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Monthly Archives: November 2005

A note to anti-vaccinators

30-Nov-05

If you post long rambling pseudo-scientific comments that get caught in the spam trap, I will not moderate them. This is because:

I have not got time to respond to each ridiculous point raised.
I do not wish to propagate quackery.
I don’t see why I should waste my valuable bandwidth on you.

If you see this as [...]

Manslaughter and doctors

30-Nov-05

Aside from horrific aberrations like Harold Shipman, doctors do not set out to cause deliberate harm to their patients. However, they do make mistakes – as we all do whatever line of work we are in.
Over the past few years in the NHS there has been an attempt to create an open culture [...]

My early Christmas present is not an Ipod

29-Nov-05

Scarpa Freney Boots and Grivel G12 new-matic crampons.
They require no batteries.
They are not MP3 compatible.

The last mountain

29-Nov-05

Snow in Wales!
This weekend I finally climbed all the Welsh 3000 feet mountains. It took me approximately 16 years.
You can do it in sixteen hours if you want, or even just over four hours if you are superfit and mentality deranged. It took me so long because when I climbed the first one I didn’t [...]

Control groups and homeopathy

28-Nov-05

A short and sensible critique of the homeopathy study that media reported on last week:
Your report (Health, November 25) claiming that a recent study provides scientific support for homoeopathic remedies is misleading.
The data presented by Dr David Spence and colleagues merely show that people reporting ailments to homoeopaths, when asked at a later date if [...]

What type of humanist are you?

28-Nov-05

Hard Hat Humanist
“You are an atheist, a rationalist, a believer in the triumph of science and of reason over libido. You can’t stand mumbo jumbo, ritual, spiritual nonsense of any kind, and you refuse to allow for these longings in others.
Astrologers, Scientologists and new–age crystal ball creeps are no different in your view from priests, [...]

Antibiotics and alcohol – and editing too

28-Nov-05

A colleague and I had a letter in the Sunday Independent yesterday:
The statement in last week’s article on pain-killers that ‘the potential danger of drinking alcohol while aspirin, paracetamol or ibuprofen are in the bloodstream is nothing like that caused by drinking while on antibiotics’ is nonsense. Though it is indeed dangerous to drink while [...]

Fat people deserve a NHS too

25-Nov-05

I have a letter in The Times about the decision by three primary care trusts in East Suffolk to no longer to fund hip or knee replacement operations for patients who are obese.
Sir, Theodore Dalrymple (Comment, Nov 24) is incorrect in his assertion that “the fat have many more complications after surgery and worse outcomes [...]

Businessmen who are complicit in gassing

22-Nov-05

Frans van Anraat is currently on trial in the Hague for “complicity in war crimes and genocide for supplying agents for poison gas used by Iraq in the 1980 to 1988 war with Iran and against its Kurdish population, including a 1988 attack on the town of Halabja.”
He is not the first businessman to be [...]