We may like to think with websites that allow us to compare prices and get feedback on books, plays, and restaurants that transparency is empowering us, but is the balance of information fair? Do we know more about Google, Tesco, and the government than they know about us? Clearly not, and, argued Roger Taylor and […]
“Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink,” said a mariner, who had returned from a long sea voyage, to a man on his way to wedding ceremony in The Rime of Ancient Mariner. The sea level in Bangladesh is rising as a consequence of all the evil we are doing by polluting Mother Earth […]
The EU debate is a fantastic example of how statistics can tell you what you want to hear, with both sides appearing to use the same facts to come to opposing conclusions. Yet on environmental issues, the story is not so perplexing. Environmental organisations, from the Wildlife Trust to the RSPB to Friends of the […]
Recently I attended the launch of a King’s Fund paper in the rarefied setting of Portcullis House, an annex of the Palace of Westminster. The subject was “Bringing together physical and mental health: A new frontier for integrated care.” A panel that included Presidents of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Psychiatrists, was chaired by a […]
The UK Health Alliance on Climate Change, which brings together major health institutions including the Royal College of General Practitioners, Royal College of Physicians, Faculty of Public Health, and Royal College of Nursing, considers a vote for Britain to “remain” in the EU as important for the protection of our health, environment, and tackling climate […]
Recent research shows that anxiety not only fails to produce good decisions but seems “exquisitely designed” to produce bad ones. In local and global health, where anxiety often thwarts good decision making, efforts to improve how choices are made have focused on collaboration and the use of scientific evidence. These efforts may have some relevance […]
Personalised medicine has become the “holy grail” of modern medical research and has been embraced by policy makers and healthcare providers as a route to more satisfied patients, more effective and efficient health services, potentially even reducing demand through more effective prediction and prevention of disease. But what do today’s health professionals make of this, […]
Does the name Malcolm Tucker ring a bell? The Malcolm Tucker I am referring to is the fictional character from the BBC political satire The Thick of it. Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi) was a government director of communications, skilled in propaganda, more specifically in the art of “spinning” unfavorable information into a more complimentary, […]
Among all the misleading statements and frank untruths with which we’ve been bombarded by both sides in the debate on the forthcoming referendum, one form of argument has not, as far as I can tell, been mentioned—the etymological one. As followers of this blog know, the English judge Sir William Jones observed, in 1786, that […]
NEJM 16 Jun 2016 Vol 374 Data about parasites 2335 I love it when it’s parasite time in the NEJM. Tenaciously clinging to the wall of the large bowel, tapeworms suck up the digested food that North Peruvians have carefully gathered and prepared, just like people who reanalyse or meta-analyse data that others have gone […]