Guardian newspaper issues Award for outstanding innovatio use of the title 'Dr"

http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1374401,00.html

Award for outstanding innovation in the use of the title 'Doctor'

Again, there was a huge amount of competition for this category: after all, in the absence of evidence, authority is everything, and borrowing it can often be very cost-effective. The "Food Doctor", Ian Marber, caused fierce debate among the judges: could an entrant be eligible if they ran a clinic called the "Food Doctor Clinic", styled themselves as the "Food Doctor" in the media and in their books, marketed a large range of "Food Doctor" products, but didn't actually call themselves "Dr Ian Marber". We thought yes.

Dr Bannock, from Channel 4's Why Weight and glowing pieces in the Daily Mail, the Express, and the Sunday Times, presented another quandary. Although he was still attached to his seven professional memberships, six diplomas, eight certificates, the odd lectureship, and had possibly claimed fraudulently in the past to have a PhD from Brunel, he did at least have the dignity to recant, under persecution from Bad Science, and publicly bin his $850 "PhD" from the Open International University of Complementary Medicine.

As the CVs of the entrants became more and more complex, Dr Ali - "Britain's top integrated health expert" - of Harley Street and the Mail on Sunday, presented a further problem. He is not registered with the British General Medical Council, and although he does state that he went to medical school in Delhi and Moscow, he also states that your skull "contracts and expands a dozen times or so each minute to push the [cerebrospinal] fluid round" your brain, along with various other amusing misunderstandings of basic medicine. He informs us he has "chosen not to apply for registration with the British GMC as the treatment which he personally provides uses massage, diet, yoga and natural supplements and oils which do not need prescription". Cynics might suggest that his decision not to apply for registration has got more to do with the fact that the GMC regulations forbid the endorsement of lucrative commercial products. Like "Dr Ali's special recipe Ayurvedic Joint Oil" (£8.50).

However the prize went, in a surprising result, to Dr Gillian McKeith PhD. It would take an entire page to unpick, in appropriate detail, the complex web of this litigious candidate's unusual CV. For those who are interested, she has now been the subject of six Bad Science columns, debunkings in several national newspapers, and a half-hour ITV documentary on Monday, which cheerfully borrowed all of my jokes, research, and ideas, although I'm not bitter. Suffice to say, regardless of the boring details, anyone who claims that eating chlorophyll will really "oxygenate your blood", and that a seed contains "all of the energy necessary to make a fully grown plant", cannot possibly have a meaningful postgraduate qualification in a biological field. She received a small specimen jar containing the faeces of the judging panel, which will be duly forwarded to her agent if she is willing to submit it for testing.