HealthSense (a registered charity) was formed over 30 years ago as the Campaign Against Health Fraud, with the specific intention of combating bogus medical claims, especially ‘cures’ for cancer.  Since that time we have continued to campaign against quackery and nonsense such as homeopathy and we have also run several campaigns against shortcomings in conventional medicine such as the appalling AgeX trial of extended breast cancer screening which was proposed by H.M. Government a few years ago.

For more than 20 years we have run a student prize competition in which we invite students to assess four fictional research proposals and to rank them in order of quality.  They then have to say why they have ranked the protocols in their chosen order.  The entries are assessed by a panel of judges who look for comments on such things as whether the trial has received ethics committee approval, whether there is a suitable control group, whether participants in the trial receive adequate information to provide informed consent, whether there is adequate blinding of participants and trial investigators, etc.  One part of the competition is open to medical and dental students and another is for students of nursing, midwifery, physiotherapy, etc.  In each category we award a first prize of £500 and several runner-up prizes of £100; of course, the student also gets to put their success in the competition on their CV.

There is more information about HealthSense and about the competition on our website .

The 2023 competition has just been launched and the closing date is the 30th of April.