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 [...]

A survivor of a hunting “accident” asks the question “Why are people still being shot?“. The MacDoctor can help with this one. He was an ED doctor for 9 years in Southland, literally the “Happy Hunting Ground” of New Zealand. Of the dozens of shooting incidents he has seen, he has yet to see one [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

New Zealand is, apparently, the third fattest nation in the world according to OECD statistics. Yet fighting the obesity “epidemic” is not rocket science. Apart from the very few people who have some serious metabolic disorder, all that causes obesity is taking in more calories than you burn up. Yes, it is rather more complicated [...]

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 [...]

In commenting on the case of Sean Davison - the man who has just been convicted of assisting the suicide of his terminally-ill mother – John Kleinsman (the director of the Nathaniel Centre, the New Zealand Catholic Bioethics Centre) makes the salient point that legalising euthanasia will leave the elderly vulnerable to pressure from family, health professionals [...]

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, [...]