I have been meaning to blog about this article in Stuff on Electroconvulsive Therapy. As with almost every media article I have every seen on the subject, this one is thoroughly biased against ECT. It is as if journalists cannot resist dredging up the checkered and lurid past of ECT and presenting current ECT practice [...]

Talking about the death toll from the February killer quake in Christchurch, Professor Mike Ardagh reckons that there will be a number of others who will have died from the quake who are not yet part of this toll. He is thinking mainly of those who succumbed to complications from their injuries or died as [...]

The MacDoctor sees that the Lancet is up to its old tricks again – publishing controversial comments and papers with poor scientific reasoning behind them. You would have thought that almost single-handedly producing the anti-vaccine movement with a poorly researched, bogus article would have taught them some caution, but apparently not. Not yet published in [...]

The MacDoctor has heard it said that what you do in your private life has no bearing on what you do in public. He clearly recalls that mantra being chanted loudly in the Clinton era but, though the voices have changed, the song remains the same even today. He thinks this is a load of [...]

Stuff reports: The Court of Appeal has upheld a High Court judge’s ruling that unborn children do not have a right to life. I can’t say I am too surprised by this. I have always thought that Right to Life were wasting time and money on a fruitless quest. It was highly unlikely that the [...]

Dr. Michael Kamrava has had his license to practice revoked. Dr. Kamrava, you might recall, is the “doctor” who implanted 12 embryos in Nadia Suleman, who then went on to have octuplets. Ms. Suleman, at the time, had five other children – all conceived by IVF – and was an unemployed single mother. I have [...]

Philosophically, I have a deep disquiet about the tendency of my profession to medicalise health. While I have no qualms at all about vigorously treating risk factors for heart disease such as high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol, I confess to being a little dubious about the advisability of blindly treating the general population with the cocktail of drugs [...]

Aviation safety experts will tell you that the weakest link in any system is the human component. They spend their days devising new ways to remove reliance on humans beings performing error-free tasks. They know that there is no such person. All humans make mistakes. The question is why do we rely on humans to [...]

Dr Shaun Holt is no stranger to controversy, having last year laid into the Chiropractors. Now he, along with a number of other researchers, have written a letter to the New Zealand Medical Journal saying: Practicing homeopathy or endorsing it by referring patients is not consistent with the ethical or regulatory requirements of practising medicine [...]

I am informed by my good friend ScrubOne that the pro-abortion lobby is planning to “hijack” World Health day with a blogswarm (profusion of posts on the same topic) using the topic “Abortion: It’s a Health Issue Not A Crime”. There is a move afoot to counter this with a blogswarm using “Abortion is NOT [...]