Administrators define the field

Administrators define the field
A panel of deans and directors from Kansas City educational institutions met at the School of Education Monday evening, affording students interested in college administration careers a chance to discuss the field’s challenges and opportunities.

The conversation was sponsored by UMKC’s Career Services Center and featured four panelists with extensive credentials in higher education administration including: UMKC’s Vice Provost for Academic Programs, Mary Lou Hines-Fritts, William Jewell College’s Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Residence Life, Ernie Stufflebean, Rockhurst University’s Assistant Dean of Students, Sean Grube, and Metropolitan Community College-Penn Valley’s Dean of Administrative Services, Thomas Walker.

LiveScience: Era of Scientific Secrecy Near End
Era of Scientific Secrecy Near End / By Robin Lloyd, LiveScience Senior Editor / posted: 02 September 2008 11:30 am ET

Secrecy and competition to achieve breakthroughs have been part of scientific culture for centuries, but the latest Internet advances are forcing a tortured openness throughout the halls of science and raising questions about how research will be done in the future.

The openness at the technological and cultural heart of the Internet is fast becoming an irreplaceable tool for many scientists, especially biologists, chemists and physicists — allowing them to forgo the long wait to publish in a print journal and instead to blog about early findings and even post their data and lab notes online. The result: Science is moving way faster and more people are part of the dialogue.

[snip]

Open Science

The open science approach forces researchers to grapple with the question of whether they can still get sufficient credit for their ideas, said physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, co-organizer of a conference on the topic set to begin Sept. 8 at the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada.

[BTW: I Will Be Attending This Unique Conference Science in the 21st Century: Science, Society, and Information Technology [http://tinyurl.com/6ll8fb] / Look For Conference-Related Postings on the _Scholarship 2.0_ Blog [http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/] within the next two weeks]

[snip]

Open science is a shorthand for technological tools, many of which are Web-based, that help scientists communicate about their findings. At its most radical, the ethos could be described as “no insider information.” Information available to researchers, as far as possible, is made available to absolutely everyone.

Beyond email, teleconferencing and search engines, there are many examples: blogs where scientists can correspond casually about their work long before it is published in a journal; social networks that are scientist friendly such as Laboratree and Ologeez; GoogleDocs and wikis which make it easy for people to collaborate via the Web on single documents; a site called Connotea that allows scientists to share bookmarks for research papers; sites like Arxiv, where physicists post their “pre-print” research papers before they are published in a print journal; OpenWetWare which allows scientists to post and share new innovations in lab techniques; the Journal of Visualized Experiments, an open-access site where you can see videos of how research teams do their work; GenBank, an online searchable database for DNA sequences; Science Commons, a non-profit project at MIT to make research more efficient via the Web, such as enabling easy online ordering of lab materials referenced in journal articles; virtual conferences; online open-access (and free) journals like Public Library of Science (PLoS); and open-source software that can often be downloaded free off Web sites.

[BTW: Several Of These Innovations Have Been Profiled In My SciTechNet(sm) Blog [http://scitechnet.blogspot.com/] and/or The Scholarship 2.0 Blog [http://scholarship20.blogspot.com/]

The upshot: Science is no longer under lock and key, trickling out as it used to at the discretion of laconic professors and tense PR offices. For some scientists, secrets no longer serve them. But not everyone agrees.

Networked Cyborgs

Just a few decades ago, as a scientist, here is how you did your work: You toiled in obscurity and relative solitude.

[snip]

However, today, more and more scientists, as well as researchers in the humanities, operate like transparent, networked cyborgs. Background research is mostly done online, not in the library. Some data and preliminary research might be posted online via a blog or open notebook. Early write-ups of the work might be announced to the public, or at least discussed online with peers. And these early write-ups might also be posted to an online publication that is not peer-reviewed in the strict sense.

[snip]

“In areas like my own subfields of theoretical physics,” said MIT physicist David Kaiser, “the only constraint [on how rapidly one generates research papers] is, ‘Did you have more coffee that day?’ We aren’t usually held up trying to get an instrument to work, or slogging through complicated data analysis.”Most people think faster is better, but there are other issues.

Is It A Good Thing?

There is “no question” that all efforts to make science more open are positive for the progress of science, says open science proponent and chemist Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who posts his lab notebook online and started a blog in 2005 called UsefulChemistry where he and his colleagues regularly discuss chemistry problems as well as Web 2.0 tools and the technical and philosophical issues they raise.His online notebook and blog definitely make it easier to communicate with colleagues, he said. Such sharing also makes it easier for others to “replicate” scientists’ work — try it themselves and convince themselves that you are right. And this replication issue is one of the principles behind scientific research. Anyone who has written down a recipe for a friend knows that we all tend to spell things out more clearly when sharing them than we would if we were just taking notes for ourselves in our own shorthand.

Open science also has the potential to prevent discrimination in access to information. Arxiv, the site for posting pre-print physics papers, was started in 1991 by Cornell physicist Paul Ginsparg, then at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to help provide equal access to prepublication information to graduate students, postdocs and researchers in developing countries.

[BTW: Paul Ginsparg will be one of several Major Players attending/presenting at The Conference [http://science21stcentury.org/abstracts.html]]

[snip]

And open science benefits the public, Bradley said. He tries to keep his posts fairly accessible (although this is not the case for all open notebooks and open science blogs).

[snip]

“It’s not clear to me that professional scientists or people in academic institutions have a monopoly on good ideas,” he said. “There are very smart people outside of academia, for example hobbyists or people in industry who could contribute, and having more contributors can only help. The same applies to interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.”

[snip]

Drawbacks of Open Science

One of the biggest fears of nearly all researchers is that someone else hears what you’re doing and beats you to publication. That means you wasted a lot of time (and most researchers work extremely long hours, so loss of productivity is especially painful and can also harm one’s chances for getting a job or promotion or funding for the next research project). Once you publicly reveal your thoughts, data or experimental results, some say, you lose control over ownership of that information. This topic is covered by an area of law called intellectual property, as well as patent law, and there can be significant money to be fought over when it comes to patents.

Hossenfelder, the conference organizer, says she knows of several examples in which scientists have had an idea for something, talked about it openly and then somebody else has published the fleshed-out idea first without giving any credit beyond an acknowledgment to the original idea-holder. Acknowledgments don’t advance careers.

However there are solutions to this, she said. For instance, the prominent scientific journal Nature encourages authors to include brief summaries of which author contributed what to a project. Some say that online posts provide a time-stamped record of when an experiment was documented. Those stamps can easily be arbitrarily altered after the fact, but it might also be possible to “lock” posts at a certain date after which they could not be changed without some sign-off permission to break the lock, Hossenfelder said. [snip]

Fear of Losing Peer Review

Another drawback of open science can be that results go public before they should. In science, experimental results are frequently proven wrong by subsequent work. Yet even peer review cannot ensure against this, nor can it prevent outright fraud, as proven by a 2005 case involving a South Korean scientist who claimed to have achieved the first cloning of a human embryo. A later examination of his work showed he had fabricated his results.

[snip]

“The social system of science has become so complicated, unregulated and dispersed in terms of geography and disciplines, so peer review has been elevated to a principle that unifies a fragmented field,” Biagioli said.

[snip]

And today, Arxiv, one of the most frequently cited examples of open science, has no peer review for individual papers, but it has begun to add in some constraints on allowable authors. The site used to allow anyone with email addresses associated with academic institutions to post their papers. Now, authors of research papers who post in Arxiv are vetted before they can post for the first time. In some ways, things are tightening up when it comes to openness in physics, Kaiser said. In any case, the function of print journals, in physics at least, is changing.

“Ease of sharing everything prior to peer review is flourishing, and in my opinion very few physicists are reading journals for information these days,” Kaiser said. “Journals have largely lost their information function.”

[snip]

For The Good Of Truth, Humanity, Economies?

Another argument in favor of open science is sort of a big picture issue for humanity, scientific truth and economies, Neylon said.

“Making things more open leads to more innovation and more economic activity, and so the technology that underlies the Web makes it possible to share in a way that was never really possible before, while at same time it also means that kinds of models and results generated are much more rich,” he said.

This is the open source approach to software development, as opposed to commercial closed source approaches, Neylon said. The internals are protected by developers and lawyers, but the platform is available for the public to build on in very creative ways.

“Science was always about mashing up, taking one result and applying it to your [work] in a different way,” Neylon said. “The question is ‘Can we make that as effective as samples data and analysis as it does for a map and set of addresses for a coffee shop?’ That is the vision.”

[http://www.livescience.com/culture/080902-open-science.html]

Thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder For The HeadsUp !

[http://friendfeed.com/rooms/science21]

Matched.co. uk and Pepperjamnetwork Payment Proofs

Matched.co. uk and Pepperjamnetwork Payment Proofs

Nutritionists and Dietitians

Nutritionists and Dietitians
If anyone had any doubt about the differences between Nutritionists and Dietitians Catherine Collins put them straight on Radio 4 recently - ‘if your urine is too dark or you are thirsty then drink squash and coffee’ she told the Radio 4 listeners

She insinuated her clinics are full of people maimed by incompetent Nutritionists. In our nutritional therapy clinics we regularly see people who feel they have to pay £95 an hour because they have been failed by their NHS GPs and dietitians, left to suffer for up to 20 years with missed obvious clues to their underlying symptom causing conditions.

I guess that’s another difference with dietitian Catherine Collins and a good nutritionist , instead of hyperbolic whinging on the radio that all Doctors and dietitians should get some basic nutrition training or be thrown in jail, qualified Nutritional therapists get on with the job of healing people.

The final difference between Nutritionists and dietitians is the most important one. Patients rarely get ’sent’ to a nutritionist, they don’t have to come, sent by their doctor. Patients choose to come, choose their therapist, choose to pay and choose to follow a nutritionist’s advice. Patients usually arrive at our clinics after a personal recommendation from someone who’s life we have already transformed.

Yes it is a constant thorn in our side too, that there are some truly awful practitioners out there that call themselves nutritionists. Surprisingly we can’t get wait to get regulated (as long as the EU leave us the tools to do the job). However although regulation will weed out some of the Personal Trainers that call themselves nutritionists and a host of other ‘Jack of all trade’ alternative therapists it won’t solve the kind of problems that provoke Collin’s vitriolic attacks. GP’s are heavily regulated, it doesn’t stop them missing things that experienced qualified nutritional therapists regard as blatantly obvious. You can’t know everything - that’s why you have specialists.

It’s great that dietitians are finally regulated and now required to participate in regular professional development but old habits die hard and there are still the odd few that are able to do more harm than good. (Ice cream and custard creams for osteoporosis!!??!!) Frustated by the constraints of dietetics as a therapeutic tool some dietitians have gone on to learn about nutritional therapy and are now some of the most dynamic practitioners out there.

A modicom of common sense maybe useful here. Choose a nutritional therapist who specialises in nutrition, with experience, with insurance, with recognised qualificatons and preferably with a personal recommendation.

Nutritional therapy is performance based. If therapists don’t get people well, patients won’t come back, they won’t tell their friends and they won’t pay the money. Chances are they won’t be in business for very long.

If you want a dietitian make sure you get a good one

Always go to your Doctor first (it’s free!) if they can’t help you give us a call!

Tony Bishop-Weston - Nutritionists London Foods for Life

Nutritionists and Dietitians

Nutritionists and Dietitians
If anyone had any doubt about the differences between Nutritionists and Dietitians Catherine Collins put them straight on Radio 4 recently - ‘if your urine is too dark or you are thirsty then drink squash and coffee’ she told the Radio 4 listeners

She insinuated her clinics are full of people maimed by incompetent Nutritionists. In our nutritional therapy clinics we regularly see people who feel they have to pay £95 an hour because they have been failed by their NHS GPs and dietitians, left to suffer for up to 20 years with missed obvious clues to their underlying symptom causing conditions.

I guess that’s another difference with dietitian Catherine Collins and a good nutritionist , instead of hyperbolic whinging on the radio that all Doctors and dietitians should get some basic nutrition training or be thrown in jail, qualified Nutritional therapists get on with the job of healing people.

The final difference between Nutritionists and dietitians is the most important one. Patients rarely get ’sent’ to a nutritionist, they don’t have to come, sent by their doctor. Patients choose to come, choose their therapist, choose to pay and choose to follow a nutritionist’s advice. Patients usually arrive at our clinics after a personal recommendation from someone who’s life we have already transformed.

Yes it is a constant thorn in our side too, that there are some truly awful practitioners out there that call themselves nutritionists. Surprisingly we can’t get wait to get regulated (as long as the EU leave us the tools to do the job). However although regulation will weed out some of the Personal Trainers that call themselves nutritionists and a host of other ‘Jack of all trade’ alternative therapists it won’t solve the kind of problems that provoke Collin’s vitriolic attacks. GP’s are heavily regulated, it doesn’t stop them missing things that experienced qualified nutritional therapists regard as blatantly obvious. You can’t know everything - that’s why you have specialists.

It’s great that dietitians are finally regulated and now required to participate in regular professional development but old habits die hard and there are still the odd few that are able to do more harm than good. (Ice cream and custard creams for osteoporosis!!??!!) Frustated by the constraints of dietetics as a therapeutic tool some dietitians have gone on to learn about nutritional therapy and are now some of the most dynamic practitioners out there.

A modicom of common sense maybe useful here. Choose a nutritional therapist who specialises in nutrition, with experience, with insurance, with recognised qualificatons and preferably with a personal recommendation.

Nutritional therapy is performance based. If therapists don’t get people well, patients won’t come back, they won’t tell their friends and they won’t pay the money. Chances are they won’t be in business for very long.

If you want a dietitian make sure you get a good one

Always go to your Doctor first (it’s free!) if they can’t help you give us a call!

Tony Bishop-Weston - Nutritionists London Foods for Life

Curling Politics

Market Your Products On EBay: Making Money In Tough Times

Market Your Products On EBay: Making Money In Tough Times
As times get tough more and more businesses are turning to ebay. Whether you’re trying to sell your own inventory, or trying to make big money selling products or services from other manufacturers, ebay is thriving in these uncertain times.

There are a variety of marketing programs to help you succeed on ebay. Here are the most popular:

1) SaleHoo Wholesale/eBay Directory. Stop spinning your wheels and join one of the largest, safest wholesale communities on the internet. Over 50,000 other online sellers, retailers and bargain hunters have discovered the best place to find legitimate, pre-screened wholesalers, drop shippers, liquidators and manufacturers for every type of product imaginable.

2) Build A Niche Store. Succeed as an eBay affiliate. Build A Niche Store (BANS) is a store / website development platform which enables you to create content based sites that generate income through the eBay affiliate programs. Over the past year and a half our “Niche Store” concept has really evolved and BANS has grown into a “proven” product with lots of positive feedback and success stories scattered across the web.

3) Auction Acrobat - eBay Delivery Automation Software. The most viable solution to eBay’s digital product ban. Auction Acrobat is not just a software but an automated sales machine that delivers CD/DVD’s, build a buyer list, and much much more… Now you can make long term residual income on eBay without selling!

4) Make Money On eBay And Your Own Website. Access 500 true drop shippers! This free turnkey ecommerce website is stocked with 200,000 drop ship products, allowing you to sell online without purchasing any inventory of your own. Free hosting and free domain names are available.

5) Content Website Builder. Create a website in 2 easy steps for eBay. Content Website Builder is an easy to use website creation software. You can make websites with hundreds of self-updating dynamic pages with keyword rich text, images, and videos. Integrated eBay, Adsense, Amazon, Yahoo!Answers and YouTube.

6) Auction Classified Cash. This product shows you how to create the perfect eBay classified ads that put more cash into your pocket and more subscribers on your lists. This program is most effective for those new to eBay or looking to improve the profitability of their sales.

7) The Silent Sales Machine Hiding On EBay. This top selling products is approaching 100,000 copies sold. Called one of the “most creative eBay ebooks ever written” by leading affiliate magazines, The Silent Sales Machine Hiding On Ebay is your key to eBay success. The product includes free upgrades (version 6 Releasing Soon).

Money Animal. Don’t let the name fool you. This product just launched and includes an exceptional member network and affiliate support. Learn to work from home by following step-by-step instruction for traffic using Adwords and EBay for online income. Full support is provided. See there sales page!

9) Auction Inspector. Niche software for eBay. If you are struggling to find profitable products to sell on eBay, then the Auction Inspector is for you. They guarantee to find you products that will make you money and that you can actually sell on eBay.

10) Become An eBay PowerSeller In 90 Days. This program has helped 1000s of people gain eBay PowerSeller status and achieve their online goals. Work from the comfort of your own home and earn the income you deserve.

Selling on ebay is a great marketing solution in today’s tough economic times. Learn to sell on eBay and your business will thrive even though the market continues to tumble. Marketing on ebay is easy to do and requires little or no startup costs.

SEO and Web design. Two birds of a feather…

SEO and Web design. Two birds of a feather…

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and web design go hand in hand. One cannot function without the other. Sure, you could have a well designed website on the internet and pay for traffic and advertising. However, no one will find you while doing a search. The benefits of being found on search engines will cut the cost of paid advertising. Yet everyday there are people who spend a great deal of money to have a site designed but wouldn’t think of having it optimized. Why, you ask? Is it the cost of SEO? Would they rather have a site created and avoid optimization to save a few bucks? If that’s the case…what do they plan to do with this site when it is completed? Advertise? SEO is advertising. It is actually one of the cheapest forms of advertising.
Were they planning on a PPC campaign? Buying banners? Page impressions on some click network? You’ve got to be kidding me. Why would anyone waste their money on those subpar options before optimizing their site?

In the long run, you’ll spend more on those “other” methods and receive fewer results than if you optimized and maintained the optimization of your site. Eventually, you’ll wind up needing SEO anyway. Trust me. If you ever wanted to know anything about something, chances are you’ve searched for it first. You didn’t click on a banner or surf into it from some click through network. Now don’t get me wrong, PPC is great if you know what you’re doing. SEO paired off with PPC is a great combination. You may even do some PPC while your SEO is taking place. Any method is better than none at all.
Unfortunately, there are those who do business on the web who think that spending money on web design alone will help attract business. You can have the most interesting storefront the world has ever seen, but if you open up for business in the middle of the desert, it won’t make any difference.

So, what do you do? Hire a designer and then an SEO guru? That would be costly. Hire a web designer that has some knowledge of SEO to optimize your site? Not a good idea. That may hurt more then help. Search engines today are smarter then they were just a few years ago. You don’t want to be penalized for bad SEO methods or worse yet have no real SEO results from contracting a web designer with only marginal experience in optimization.

You need to find a web design company that has an SEO expert on board. SEO is a full time job. You want to make sure the SEO guru is knowledgeable and is up to speed with the latest algorithms. Check their portfolio and ask to see their SEO achievements. You should be able to contact their present or former clients to see if they are happy with their results. Remember, anybody can spot a great looking website, but SEO experience should be researched before you hire anyone. Ask for a proven track record. If you can find the right combination of an SEO guru and experienced web designers in one package, you can save a lot of time and money while taking care of the first two things every business should: getting customers to your site and giving them a reason to stay.

For Affordable SEO, SEM, website design and more visit Joe’s site. To read the latest SEO News visit his blog.Or, read articles on SEO.

Marketing Without Money

Marketing Without Money
Hello All,

Happy Friday. A colleague recently asked me how he can market his small business with little or no money. Sound impossible? Not at all. Keep in mind that marketing isn’t just about advertising and trade shows… it’s about communicating your message - brand, product benefits, etc. - in all you do.

I suggested three things that could be done immediately to being marketing without money.

1. Change your voicemail. Add you company tag line, mention a new product, or let your caller know about a recent offer. This can be done at zero cost and helps to market your company, products and services.

2. Ask for a Referral. The purpose of marketing is to sell. Why not cut to the chase? After each sale, ask for a referral. Your customer usually knows at least one other person who can benefit from your service.

3. Write a letter. Do you have a short list of prospects that you’ve been trying to reach but no marketing materials? No matter…. generate a handwritten not that specifically addresses your prospect’s pain points and how you and your business can alleviate them. For less than 50 cents, you’ve created a powerful marketing piece that can generate significant results.

Marketing doesn’t have to cost a lot, or anything for that matter. Keep it simple and think about those ways in which you’re currently communicating with your prospects and customers. Can you turn these communications into marketing opportunities?

SEO and Web design. Two birds of a feather…

SEO and Web design. Two birds of a feather…

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and web design go hand in hand. One cannot function without the other. Sure, you could have a well designed website on the internet and pay for traffic and advertising. However, no one will find you while doing a search. The benefits of being found on search engines will cut the cost of paid advertising. Yet everyday there are people who spend a great deal of money to have a site designed but wouldn’t think of having it optimized. Why, you ask? Is it the cost of SEO? Would they rather have a site created and avoid optimization to save a few bucks? If that’s the case…what do they plan to do with this site when it is completed? Advertise? SEO is advertising. It is actually one of the cheapest forms of advertising.
Were they planning on a PPC campaign? Buying banners? Page impressions on some click network? You’ve got to be kidding me. Why would anyone waste their money on those subpar options before optimizing their site?

In the long run, you’ll spend more on those “other” methods and receive fewer results than if you optimized and maintained the optimization of your site. Eventually, you’ll wind up needing SEO anyway. Trust me. If you ever wanted to know anything about something, chances are you’ve searched for it first. You didn’t click on a banner or surf into it from some click through network. Now don’t get me wrong, PPC is great if you know what you’re doing. SEO paired off with PPC is a great combination. You may even do some PPC while your SEO is taking place. Any method is better than none at all.
Unfortunately, there are those who do business on the web who think that spending money on web design alone will help attract business. You can have the most interesting storefront the world has ever seen, but if you open up for business in the middle of the desert, it won’t make any difference.

So, what do you do? Hire a designer and then an SEO guru? That would be costly. Hire a web designer that has some knowledge of SEO to optimize your site? Not a good idea. That may hurt more then help. Search engines today are smarter then they were just a few years ago. You don’t want to be penalized for bad SEO methods or worse yet have no real SEO results from contracting a web designer with only marginal experience in optimization.

You need to find a web design company that has an SEO expert on board. SEO is a full time job. You want to make sure the SEO guru is knowledgeable and is up to speed with the latest algorithms. Check their portfolio and ask to see their SEO achievements. You should be able to contact their present or former clients to see if they are happy with their results. Remember, anybody can spot a great looking website, but SEO experience should be researched before you hire anyone. Ask for a proven track record. If you can find the right combination of an SEO guru and experienced web designers in one package, you can save a lot of time and money while taking care of the first two things every business should: getting customers to your site and giving them a reason to stay.

For Affordable SEO, SEM, website design and more visit Joe’s site. To read the latest SEO News visit his blog.Or, read articles on SEO.

Alpha Software ahora en Espanol!

Alpha Software ahora en Espanol!
We’re slicing the limes and passing the tequila here at Alpha Software today in honor of our newest Mexican partner, Serco Commercial. Just kidding, I’m just sitting alone in my office wearing a Sombrero eating a taco. Kidding again, I’m just alone in my office. But I am really excited!

Headquartered in Monterrey, Mexico, with branches throughout the country, Serco has been in the software biz for more than 15 years. They specialize in designing, programming, and implementing desktop and Web-based software solutions tailored to their customers’ needs.

We recently sat down with Luis Rodriguez, software engineer and president of Serco Commercial, to talk about our promising new partnership. Please welcome Luis and his team to the Alpha community, and enjoy this introduction we put together.

Y ahora, una version en espanol. You like that? I’ve been practicing.

All’s calm on the IT front
I recently shared what I thought the financial crisis means for IT. And on a day like today, as the stock market crumbles before our eyes, it’s good to keep that in mind.

Need a little more reassurance? Late last week, Digg Inc., the popular social networking site whose users vote on their favorite news stories, announced a major expansion fueled by a $28.7 million in Series C funding.

Our retirement savings might temporarily be swirling down the toilet, but innovation isn’t a commodity that’s bought and sold. Great ideas will still find great funding. And great developers and apps will still find customers in need.

And the financial markets? They’ll bounce back.

Nutritionists and Dietitians

Nutritionists and Dietitians
If anyone had any doubt about the differences between Nutritionists and Dietitians Catherine Collins put them straight on Radio 4 recently - ‘if your urine is too dark or you are thirsty then drink squash and coffee’ she told the Radio 4 listeners

She insinuated her clinics are full of people maimed by incompetent Nutritionists. In our nutritional therapy clinics we regularly see people who feel they have to pay £95 an hour because they have been failed by their NHS GPs and dietitians, left to suffer for up to 20 years with missed obvious clues to their underlying symptom causing conditions.

I guess that’s another difference with dietitian Catherine Collins and a good nutritionist , instead of hyperbolic whinging on the radio that all Doctors and dietitians should get some basic nutrition training or be thrown in jail, qualified Nutritional therapists get on with the job of healing people.

The final difference between Nutritionists and dietitians is the most important one. Patients rarely get ’sent’ to a nutritionist, they don’t have to come, sent by their doctor. Patients choose to come, choose their therapist, choose to pay and choose to follow a nutritionist’s advice. Patients usually arrive at our clinics after a personal recommendation from someone who’s life we have already transformed.

Yes it is a constant thorn in our side too, that there are some truly awful practitioners out there that call themselves nutritionists. Surprisingly we can’t get wait to get regulated (as long as the EU leave us the tools to do the job). However although regulation will weed out some of the Personal Trainers that call themselves nutritionists and a host of other ‘Jack of all trade’ alternative therapists it won’t solve the kind of problems that provoke Collin’s vitriolic attacks. GP’s are heavily regulated, it doesn’t stop them missing things that experienced qualified nutritional therapists regard as blatantly obvious. You can’t know everything - that’s why you have specialists.

It’s great that dietitians are finally regulated and now required to participate in regular professional development but old habits die hard and there are still the odd few that are able to do more harm than good. (Ice cream and custard creams for osteoporosis!!??!!) Frustated by the constraints of dietetics as a therapeutic tool some dietitians have gone on to learn about nutritional therapy and are now some of the most dynamic practitioners out there.

A modicom of common sense maybe useful here. Choose a nutritional therapist who specialises in nutrition, with experience, with insurance, with recognised qualificatons and preferably with a personal recommendation.

Nutritional therapy is performance based. If therapists don’t get people well, patients won’t come back, they won’t tell their friends and they won’t pay the money. Chances are they won’t be in business for very long.

If you want a dietitian make sure you get a good one

Always go to your Doctor first (it’s free!) if they can’t help you give us a call!

Tony Bishop-Weston - Nutritionists London Foods for Life

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