A few years ago I felt compelled (out of both a sense of duty and a feeling of nausea) to chide the Independent about its complementary health guru. “Oooh, but he’s very popular,” was the newspaper’s defence. So is pornography, I said. “Oooh no,” they replied, in an outraged tone, “that wouldn’t be ethical,” though I reckoned that big tits on page 3 is a lot more ethical than snake oil salesmen peddling the illusion of knowledge to the …