UK’s Phased Smoking Ban
UK MPs have just passed the Tobacco and Vapes Bill by a 383 to 67 vote. If the measure becomes law it will ban the sale of tobacco products to anyone born after January 1, 2009. This is not just an age limit – this is a permanent phased ban. If the law passes and stands, anyone born after that date will...
The Ethics of Artificial Brains
We are living in a time of technology advancing so rapidly it is challenging to keep up. This has multiple ramifications, and in the area of biomedical research, there is an important ethical and regulatory dimension. Confronting the ethical considerations of our own technology is nothing new, and fresh debate seems to erupt with every new development – including in-vitro fertilization, transplanting...
What Is Type 3 Diabetes?
I’m always wary of new medical terms that seem to be used and promoted prematurely, when still in the hypothesis phase. It seems like an obvious way to bias any thinking about an alleged phenomenon – just label it as the hypothesis, as if it is already a conclusion. Calling symptoms that may follow a lyme infection “chronic lyme disease” implies something...
Sweetened Drinks and Risk of A-Fib
Yet again the public is being subjected to warnings about the potential health risks of consuming a common food item based upon insufficient evidence. Last month it was oat products, and now it’s sweetened drinks. The study is a prospective cohort study, which means it is observational. The researchers looked at over 200 thousand participants in the UK biobank. At the start...
Measles Outbreaks on the Rise
The world is experiencing increasing outbreaks of a completely preventable disease. What's going wrong?
Parasite Cleanse
Tik Tok is a cesspool of wellness pseudoscience and misinformation. All of social media has the potential to spread misinformation without any filter, but for some reason Tik Tok has become the preferred platform for the most outrageous claims and nonsense. A recent trend on Tik Tok (and within the wellness community generally) is the parasite cleanse. The idea is that many...
Hypervaccination
What would happen if you were vaccinated 217 times against COVID? Let's find out.
What Is Somatic Therapy?
Is modern medicine descending into pseudoscience, or is scientific medicine still going strong? Unfortunately, I think both of these things can happen at the same time. On the one hand, scientific research in medicine is progressing nicely. We are seeing the results of scientific breakthroughs made decades ago, with monoclonal antibody therapies, new therapeutic targets, the beginning of real genetic therapy, brain-machine...
Pesticide in Oat Products – Should You Worry?
You know the rule about headlines - if there is a question in a headline the answer is almost always "no". This article is no exception.
Don’t Blame the Patient
When patients are diagnosed with cancer, or a terminal illness of any kind, they report that there are a couple of near universal reactions by the people around them. First, everyone has advice for them. Everyone thinks they know what caused their illness and what will cure it. The floodgates of free advice and misinformation open. Everyone also wants them to stay...