There is a point where legislation slips from being a useful, if sometimes cumbersome, tool for achieving an orderly, well-functioning society into a meddlesome mess of nanny statism and absurd zealotry. Most of us can sense it easily when it effects us and impedes our lives. It is a little harder to appreciate when the [...]

Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article.  And in the quest for ever more sensational headline, MacDoctor brings you the original spam – food. Tasty foods linked to addiction Sugar and fat produce changes in the brain which resemble the effects of addictive drugs, a Waikato [...]

A researcher into the benefits of resveratrol, the ingredient in red wine that is thought to have cardiovascular benefits, has been found to be falsifying his results. Dr. Dipak Das is alleged to have fabricated, falsified and manipulated data for several minor published studies of the substance. This is a little weird in itself because there [...]

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 [...]

Yesterday, John Roughan’s column in the Herald was about the people of Christchurch and their need to know “the worst they might face”. He draws his story from the reluctance of the GNS to make comments about the possibility of further strong earthquakes even though they knew there was good scientific evidence that there would [...]

Vi♦ta♦myth [vahy-tuh-mith; Brit. also vit-uh-mith] A factoid about vitamins that is wildly inaccurate or untrue Vitamyths come from both ends of the vitamin spectrum. Those who promote the consumption of vast amounts of vitamins are usually happy to make outlandish claims about their efficacy. This is, in some ways, quite understandable, as it is in [...]

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 [...]

This is a graph (nicked from the Herald) plotting the presentations of non-accidental injury (child abuse) at Starship hospital. Normal people would almost certainly view this as good evidence that the problem is getting worse. Unfortunately, self-serving, butt-covering bureaucrats see things differently. Here’s one: “The way I interpret this is that the numbers are good [...]

The Herald tells us today that a third of Kiwis believe we have been visited by aliens. The MacDoctor concedes that the universe is a pretty big place and that there may indeed be aliens out there. However, he is not prepared to believe that aliens have visited the earth unless someone can answer a [...]

I have to say, I much preferred the WHO when they were only a rock and roll band and not a teeming hive of health BureauPrats*. This week, a meeting of the terminally stupid (otherwise known as the International Agency for Research on Cancer – IARC) issued a statement that flies in the face of logic, [...]