Early this morning, the Nullopathy article in Wiki4CAM, the so-called complimentary and alternative medicine wiki, was deleted, by someone calling himself “DoctorB” (my personal prime suspect being “Doctor B… en Goldacre”, who we all know wouldn’t approve of nullopathy, although he has been curiously silent on the subject). The stated reason in the deletion log was “content was: junk”. The talk page simply read:

This article is believed to be the work of a parodist or vandal and should be deleted immediately.

Imagine my shock and appalledness, especially after I’d read this, from their page “Why do we need Wiki4CAM?”:

Are you wondering why do we need Wiki4CAM when we already have the Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is undoubtedly the world’s biggest and most read and referenced encyclopedia. The community participation has made it a huge success. But its open architecture has (at times) also led to the use of Wikipedia for gaining political mileage and for spreading biased views by a handful of editors.

The same thing has happened to most complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies on Wikipedia. A handful of wiki editors are going out of their way to discredit and disrepute nearly all alternative medicine as unscientific.

…and here we see the Wiki4CAM editors describing nullopathy as “junk”! Who are they to decide what’s real and what’s junk? Have they run a trial of nullopathy? They never mention one.

Furthermore, they have an article on intercessory prayer. I mean, come on. Homeopathy, sure. Acupuncture, naturopathy, fine. Hydrotherapy, magnetotherapy, chiropractic, I’ll give you those. But intercessory prayer? That’s just nullopathy with your hands together!

I thought that Wiki4CAM was a place for practitioners of all alternative therapies to come together and discuss and promote them without being oppressed by “mainstream” alternative medicine and Big Complimentary, pushing the more widely-accepted forms of CAM and silencing the voices of the small modalities like nullopathy. Clearly there is a conspiracy in the world of CAM to discredit nullopathy. Probably this is why it was so hard for me to originally find out anything about it (more on that in a future post). CAM is a multi-million pound industry… in retrospect maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t want people to know about the cheapest form: nullopathy.

This is not the end of this.