I find it hard to fathom why a woman with six children would require fertility treatment. Yet that is what was given to the woman who gave birth to octuplets this week. She has six children, including two-year-old twins. 
I can’t tell you how appalled I am by the dubious ethics of this situation. Although I [...]

So Darwin was right, man did descend from apes. Only it appears that some did not bother to go the full distance.
Twenty teenagers harassed an ambulance as it attempted to pick up one of their number who had been shot.
Perhaps DoC could find a nice forest for them to swing around in.
However, DoC will have [...]

I’m not altogether in favour of the current national vaccination schedule. I have already blogged about the dubious benefits of the meningococcal vaccine and the cervical cancer vaccine, Gardasil. I fail to see the benefit of vaccinating against the perfectly benign childhood disease, mumps. It is also a mystery to me why boys are immunized against german measles, which [...]

When does your ambulance journey end? Is it when the ambulance arrives at the emergency department, or when you are finally allowed to decant the patient into an ED bed? Clearly, the practice of keeping patients in an ambulance until a bed is available, suggests that ED personnel think it is the latter. A new [...]

The Editor of the Herald rightly calls for the extremely dumb and pointless cap on university funding to be removed. As far as I can tell, this was placed on universities as a reaction to some courses of very dubious value being offered in order to generate funds. As the editorial points out, it makes [...]

Garth George complains today about the apparent lack of action in the National government after a flurry of activity before the summer holidays. The Standard applauds this sentiment but for almost the exact opposite reasons to George. The Standard thinks this is because National does not know what it is doing. George is simply disappointed [...]

Interesting take that Pete Hodgson, Labour’s MP for Dunedin North, has on Tony Ryall possibly firing Otago DHB chairman Richard Thomson over the DHB’s handling of the $17 million IT fraud. He has accused Ryall of “political interference”. This is a bit rich from the party that brought you the Hawkes Bay debacle and the Peter Doone character assassination. Hodgson [...]

The controversy about MidCentral Health gagging it’s doctors continues. Another doctor has confirmed that the DHB has warned them not to speak to the media about it’s ailing oncology service. MidCentral denies this. I believe the doctors.
It is my experience that DHBs do not like their bad news paraded about in the media. In some [...]

And there is that fishy smell of red herrings on display. Tian Wenhua, the disgraced CEO of SanLu, is attempting to blame one of the Fonterra co-directors for misleading her into thinking that there was a safe level of melamine that was acceptable in milk. Fonterra, of course, states that it made it “vividly clear” [...]

I see that medical council is starting consultation over a peer-review system for doctors. I like Ron Paterson’s comment on the idea.
“It is the body that is saying to the New Zealand public ‘yes, this doctor has a warrant of fitness’, and I think at the moment we have a tougher warrant of fitness system [...]