Earlier this month we noted that the New Zealand Chiropractors’ Association was alleging defamation against the New Zealand Medical Journal and pharmacologist David Colquhoun of University College London.

Now their colleagues on the other side of the world have also called in the legal teams. The British Chiropractic Association is suing author Simon Singh over an article he wrote in the Guardian.

“It wasn’t a decision taken lightly,” Antoni Jakubowski, a member of the association’s governing council, told the Daily Telegraph. “I know that a lot of thought went into this.”

As the Telegraph points out it is quite unusual for Singh to be sued and the Guardian to be left well alone. The Quackometer blog has excerpts of the Guardian article that led to this action and links to a cache of the full piece.

Singh is currently promoting a book written with Edzard Ernst, professor of complimentary medicine at the UK’s Peninsula Medical School. The Skepchic blog notes:

If you’ve read Simon’s book Trick or Treatment (and you should, it’s brilliant), you’ll know that he’s actually quite fair to the chiropractic industry, admitting where it may have some benefit while cautioning patients against the dangerous practices that have no benefits at all.

Singh told the Telegraph: “I will contest this action vigorously. There is an important issue of freedom of speech at stake. Sadly, I cannot speak about it at this early stage because I have already engaged lawyers.”

David Colquhoun also seems to be generating income for lawyers, as he notes in a recent blog:

This post is written in part as a distraction from a plague of lawyers, in New Zealand, here in the UK, and now in the USA (my movie, Integratative baloney@Yale, has recently been removed from YouTube. More on that coming soon).