Stephen Barrett - Consumer Information

Consumer Information

The Quackwatch website is Barrett's main platform for describing and exposing what he and other contributors consider to be quackery and health fraud. The website is part of Quackwatch, Inc., a nonprofit corporation that aims to "combat health-related frauds, myths, fads, fallacies, and misconduct." Barrett's writing is supplemented with contributions from 150+ scientific, technical, and lay volunteers and includes numerous references to published research articles. Barrett defines quackery as "anything involving overpromotion in the field of health," and reserves the word fraud "only for situations in which deliberate deception is involved."

Barrett has become a "lightning rod" for controversy as a result of his criticisms of alternative medicine theories and practitioners. Barrett says he does not criticize conventional medicine because that would be "way outside scope." He states he does not give equal time to some subjects, and has written on his web site that "Quackery and fraud don't involve legitimate controversy and are not balanced subjects. I don't believe it is helpful to publish 'balanced' articles about unbalanced subjects." Barrett is at the forefront of exposing questionable aspects of chiropractic.

Barrett is a strong supporter of the HONcode and has made efforts to improve compliance with its rules and to expose those who abuse it. In a whole "Special to the Washington Post", extensive coverage of his views on the subject were provided, including his criticisms of many named abusers.

A number of practitioners and supporters of alternative medicine oppose Barrett and Quackwatch for its criticism of alternative medicine. Donna Ladd, a journalist with The Village Voice, says Barrett relies mostly on negative research to criticize alternative medicine, rejecting most positive case studies as unreliable due to methodological flaws. She further writes that Barrett insists that most alternative therapies simply should be disregarded without further research. "A lot of things don't need to be tested they simply don't make any sense," he says, pointing to homeopathy, chiropractic, and acupuncture as examples of alternative treatments with no plausible mechanism of action.

Some sources that mention Stephen Barrett's Quackwatch as a useful source for consumer information include website reviews, government agencies, various journals including an article in The Lancet and some libraries.