11 June 2009
One of the most important and the most chilling stories about the future of free speech is playing out in the British courts. Science writer Simon Singh has been sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association for calling chiropractic “bogus.” Singh lost in the lower courts and is appealing. His chances of winning are slim, as British libel laws are notoriously plaintiff-friendly. Worse still, one can sue in British courts if only one of the readers of the alleged libel is in Britain, making the UK the venue of choice for any organization that wants to silence its critics. If the British libel laws are allowed to stand, we are facing a new wave of censorship, this time via libel laws, that will allow corporations, trade associations, cults—any organization with pockets deep enough to hire lawyers—to silence their critics.
Singh had the temerity to actually tell the truth: that chiropractic is a bunch of woo with little or no real evidence to support its claims of actually being beneficial to people (beyond the benefits of the placebo effect). For this, he is losing a very large amount of money. For even if he wins, the legal fees will be ruinous. (There probably is some kind of legal defense fund, but still...)
There is some good news, though. The British Chiropractic Association has begun to tell its member practitioners to remove all their bogus claims from their web sites and to stop advertising themselves as medical professionals.
Mark Liberman over at Language Log has a good summary of the Singh story with many relevant links.
(I normally avoid political topics here on wordorigins.org, but this one is important enough that I can’t ignore it. The Singh case and the travesty that are the British libel laws strike at the very heart of how we conduct open and honest discourse in a free society. Besides, it’s non-partisan. As you can probably tell from this post, I have a strong opinion about chiropractic and other alternative “medical” disciplines, but whether or not chiropractic actually works is not the point of this post. I’d be just as much opposed to the silencing of advocates of chiropractic.)
