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20th February 2023
This week’s newsletter starts off (relatively) lightly, with an article from Katrina about p-hacking. Katrina’s been writing some great articles for us recently, and it was a pleasure to have her on our podcast a couple of weeks ago. We’re hoping to have her join us again to talk about her new article this week, and if you’re both a listener and a reader you can get a sneak preview of what she’ll be talking about.
From trying to teach you a little about p-hacking, we go straight to begging you for help. Dan Ryan has done a good job of wading through submissions for the in progress Therapeutic Products Bill, sorting the bad from the good, and summarising the arguments he’s seen from conspiracy theorists and the like (who Voices for Freedom and others have rallied to make submissions) for why the government should keep their hands off Natural Health Products.
Obviously here at the NZ Skeptics we’re very much in the camp that regulation is a good thing. We don’t want to take away people’s ability to make dumb choices and use alternative medicine, but we do want the government to make sure those products are safe. And, ideally, we’d like to see practitioners banned from making health claims about their products if they don’t have evidence to back them up. It seems like a no-brainer, but somehow the government thinks that it should be okay to make a health claim simply because of historical use!
I follow up Dan’s article with a little about the bill itself, give you some pointers on where to look in the bill for issues, and then really try and tighten the thumbscrews and pull on your heartstrings to get you all to make your own submissions - in the end I get so desperate I even offer you all a pint of beer for your effort!
Finally, once you’ve been guilted into helping save New Zealand from the herbal apocalypse, Bronwyn continues her look into fundamentalist Christians (or Fundies, as she calls them) with Nancy Campbell and her strange family.
