The truth is out there. But trawling through what passes for healthcare advice on the Internet, you wouldn't know it. In a week that sees the advent of the International Trepanation Advocacy Group online, you may well feel that you need more of it like you need a hole in the head.

Fact, Fiction and Fraud in Modern Medicine sounds promising. Former Israeli paratrooper turned doctor Thomas A Dorman has provided a vast compendium of personally authored articles on matters medical and scientific to bring to people the services of 'a physician who is squarely on your side'.

Alas the Edinburgh-trained doctor's views are not so much off-centre as off the wall. Though an orthopaedic specialist, he does not hesitate to argue that HIV does not cause AIDS, and quotes approvingly claims that anti-AIDS drugs amount to 'mass murder to contain the size of the population by foul means'.

He goes on to argue that government funding has 'destroyed the integrity of independent research' and that an 'official conspiracy' permeates science in general and medicine in particular, while exposing 'the disparate forces responsible for the obvious ongoing destruction of western civilisation'.

Dr Dorman is, incidentally, a keen advocate of 'alternative medicine'. Though probably not a subscriber to The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, which aims to correct the lack of reliable information about the effectiveness of such remedies by examining the available data 'with scientific rigour'.

Its current issue concludes that oxygenation therapy 'simply does not work as advertised and can actually be extremely dangerous', that claims for magnetic therapy 'are unsupported', and that there is 'no convincing evidence' for therapeutic touch.

Rigorous it may be, but unlike trepanation, you can't say it's boring.