For someone who was being sued for libel, Simon Singh seemed remarkably upbeat.
When I spoke to the highly respected and best-selling author a short while ago, his cheerful demeanour (complementing his almost-comically-cropped Mohican-esque haircut and circular glasses)- suggested nothing of the anguish he had been going through since the beginning of a two-year court case brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA).
“When I write about something, I get obsessed”, admitted Singh. Back in 2005, a tongue-in-cheek article suggesting new, more scientifically accurate lyrics about the origin of the universe for Katie Melua’s ‘Nine Million Bicycles’ song led to the singer re-recording her single with Singh’s words.
“It was the highpoint of my career”, says Singh, who had spent three years researching Big Bang, his imaginatively titled history of cosmology.
The same obsession is clearly evident in Singh’s most recent book, Trick or Treatment, which tackles the murky world of alternative medicine.
It was his 2008 column in The Guardian, ‘Beware the Spinal Trap’, highlighting what he saw as the dangers of one such treatment, which first caught the attention of the BCA.
In the article, which was removed from The Guardian’s website following a legal complaint from the BCA, Singh wrote that chiropractic does not cure colic, asthma and persistent crying, and that the BCA “happily promotes bogus treatments”. The article has since been reinstated.
When I asked why he had decided to single out chiropractics in his column, Singh replied: “That week was National British Chiropractic Awareness week and I thought I’d make people aware of chiropractic. Boy, did I make people aware of chiropractic.”
The BCA began a court case which left Singh out of pocket to the tune of £200,000; costs that, despite a landmark court ruling on April 2 in Singh’s favour, will never be entirely recouped.
And although the BCA withdrew their libel action on April 15, Singh does not feel overwhelmingly victorious.
Last week he told interviewers, “my bill for a clear victory could be £60,000. That explains why people don’t fight libel cases: even if you win, you lose”.
I was talking to Singh before he delivered a talk to Sheffield’s branch of Skeptics in the Pub, a group which comes together to discuss topical issues and back-slap a bit about the extent of their own wisdom and enlightenment.
But the very opportunity to talk about these things is something sacred, says Singh, who appears to equate the BCA’s action against his article with censorship.
“The only way that science, medicine and technology progresses is through debate and discussion.
“That’s what is happening tonight – I’ll say something, and then 50 people will ask me questions. Some of them may challenge me, some of them may even be beefing my position.”
Singh’s interest in alternative medicine was in part sparked when he heard that students were going overseas on gap years and using homeopathy to protect themselves from foreign diseases.
Homeopathy, according to The Society of Homeopaths, is a system of medicine which involves treating illnesses with highly diluted substances, working on the principle of “like cures like” – that is, a substance that would cause symptoms in a healthy person can be used to cure the same symptoms in illness.
“Often you’re just left with a sugar pill with nothing in it”, says Singh. “The homeopath says it’s a memory of the ingredient which is protecting you, but scientifically it makes no sense, and clinical trials don’t back it up.”
Singh said he couldn’t believe that the treatment was trusted by both students and perpetuated by practitioners, so he set up an experiment.
“I asked a young student to go to 10 different high-street homeopaths, and to tell them that she was going to West Africa and wanted an alternative to conventional treatments. I specifically picked West Africa because there are strains of malaria there which can kill within three days.”
The result? “10 out of 10 homeopaths said ‘here, take this’. So, 10 out of 10 homeopaths were willing to let this young woman go off abroad and risk her life, because they clearly believed in what they were selling.”
Singh found it both fascinating and alarming that such a thing could happen.
“It made me realise that there are smart people out there who believe this stuff works, and there are practitioners out there who are willing to provide it, and nobody seems to be actually looking for hard facts.”
The incident prompted Singh to find a co-author – Edzard Ernst, the world’s first professor of complementary medicine – and give alternative medicine a rigorous investigation.
“We decided to let people know the facts. You know, what works, what doesn’t work; what’s safe, what’s dangerous; what we have absolutely no clue about whatsoever.”
The result was Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial, which looks at four therapies in detail – acupuncture, herbal medicine, homeopathy and chiropractic – and gives one-page summaries of all of the others.
“People have said that we’re relentlessly negative and anti-alternative medicine”, he says.
“We’re not anti-alternative medicine. We’re just pro-evidence. We look at each therapy one by one, and we’re only negative if the data’s negative, like for homeopathy.
“If something’s proven by evidence to work, for example, hypnotherapy for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, then we’re very happy to embrace it.”
Perhaps naively, I asked whether Singh had tried all of the therapies himself in order to write the book.
“No”, he replies, “because I was never that ill”; but that’s not the real reason, as Singh explains.
“Alternative therapists have said, how can you write about this if you’ve never tried it? Well, let’s say I tried reiki, and it made me better. How arrogant of me would it be to say that reiki must work, because it worked for me; or if I had a really bad experience, to say, reiki’s terrible because it made me ill.”
The scientifically rigorous way to measure a treatment’s effectiveness is to subject it to a clinical trial – “rather than relying on our experiences”, Singh says, “we looked at research from around the world”.
The slightly unforeseen result of Singh’s brush with the law over chiropractics has been the writer’s consequential championing of libel reform.
“It’s generally accepted that Britain has the most oppressive libel laws in the free world.
“It’s incredibly easy to bring a libel suit – anybody can just issue one and suddenly you’ve got to make a decision: am I prepared to stake my entire earnings on defending this article, or do I just walk away?”
Fellow scientists faced by similarly crippling legal fees from libel battles have told Singh that they keep on fighting because to concede defeat would be to break the Hippocratic Oath.
One such person, cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst, who is being sued for saying a US heart device does not work, told Singh “I’d rather be a good doctor than a quiet doctor”.
Although Singh effectively won his own libel case, he says he did so despite the libel laws; libel reform is still an area in dire need of attention.
“There’s a lot to be proud about the English legal system. But I would defy any politician to argue against libel reform. The right of free speech, to have fair and open debate, is a cornerstone of who we are and what we are.”
The fact that I was initially worried about having this article published surely says something too.
“For a student newspaper, libel reform is as important to you as it is to me”, said Singh. “If you can’t write about stuff because you’re scared of libel, then your readers will never ever read about it.”
Just as Simon is about to leave to give his talk to the Sheffield Skeptics, I squeeze in one last question, anxious to steer the conversation back round to the original subject – alternative medicine.
Does he see it as simply another lifestyle choice which may go out of fashion?
“I just see it growing – it’s been growing year on year for the last 15 years. People invest in it because it’s natural, traditional, and holistic; it fits in with a belief system that they might have.
“‘Trick or Treatment’ is about finding out what works, and embracing it, and finding out what doesn’t work, and letting the public know.”