Current Affairs
Homeopathy goes to the Houses of Parliament!
This week the ‘homeopathic question’ was asked by a House of Commons Science & Technology Committee. A mixture of experts and alleged ‘experts’ were apparently ‘grilled’ in order to ascertain whether there is any evidence that homeopathy works. You can see a transcript of the proceedings here: Dr Peter Fisher, chief physician at the Royal [...] Read more »
Of Rats and Junk Food Junkies
It’s official. Junk food is almost as addictive as heroin! And no I’m not being provocative just for the hell of it. (Provocative therapists should never be gratuitously provocative.) No, the men in the white coats with bad news this time are neurobiologists, Dr Paul Johnson and Dr Paul Kenny. The Daily Telegraph reports today [...] Read more »
Childbirth, Studs and Horses for Courses
For many years husbands or partners of women giving birth have been commended for and even expected to be present during the process of labour. It was considered the modern norm even though holistic obstetricians such as Michel Odent warned against this. The results of multiple recent studies in different countries seriously questions the wisdom [...] Read more »
Good News for Men: Fast cars are good for your health!
People love to mock men who buy Porches when they enter middle age. Common ways of belittling these guys is to mutter things like ‘mid-life crisis’ or ‘male menopause’. Well it turns out that fast cars, especially fast red cars really are good for the health of middle-aged men! There is now evidence for this [...] Read more »
Could sperm be the secret elixir of eternal youth? With more and more talk of prolonging life to 100 and beyond, doctors may feel under increasing pressure to be able to deliver what the media promise. Clerics are in trouble too: Why talk eschatologically about life after death when it might be possible to live [...] Read more »
Obesity: The way the West will be lost?
As a physician, I’m aware of the dangers of obesity to health of course. But never in my wildest dreams did I suspect that obesity could be the cause of the decline of Western civilisation? Did I even think that it could be a reason why we could lose the struggle in Afghanistan, a place [...] Read more »
OFFICIAL NEWS: Size Matters – In Chocolate.
In one of the most innovative and enterprising moves to stop the obesity endemic in its tracks ever made by a nanny state, a prescient quango known as the Foods Standards Agency (FSA) has advised/warned chocolate manufacturers to keep the size of their chocolate bars down. Hapless confectioners have been told that chocolate will be [...] Read more »
Give me a doctor partridge plump!
I switched on the radio this morning and immediately heard extremely important news from America. Apparently the President had appointed a very FAT doctor to the most heavyweight medico-political job in the country – surgeon general. Across the media and the blogosphere, self-righteous commentators were self-righteously condemning the Chosen One for sending out the ‘wrong [...] Read more »
£20 to see a doctor? Americans would think they had died and gone to heaven!
The suggestion by a ‘think tank’ that more well-off patients should be charged £20 when they see their NHS GP has been greeted with howls of disapproval here in the UK. I’m informed however that people in America are totally bemused by this news item. For them £20 to see a doctor must seem like [...] Read more »
Brilliant Speech by Prince Charles: Future King shows the limitations of mechanistic and reductionist thinking.
In what was surely the speech of his life, Facing the Future, (The Richard Dimbleby Memorial Lecture broadcast on BBC last night – you can still hear it here, Prince Charles made an impassioned appeal for a new way of viewing the present world crisis with special regard to the environment. Rather than condescendingly lecturing [...] Read more »
