This post is completely off-topic but is on a theme that I feel very personally attached to.
I am a sufferer of Rheumatoid Arthritis, an immensely painful condition that means some days I am unable to walk, others unable to use my hands, and every so often someone passes me a book on complementary therapies for my evaluation. While I am always skeptical of such things I often take a look just to see what was being suggested and also out of respect for the person who was kind enough to give me the book. However, I recently received a copy of Margaret Hills' "Curing Arthritis: The Drug Free Way" and was so angered by what I read that I had to make this post.
Hills claims that all types of arthritis are caused by a build up of uric acid throughout the body (page 9 - second edition). This is actually the cause of acute gout and NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with Rheumatoid Arthritis (nor osteoarthritis, but here I will focus on RA). One of the, not biggest, but large problems I face with this illness is explaining to people that it is an auto-immune disease in which the immune system attacks your own body, most people never having heard of the differentiation between osteoarthritis (which is chronic wear-and-tear on the joints) and RA. When someone publishes a book claiming that RA is a "build up of acid" or any other bollocks along those lines it makes my life far harder - after all, people will say to me that I could cure myself just by not eating so much acid!
If Hills really wanted to help the population who suffer from real RA she would not perpetuate her malicious voodoo about the causes and attempt to scare people off drugs that can have real life-improving impacts. Her claims about the dangers of Voltarol (diclofenac) are unfounded and damaging. She could really do with some instruction on basic logic at pages 23-24 where she claims that the inability to treat Tennis Elbow with steroid injections proves that drugs are dangerous and ineffectual "in contrast to" reports showing that a vegetarian diet can help RA. Strangely she neglects to mention the fact that steroid injections are incredibly effective for Rheumatoid Arthritis - perhaps because it completely disproves her mumbo-jumbo.
When not bashing on about how thankful she is that the Lord God allows her another day to live and spread her bullshit, Hills tries to inspire sympathy by stating that her case of arthritis was the worst she has ever seen in anyone. Having read her book and seen her inability to grasp the basic, now universally accepted, facts about RA, I would claim that her propagation of such material is mendacious and, by logical inference, I would extend that to her own condition. If she had RA and it went away by simply not eating any acids then I'm Abraham Lincoln - as many people with RA will testify (the ones who were stupid enough to try her therapies), they simply don't work - people with RA will NOT get better because they eat no acids (see here for a thread consisting mostly of people who say it doesn't work).
Thanks for reading - I appreciate that you read this blog for my insights into WebSec as opposed to rants about bogus therapists, but I hope that you will link to this article if you possibly can, to boost the pagerank of this post so that others can be warned of the dangers this woman poses.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheumatoid_arthritis