Not much time for blogging tonight but I could resist a quick comment on the low-hanging fruit offered by ScrubOne in this comment. The Yahoo “news” item reads:
I feed my son marijuana
While most parents are focussed on warning their children about the dangers of drugs, mum-of-three Mieko Hester-Perez is happily dishing up marijuana to her [...]
If ever there was a good example of why health journalists should seek to gain a proper understanding of the material they are writing about it is this:
Study finds vitamins boost mental health
People with mental illness made “remarkable” improvements by taking a daily dose of nutritional supplements rather than conventional medicines, a trial has found.
The [...]
After all the scare stories about the dangers of cell phones the Herald carries an article today that is a delicious irony.
Mobile phones may improve memory – study
The headline is, of course, the usual media hyperbole. The study they are “interpreting” is one on mice that have been genetically engineered to develop a disease that [...]
As we approach the New Year and my 1000th blog post (which will be sometime in January), allow me a moment of introspection. A number of fellow bloggers have left the blogosphere or drastically reduced their presence. Some have moved to new homes. Some have disappeared without even a farewell (Monkey, where are you?). Some [...]
Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article.
Well, half the headline is ok…
DHBs, union clash over plan to axe 20 doctors
Plans to cut 20 resident doctor positions at Auckland hospitals will increase the pressure on remaining staff and threatens standards of patient care, a unionist says.
But the [...]
An article in yesterday’s Dominion Post posted on Stuff caught my eye. It featured a call to end the practice of “seclusion” – the isolation of a mental health patient in a bare room. What attracted my attention was the utter lack of any sort of attempt at balance or analysis. The article mainly featured [...]
You wouldn’t think it, but one of the hardest things to do in medicine is spot someone going off their chump. The world is full of eccentric people who do extremely odd things but are no more insane or dangerous than you or I (well, me, at any rate!). It is particularly hard to diagnose [...]
Remember the millennium bug? Well it appears the same sort of bug has struck twitter clients the world over in a terrifying holocaust called the Twitpocalypse. Tweets are assigned a unique ID number and, on Friday, the ID number became larger than the twitter clients could handle 2,147,483,649. For those technically minded, this is the [...]
The media and the blogosphere have been alight with the by-election in Mt Albert and the selection of candidates. To this frenzy, I must add a small voice of dissent. The by-election fills me with deep torpor – and I don’t mean the town in the middle of North Island (no matter what the TVNZ [...]
Women who want to physically become men. Men who want to be female, not just gay. These are the true transexuals. Men and women who want to become the other sex, not just emulate them. We consider these people as mentally unwell and have a word for their condition. It is called Gender Identity Disorder.
I [...]
