 I'm making this video to call attention to a grave injustice being done, and I need your help to stop it. Simon Singh is a British author and scientist, with a PhD in particle physics. He writes popular books on science such as Fermat's Last Theorem, The Code Book, Big Bang, and Trigger Treatment, Alternative Medicine on Trial. He also writes a column in the British Daily newspaper The Guardian. In 2008, he was sued by the British Chiropractic Association for libel, for an opinion article he wrote that was critical of chiropractic treatment, entitled Beware the Spinal Trap. This is what the BCA are so upset about. The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organization is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession, and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments. The BCA are able to sue a journalist for making this statement in an op-ed, because of the queerness of libel laws in the UK. And therein lies one of the two problems I want to address. 1. England's libel laws need to be reformed. People need to be able to speak out of newspapers, and the case against Singh needs to be thrown out. 2. The tolerance for chiropractic and mainstream medicine is not appropriate. It doesn't deserve to be in the same category with chemotherapy, surgery and antibiotics. It's not evidence-based medicine. I'm going to break up this video into two parts. The first part is about Singh vs BCA and the British libel laws. And the second part is why I think chiropractic is a pseudoscience. Each part has a challenge for you, the viewer, to get involved. We in America tend to look towards England as a progressive nation. More liberal than the US in civil rights and free speech. And yet London is known as the capital of libel lawsuits. Why? The most striking issue is who can sue in British courts, almost anyone. If as much as a single copy of a book, newspaper or magazine is sold in England, even in a second-hand shop, any claimant can sue the author for libel. This has led to a phenomenon known as libel tourism, such as when Kate Hudson, an American actress, went to London to sue the National Enquirer, a US-based, well I'm going to call them a newspaper, for claiming she had a needing disorder. So why would anyone want to choose England instead of say Belgium to go to court? Because the burden is placed mostly on the defendant, and 90% of cases are awarded to the claimant. There is no cap on damages and they tend to be on the extreme end. Costs for a libel trial often exceed millions of pounds. Many times the suit is brought by very large organizations against a single journalist, as in the McLeibel case, where McDonald's sued David Morris and Helen Steele for distributing pamphlets against McDonald's food, business practices, and ecological impact. Simon Singh has the support of the Guardian for his legal defense, but they aren't obligated to provide him financial support. They could just as easily have left him to his own resources. It's worth reflecting on what libel laws exist for. They're to protect people from undue slander, false factual statements that cause harm to a reputation or an enterprise. They protect personal privacy and well-being, and they provide a barrier to prevent companies from constantly battling false claims. One can imagine a beer company alleging in print that their competitor uses harmful industrial waste in the competing product. They would have a legitimate claim to seek redress for lost current and future sales. But when a journalist writing an opinion piece advances the idea that a professional organization is overstating their ability to treat a condition, is it libel? If he had said 5,000 people died last year from chiropractic treatments, and that was not factually true, that would be libel. If he had said that chiropractors do not receive any education, or have lower than average IQs, and it was untrue, that would be libel. What he actually said is, to me, no different than saying that a politician is unqualified to judge a piece of medical legislation because he or she is not a doctor. It's criticism, not damaging misinformation. If we stifle that, or create a special category of protected speech for alternative medicine, debate and a free press will grind to a halt. The crux of the argument in court is over the phrase, it happily promotes bogus treatments. According to the ruling of the most recent appeals process, on February 23rd, happily implies willfulness, and bogus implies a criminally negligent act of deception. Simon has decided to make a defensive justification, that is, he's going to prove that what he said was true in the essentials, so therefore cannot be libelous. He's going to put the whole idea of chiropractic treatment on trial, or at least the claims about treating colic and sleeplessness in children. He has a good shot, as I'll talk about in the next video, there is no good scientific evidence that chiropractic is effective at treating anything other than lower back pain. The challenge will be convincing the court of what constitutes good evidence in a scientific study. It's a bold move, but it forces the chiropractors to either agree to stand by whatever the science shows, or to play lawyer's games with scientific standards, arguing over what constitutes good definitive studies. It may end up revealing the seamy underbelly of chiropractic to the world at large. Now, I'm not afraid of the reasonable application of censorship, for the protection of people's safety and happiness. I've removed comments I felt were dangerous or spam from my videos, but I think that this move by the B.C.A. is a blatant case of suppressing a dissenting opinion by exploitation of a bad law. It reflects very poorly that the B.C.A. chose to take sing to court rather than, say, printing a rebuttal in the Guardian, citing the evidence for the benefits of chiropractic. Rather than engage in a debate, they decided to shut it down, to prevent this journalist from having a voice. I think that's wrong, and I'm not alone. The bigger picture here is the right for advocates of science and reason to speak out against pseudoscience and bogus treatments. If the champions of evidence-based medicine can be silenced by such tactics, then we have sacrificed 300 years of medical advancement. There are things you can do if you feel motivated to help. First, sign an online petition for British libel reform. The link is in the sidebar. And get the word out about Simon Singh on your channel, or your blog, or your Facebook page. You can mirror this video if you like, or make your own. If you're a British citizen, contact your MP and let them know where you stand on the issue of libel laws, chiropractic, and Simon Singh. Thanks for watching.