This time, Jayney Goddard, who calls herself the President of The Complementary Medical Association, is calling on homeopaths and other quacks to provide evidence for her to take to the ASA that they are being very mean to them.

She has been circulating an email asking for evidence that the ASA has really hurt the feelings of people who make livings from selling superstitious and pseudoscientific forms of treatments. And hurting people’s feelings is bad.

Let’s remind ourselves what the ASA are really doing. Last night, I wrote about how the ASA investigated one of the UK’s largest homeopathic pharmacies that had been selling ‘remedy’ kits for travellers to prevent them catching fatal diseases. These kits do not work and by promoting such things, and denigrating real vaccinations, they put people’s lives at risk. If a few feelings are hurt upon the way then so be it.

Goddard claims she is meeting the ASA this Friday. She is taking along an advertising executive called David Hawkins who she describes as “a multi-award winning advertising and brand creation genius”. (Prizes for anyone who can detail these awards).

Also along for the ride is Dr Robert Verkerk and Meleni Aldridge from the Alliance for Natural Health. The ANH is an industry lobby group who work mainly for food supplement companies and spend much of their time lobbying the EU and governments to give such retailers an easy legislative life. They do this, of course, under the banner of ‘health freedom’ and people’s choice to ‘alleviate suffering’ through ‘natural health choices’.

It may be worth – just for the fun of it – going back a few years to when I first wrote about Jayney Goddard.

She had been appearing on TV – debating with a certain Simon Singh – about whether Homeopathy was a waste of money. She was very impressive and had lots of ‘research’ at her finger tips. She sounded too impressive and her online list of qualifications, awards and distinctions were too good to be true.

Jayney had been describing herself as having a “Professorship from Mahendra Sanskrit University in Kathmandu”. She was “the world’s largest professional membership body for complementary medicine” and has “been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine”. She “studied homeopathy at Imperial College for five years and has won numerous awards”.

A little digging revealed that the Mahendra Sanskrit University had been destroyed by Maoist rebels many years before. It also became clear that being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine required little more than a cheque for a few hundred pounds, and that, of course, Imperial College had never taught homeopathy. Indeed, the University, I understand, wrote to Goddard to stop her making these claims.

All very impressive stuff.

It would also appear that Goddard is well known to the ASA as someone complained about her last year for advertising what appeared to be a very dodgy multi-level marketing scheme with very misleading claims. Well worth reading about on Sceptical Letter Writer’s blog. The ASA found that her company, Magic Bullet TV Ltd, had misled with its advertising and made unsubstantiated claims. Note, that Jayney does not mention her own direct experience with the ASA in her email below.

Anyway, that leaked email in full…