Quacktitioners and The Quackometer

Discovered a really fun site today - The Quackometer. So I've been feeding a few pages into it... (Note, according to the site the Canard is the internationally recognised SI unit for Quackery.)

Lets start with the Lightning Process... The homepage scores 7 Canards. The black duck says...

This web site is using serious amounts of quack medicine terms. It is throwing in some scientific jargon and may be doing this to give an appearance of knowledgablity. It shows no sceptical awareness and so should be treated with a suspicious mind.

Now if you follow on to the page What is the Lightning Process we get 8 Canards. The black duck says...

This web site is using serious amounts of quack medicine terms. It is heavily using scientific jargon and may be doing this to bamboozle. It shows no sceptical awareness and so should be treated with a suspicious mind.

Moving on to Phil Parker's bio page we reach an astonishing 9 Canards. The black duck says...

This web site has more quackery than my village pond. It is throwing in some scientific jargon and may be doing this to give an appearance of knowledgablity. It shows no sceptical awareness and so should be treated with a suspicious mind.

The page on Details of The Phil Parker Lightning Process also scores 9 Canards. As does the Prospectus! So I thought I'd do a search on the man himself. Scores 6 Canards - am surprised it's that low! Possible Quackery pages found: 4880. This name appears on web sites with serious amounts Quackery!

As you may have gathered from some of my previous rants, I am not much impressed by Reverse Therapy and Mickel Therapy either. So I thought I'd run a few Quackometer scores on those sites too.

Reverse Therapy scores an amazingly low 1 Canards on it's home page... So then I ran the Quackometer on Dr John Eaton, the founder of Reverse Therapy. Came back with a more believable 5 Canards. Possible Quackery pages found: 349. But moving to his About us page we find the full 10 Canards! The black duck says...

The quacking noise is deafening. This web site is riddled with loosely defined terms and possibly pseudoscientific language with huge sprinklings of alternative medicine mumbo jumbo. It is full of scientific jargon that is out of place and probably doesn't know the meaning of any of the terms. It shows no sceptical awareness and so should be treated with a suspicious mind. It also looks like this site is trying to sell stuff. Buyer Beware!

Compare the equivalent page on Mickel Therapy, which comes back Quack free! But then Dr Mickel is a qualified medical Doctor and MBChB MRCGP.

Moving on to the More about Reverse Therapy, we find "This site has a has a currently measurable quackery content of 7 Canards". I was somewhat surprised to find that the page on Bodymind only registered 7 Canards too.

The Mickel website doesn't really have an equivalent page. It has pages with videos on, but I don't think that the Quackometer works on those. But delving through the website I found a few pages that registered 1 Canard. And then I found this News page, which states:

The Matrix and Keys to Health

Mickel Therapy has undergone significant evolution over the last year. This has resulted in an additional understanding of ‘dis-ease’ states and how we can treat these. Dr Mickel is currently writing a new book that will expand on this information.
(snip)

Not surprisingly (look at the link!), this did rather worse, 6 Canards - The black duck says...

This web site is heavily laden with loosely defined terms and possibly pseudoscientific language. It is full of scientific jargon that is out of place and probably doesn't know the meaning of any of the terms. It shows no sceptical awareness and so should be treated with a suspicious mind.

I get the feeling that the way the Mickel Therapy website is arranged a lot of the stuff on it won't register high scores on the Quackometer, but the Reverse Therapy website gets higher scores because it tells you rather more about about the therapy. I wouldn't try any of these therapies myself (not that I can afford to). Even without the Quackometer scores.