Quack closes Quackometer
Netcetra, webhost to the Andy Lewis’s excellent Quackometer, has folded at the merest whiff of a lawsuit from a notorious “alternative medicine” practitioner.
“Professor” Joseph Chikelue Obi, self-proclaimed “Alternative Medicine Strongman and Royal College of Alternative Medicine (RCAM) Boss”, didn’t like being exposed on Quackometer so he got someone called “Suessenbach”, his legal representative, to scare Netcetera into shutting down the site.
It wasn’t too difficult.
Thankfully, Positive Internet have agreed to take on the website. Not that Obi will be deterred. According to his blog:
if the Quackometer’s current ISP (Positive Internet Ltd) decisively fails to tackle the legitimate concerns of the Alternative Medicine Fraternity , then we will have no other option but exert appropriate fiscal leverage through the commercial invoices of it’s major client base, many of whom are (thankfully) exceedingly well known to us.
For each errant ISP (or Media Outfit), we will use a totally different strategy altogether ; as it is firmly against the law of Natural Justice for any one of them to be greedily making an outrageously easy living out of intensely amplifying our very own indelible pain and suffering.
So , all of those Tuppeny Defamers who are gleefully expecting us to use the very same modus operandi more than once, should please kindly think again.
My fundamentally humble message to all Skeptic Internet Service Providers (out there) today is therefore extremely loud and exceedingly clear : Stop condoning the ruthless harassment of Alternative Medicine Practitioners – or be fully prepared to face the dire financial consequences of your actions!”.
Anyone got some stale breadcrumbs to chuck him? That might keep him occupied for a while.
This isn’t the first time someone has tried to silence Quackometer. As we reported last year, the Society of Homeoquacks successfully cowed his ISP to pull an article critical of them. He’s well shot of Netcetera.
UPDATE: (25th Feb) Quackometer is back.
If it walks like a duck…etc etc
QUACK!!
It’s worth googling him, btw, to follow up his many and peculiar contributions to various online medical forums – he really is a high-level mentalist and then some.
Free speech needs more protection. Really.
Marc, I am not sure if freedom of speech needs more protection – or needs to be more aggressive.. It is a hard question of how to operate in an environment where people are using the freedom of speech to shut others up. I begin to think that maybe people need to get together and say that once a person tries to shut others – they forego their right for free speech.. If I aim a gun/lawsuit to your head saying that you should shut up – do I have the right to continue saying whatever is on my mind..? Or, as the case is with the good dr obi, saying on his site, that if others do as Quackometer – he’ll do the same again.. How can free speech operate in an environment of fear? Should the bully get the same protection as the bullied?
These are hard questions because we want to have any opinion heard, but that aspiration in itself might need to account for a situation when one opinion holder tries to use that very freedom to take it from others..
Ooops, I couldn’t help myself, I’ve just sent him this:
“I was just wondering why someone as important and famous as you doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry?”
Anyone as self obsessed as he is bound to go and try to write his own entry, which will have predictably hilarious results.
This is fucking priceless:
[…] Dr Obi is now facing the threat of legal action from a woman who says she paid him £3,500 after she appealed for help with a mystery sickness.
He wrote to Margaret Lewis, 58, after she placed an advert in the British Medical Journal asking for a doctor who could cure an undiagnosed 20-year illness.
Mrs Lewis claims she was visited twice by Obi but she has not been able to contact him since.
Dr Obi, using the title professor, said his company, Advanced Wellness Interventions, could provide “a multi-disciplinary team of almost seven different practitioners”.
He said he would need a lifetime registration fee of £2,500, and an appraisal fee of £1,000 to cover a three-hour telephone consulting session and an intensive home visit and until this was paid in cash into his bank account he could enter into no further correspondence.
Desperate to be cured, Mrs Lewis, widowed and living alone, says she paid her life savings into Dr Obi’s account as requested, and although he did visit her house she said he made no diagnosis, arranged no tests and has not been in touch since.
She said: “I don’t normally part with money like this, but I was so desperate because I have been ill for so long and no one can do anything.
“He did come down and see me but directed a lot of the questions at my partner and we didn’t seem to get anywhere.
“He was very charming. He kissed my hand on the way out.
“But that was the last I’ve heard from him. We’ve called and called all the numbers, even an international mailbox he gave us because he said he travelled in the tropics a lot.
“He promised me a cure, but now I have no money and will continue to get into more debt paying for carers for an illness no one can seem to diagnose. I am devastated.”
The Chronicle tried to find Dr Obi at the address he gave Mrs Lewis but we found the house, in Aycliffe Crescent, Wrekenton, standing empty, having been repossessed by the building society.
Neighbours told us he told them he had gone on a cruise and would be away for a while but they were keen to speak to him because they say he had borrowed furniture from them and not returned it.
[…]
Ooops, should have included a URL with that last post:
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/todays-evening-chronicle/tm_objectid=14557214&method=full&siteid=50081&headline=shamed-doctor-probe-name_page.html
Hey wait, Wrekenton? That’s over my way. If anyone does manage to track the bastard down, let me know and I’ll pay him a visit.
@4. Free speech is one thing, spurious and falicious claims are another; we should be careful not to confuse the two.
I’ve just published the first two of a series of articles looking into this guy. From companies registered to fake addresses to false IDs to scams and missing money, all run from a small house near Newcastle, he has to be one of the craziest quack stories I’ve ever come across :S More at: http://layscience.net/?q=node/34 and http://layscience.net/?q=node/32 .