Definitely not an advert

Let’s suppose you were putting together the most stereotypical Daily Mail health story (that wasn’t about cancer). What would you include?

Well, obviously first of all, you need your patients. They should be someone Mail readers can sympathise with – white, straight, middle-class, happy and utterly conventional.

When Charlotte Davies met her future husband there was an instant attraction […]

The university administrator met [accountant] Dean three years ago in a bar in Colchester, Essex, and the pair quickly became inseparable.

Secondly, we need a disease. That can either be something rare and terrible – a unique form of cancer, for instance, or a disease like meningitis that often affects the young – or it can be something everyday, like sore joints or high blood pressure… or eczema.

Unfortunately for her, there was also an instant reaction – on her skin. Within weeks of meeting her soulmate, her eyelids erupted with eczema and her eyes had swelled to the size of golf balls.

Third, doctors have to be baffled. If your patient just stumbled to the GP and got a diagnosis, that’s no good. They have to have to been bounced from hospital to hospital until some maverick doctor (who may be played by Hugh Laurie) works out what the true problem was. Better yet, medical science should fail all together, and “alternative medicine” has to provide the “answers”.

Doctors struggled to explain the sudden reaction and it was a homeopath who eventually diagnosed the cause…

Fourth, you need a hook. Something that makes this case of eczema different from the millions of others out there.

… as love.

Sigh. Yes.

‘He told me that it was common for eczema to be effected by emotions, but typically due to stress, trauma or unhappiness. This was the first time they had ever heard of someone being allergic to love’, she said.

‘I felt like my body was putting Dean to the test, because even though my heart told me he was The One, it was as if my body wanted to see if he really was a good as he seemed.

‘If he loved me after my eyes had turned into a bright red tomatoes literally within days of meeting him, then I’d know his love was true.’

Aww.

Fifth, you need a moral. Something to appeal to the Daily Mail‘s sensibilities. One common one is the story of the mother who goes against medical advice to abort a foetus, and is then lucky enough to bring it to term safely – women who aren’t so lucky don’t seem to make the papers in quite the same way, of course. In this case, the moral is…

She said: ‘In December we got married and the eczema started to get a lot better. Perhaps my hormones calmed down and I just felt more relaxed once we were married, but it certainly seems to have cured me.’

The headline goes even further: “Allergic to love: Meeting my soulmate brought me out in itchy eczema… until he proposed”.* You heard it here first – living in sin causes eczema!

Oh, and sixth, you need to blatantly plug a product, of course!

Charlotte tried a concoction of steroids, creams, and alternative medicines, to no avail. Eventually she chanced upon Skin Shop’s Dry Eye Gel, a product she describes as ‘miraculous’ at treating the symptoms. […]

Dry Eye Gel costs £8.99 for 30ml and is available from [ADDRESS REDACTED]

Incidentally, the Dry Eye Gel website promotes their product “As seen in the Daily Mail“, while every photo in the article – including the couples wedding pictures – are credited to “Eastnews Press Agency”, a PR photography company which claims on its site that “We know exactly the style of images National and Regional newspapers demand. With this knowledge we can give you and your clients the best opportunity to gain maximum press exposure. We can offer everything from straight forward picture coverage to an all-in-one package. This would include a full “news write through” of press releases and picture distribution service direct to National and Regional Press.”

Come to think of it, it sure was convenient for everyone involved that a woman decided to tell a national newspaper about her relatively minor skin condition, wasn’t it?

(Thanks to Tabloid Watch for pointing out the Dry Eye Gel website)

* There’s a joke about loveless marriage in there somewhere, but I’m not cruel enough to make it.

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Despite mounting evidence

“I don’t know how, but homeopathy really does work”, says Rachel Roberts in today’s Comment is Free, with the tagline “More of a mystery is why scientists continue to debunk it despite mounting evidence that homeopathy is effective“. Now, CiF is The Guardian‘s opinion section, and is known for giving some particularly controversial viewpoints a platform, so some sort of devil’s advocacy about homeopathy is to be expected. Okay, it would still hardly be a debate so much as just blind contrarianism, but that’s about par for the course of modern journalistic “balance”. This however goes way beyond that, into out and out nonsense on an actually epic scale.

This will be a paragraph by paragraph takedown, so it’ll get a bit long, but if you want a summary, the article takes place in topsy-turvy world where nearly every scientific study proves homeopathy works, and yet no scientist believes in it. Roberts then tries to claim that because scientists in topsy-turvy world are blinded and ignorant, scientists in the real world must be equally stupid.

Here we go: