- posted here today -- and to cross post it here.

I promptly and gratefully accepted both invitations -- PMH

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And to Eileen and anyone who knows if she’s real or not, please get in touch!

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On April 25, my Belfast, Northern Ireland, blogging buddy Dean Sterling Jones and I co-signed and co-blogged a request for a review of "crystal therapy" and other dubious medical treatments being offered by a Liverpool hospital. On May 2, we blogged about a similar request we made re: a Derbyshire hospital offering "energy therapies." On May 11, we blogged about a similar request we made re: a Norwich area medical facility offering "Thought Field Therapy" and other iffy treatments.

We filed our requests with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), "the independent regulator of health and social care in England."

Today we filed the following request with the CQC re: the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine, Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital, and Bristol Homeopathic Hospital.

Incidentally, my mother -- a freelance writer who advocated of all sorts of dubious "alternative" medical treatments -- co-authored the 1981 book, Homeopathic Medicine At Home.

On April 25, my Belfast, Northern Ireland, blogging buddy Dean Sterling Jones and I co-signed and co-blogged a request for a review of dubious medical treatments being offered by a Liverpool hospital. On May 2, we blogged about a similar request we made re: a Derbyshire hospital offering "energy therapies."

We filed our requests with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), "the independent regulator of health and social care in England."

Today we filed another request with the CQC re: Hoveton & Wroxham Medical Centre (see the map) which, according to their website, is offering these treatments (all links to Quackwatch.com):

• “Hypnotherapy”
• “Neuro-Linguistic Programming” (NLP)
• “Time Line Therapy”
• “Life Coaching”
• “Emotional Freedom Techniques” (EFT)
• “Thought Field Therapy” (TFT)
• “Eye Movement Integration”
• “Energy Healing”
• “Mindfulness”
• “Reiki”

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Last Monday, my Belfast, Northern Ireland, blogging buddy Dean Sterling Jones and I co-signed and co-blogged a request for a review of dubious medical treatments being offered by a Liverpool hospital. We filed our request with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), "the independent regulator of health and social care in England."

Via  People’s Experiences of the Health Psychology Service at Walton Hospital, Derbyshire County Community Health Services

Today we filed a similar request with the CQC re: Derbyshire Community Health Services which is apparently offering “Neuro-Linguistic Programming,” “energy therapies,” and “Emotional Freedom Technique,” treatments discussed in the post Mental Help: Procedures to Avoid by retired psychiatrist Stephen Barrett MD, founder and proprietor of Quackwatch.com.

A couple days ago, Dean Sterling Jones, my Belfast, Northern Ireland blogging buddy, reported an item about how Aintree University Hospitals in Liverpool offers, apparently via the publicly-funded National Health Service, these "holistic treatments" (all links to Quackwatch.com): 

• “aromatherapy” 
• “aromatic facial"
• ”reflexology” 
• “crystal therapy” 
• “reiki”
• “colour therapy (chromotherapy)”

Today Dean and I co-signed (and are co-blogging) this request for a review to the Care Quality Commission, "the independent regulator of health and social care in England."

I co-authored and cross-blogged this item with Belfast, Northern Ireland writer Dean Sterling Jones who shares my interest in the subjects of free speech and censorship. For example, click here for an item he blogged recently about a Belfast pastor on trial for preaching a "grossly offensive" sermon.

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On November 5, a letter signed by over 180 credentialed professionals, including a number of prominent faculty members at major universities, was sent to the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal).

The letter -- organized by Bonnie Liebman MS at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a Washington, DC-based advocacy nonprofit -- requested that the journal retract The scientific report guiding the US dietary guidelines: is it scientific?, a September 23 article by journalist/author Nina Teicholz that criticized the methodology and findings of the 2015 US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC).

Never heard of the DGAC? Until recently, neither had we.

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We'll leave it to experts -- including the National Academy of Medicine -- to debate the scientific issues and the merits of Teicholz's article.

We're interested in these journalism-related questions.

1) Why the pile on? Is her article a danger? If so, to whom?

2) Instead of trying to disappear her article, why not write a letter to the editor or a rebuttal? 

3) Has CSPI ever organized retraction request letters for other articles?

4) Have any of the signatories ever requested retractions of other articles?

Re: that last question, part-time unpaid bloggers that we are, Dean and I don't have the time to ask everyone who signed. However, we will ask CSPI and the 14 members of the 2015 Guidelines Advisory Committee, all of whom signed the letter.

At the moment we can report that 18 co-signers of the original letter have been deleted from a subsequent version.

What happened is that after receiving the November 5 retraction request, the BMJ published a November 19 post Executive Editor Theodora Bloom that included:

In line with our usual practice, this will require all signatories to declare their competing interests, which are not provided in a version of the letter posted on the website of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest.

On December 17, the BMJ posted an updated version of the CSPI letter, absent the names of 18 scientists and grad students.*

We know why one of the co-signers is MIA. As I reported last month, University of Colorado professor and former American Heart Association president Robert Eckel MD e-mailed me that he'd removed his name because I'd filed a related public records request with the university.

1. Sharon R. Akabas, PhD
Director, MS in Nutrition
Associate Director for Educational Initiatives
Columbia University
Institute of Human Nutrition
New York, New York, USA

2. Carol J. Boushey, PhD, MPH, RD
Associate Research Professor
Epidemiology Program
University of Hawaii Cancer Center
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

3. Robert H. Eckel, MD
Professor of Medicine
Division of Endocrinology, Metabolism and Diabetes
Division of Cardiology
Professor of Physiology and Biophysics
Charles A. Boettcher II Chair in Atherosclerosis
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Director Lipid Clinic, University Hospital
University of Colorado, Denver
Denver, Colorado, USA

4. Wafaie Fawzi, DrPH
Richard Saltonstall Professor of Population Sciences
Professor of Nutrition, Epidemiology, and Global Health
Chair, Department of Global Health and Population
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

5. Enrique Jacoby, MD, MPH
Regional Advisor on Nutrition and Active Living
NMH Pan American Health Organization
World Health Organization
Washington, D.C., USA

6. José Lapetra, MD, PhD
Médico de Familia
Responsable del Grupo de Investigación "Dieta, Nutrición y Prevención de Enfermedades en Atención Primaria"
CIBEROBN, Instituto de Salud Carlos III
Unidad de Investigación del Distrito Sanitario Atención Primaria Sevilla
Sevilla, Spain

7. Graham MacGregor, MA, MB, BChir
Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine
Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine
Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary
University of London
London, United Kingdom

8. Meena Mahadevan, PhD
Associate Professor
Program Coordinator for Applied Nutrition
Department of Health and Nutrition Sciences
Montclair State University
Montclair, New Jersey, USA

9. Salvatore Panico, MD, MS
Professor of Internal Medicine
Federico II University
Naples, Italy

10. Emma Patterson, PhD
Project Manager for School Food Sweden
Community Nutrition and Physical Activity
Karolinska Institutet
Stockholm, Sweden

11. Mike Rayner, DPhil
Professor of Population Health
Director, British Heart Foundation Centre on Population Approaches for Non-Communicable Disease Prevention
Nuffield Department of Population Health
University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom

12. Lesley Schmidt Sindberg, MPH
Senior Research Coordinator
Healthy Eating Research
University of Minnesota School of Public Health
St. Paul, Minnesota, USA

13. Francisco J. Tinahones, MD, PhD
Professor of Medicine
Director, Endocrinology and Nutrition Services, Hospital Universitario Virgen de la Victoria
Coordinator, Complications of Obesity, CIBEROBN
University of Málaga
Málaga, Spain

14. Dianne S. Ward, EdD
Professor, Department of Nutrition
Gillings School of Global Public Health
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

15. Julia Wärnberg, PhD
Nutritionist
University of Malaga
Malaga, Spain

Graduate Students

16. Stacy Blondin, MSPH
USDA Doctoral Fellow
ChildObesity180
Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy
Tufts University
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

17. Larissa Calancie
Doctoral Candidate - Nutrition Interventions and Policy
University of North Carolina
Gillings School of Public Health
UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

18. Violet Kiesel
Graduate Student
Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

Here's the original letter with the 18 names highlighted:




* Not on the original November 5 letter, but she signed onto the December 17 version:

I co-authored this item with Belfast, Northern Ireland writer Dean Sterling Jones who's cross-posting it at his lively Shooting The Messenger blog. 

I first contacted Dean a couple months ago after I was flattered to learn he'd picked up my September 30 item about Dr. David Katz posting a shill five-star review on Amazon for his novel reVision. Since then, Dean's been keeping his readers informed about further developments in Dr. Katz's literary career.

Dean turned up the Goodreads review; I sent the inquiry. We'll update if/when the company responds. (For clarity, my inquiry is slightly edited.)

Subject: blogger inquiry
To: Goodreads <support@goodreads.com>, <press@goodreads.com>
From: Peter Heimlich <peter.heimlich@gmail.com>
Cc: Dean Sterling Jones
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 2015 16:36:25 -0500

Hi Goodreads Team,

1) Here's a screenshot I just took from a Goodreads review page:



2) Per this screenshot I just took from his Facebook home page, you can see that the above David Katz is David L. Katz MD of Yale's Griffin Hospital and that he's hyping the book reVision:



3) Recent articles in the Yale Daily News, Retraction Watch, and IMediaEthics (please click the names to read those stories) reported that the Huffington Post deleted two columns by Dr. Katz in which he lavished praise upon reVision without informing readers that he wrote the novel and that Amazon.com deleted a five-star review for reVision which Dr. Katz posted on his Amazon user account without identifying himself as the author.

Here's my question.

Is Dr. Katz's Goodreads review of reVision in compliance with your review guidelines?


UPDATE, 12/16/15, 10:18pm ET: Just hours after Dean Jones Sterling and I blogged our items, Goodreads.com scrubbed Dr. Katz's self-review.

Here's a screenshot I took of the web page a few minutes ago: