Worrying scientific illiteracy among our elected representatives
Jun
23
2010
Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, I have just found out (via @bengoldacre and @DrEvanHarris) that one of our esteemed elected representatives, David Tredinnick MP, has tabled 3 Early Day Motions singing the praises of homoeopathy.
Oh dear.
These EDMs are based on 3 published papers in the peer reviewed literature, which claim to show homoeopathy is [...]
Open access publishing
Apr
08
2010
Yesterday’s big health story was the news that 5 portions of fruit and veg per day probably doesn’t have much of an impact on cutting your cancer risk after all. As regular readers of this blog will know, I don’t much like taking such stories at face value, and always prefer to read the original [...]
Breast cancer screening and peer review
Apr
06
2010
I’ve been thinking some more about the paper on breast cancer screening that I blogged about last week.
Just to recap, a paper was published last week claiming that the benefits of breast cancer screening comfortably outweigh the harms. This paper was picked up by the media, who reported its conclusions almost entirely without any critical [...]
Breast cancer screening part 2
Apr
01
2010
I blogged yesterday about how a story about the latest research in breast cancer screening had hit the news, even though the research had not yet been published. I noticed later in the day that there were huge numbers of tweets about the study on Twitter, almost all of which seemed to say that it [...]
Breast cancer screening
Mar
31
2010
When I listened to the news on the radio this morning, the lead story was about a “major new study” that had found that breast cancer screening does more good than harm.
It’s an important question. There are certainly women who are alive today who would not have been alive today if their cancers had not [...]
