The British Autogenic Society (BAS) feels so strongly that it has something important to offer the world that it asked the Guardian to take a look. Autogenic therapy - didn't you know? - consists of a series of lessons in how to calm yourself down. Lest that sound a little lightweight, the BAS boasts that "there are at least 3,000 scientific papers around validating the effectiveness of autogenic therapy". Instead of actually citing them, the BAS press release restricts itself to explaining the Greek origin of the word "autogenic" and making an effort to link its pyschiatrist founder to Freud. Scientific respectability, it seems to think, gets handed down personally like a family recipe for chicken soup.

Then there's always the shampoo- advertisement approach: shove in a few pointless long words and technical sounding terms. BAS's website, without context or explanation, mentions impressively that the therapy "has shown an increased balancing of the left and right hemispheres, together with an increase in alpha wave activity and an upward shift into the theta region". If your bullshit sensor hasn't started alarming at this point, you're probably too relaxed to stand the remotest chance of benefiting from Autogenic Therapy (the Society always refers to it in impressive Capitals).

I could find 1,000 articles on Medline (the database containing virtually all the world's published medical research) that mentioned autogenic therapy. Most of the ones I looked at had nothing to do with "validating the effectiveness of Autogenic Therapy". They just happened to mention it. A very few short-lasting, small and poor quality studies showed that this brand of relaxation therapy made people more relaxed than no therapy whatsoever.

Drug companies have to watch what they say. If they make claims for their products that aren't heftily substantiated, or are potentially misleading, there's a stack of laws, regulations and angry consumers ready to sue. Somehow if you're selling something that isn't actually a pill - and the British Autogenic Society has a product and it wants your money for it - you can say more or less what you like. And if it stays that way, we'll have to carry on trusting its poorly substantiated claims, pay our money, and not ask any stressful questions.