badscienceblogs

* sound of snoring *
New Year’s Eves somehow aren’t quite what they used to be once you have small children. Apart from anything else, exhausted parents have a tendency to be pretty much comatose long before the witching hour of midnight. Of course, the now-popular-in-Britain continental-style New Year fireworks do tend to rouse the little [...]

I recieved this graceful response from the office of Kathy Sinnott, MEP just before Christmas.
As Iʼm sure you know, Kathy is against the Lisbon treaty in its current form although she is in favour of the EU albeit a reformed and democratic EU. We were asked by an Irish natural health organisation to back an [...]

Ben Goldacre has done a review of 2008 so I thought I’d take a leaf out of his book (or should that be a byte out of his blog? Whatever. You know what I mean.) and produce my own review of my first full year of serious blogging.
Homeopathy featured prominently and I began the year [...]

Dr Aust and the family Aust live in a decent sized city in the North of England. As cities tend to, this one has a good share of urban poverty.

A few years back we were discussing how to incorporate a ”learning outcome” (yuck) into Dr Aust’s bit of the University’s medical degree that would [...]

Can you get 23 portions of fruit and veg in a single glass of juice: Patrick Holford Ponders, Briefly, Before Suggesting a Product where you can consume an astonishing number at a high cost, without any variety and without any evidence of efficacy.

A frivolous review of my blogging year hidden in a google trends exploration of why hamster-based posts are a good idea.

A bit of year-end tidying In which I own up to providing a contribution for Alom Shaha’s “Why is science important?” project; and confess to some dodgy undergraduate experimental technique.

[bpsdb] Mike Adams came to my attention recently, when I decided to subscribe to a couple of the nuttier alternative medicine websites out there to help provide raw material to feed by blogging habit. He is… let’s say passionate, about the wonders of alternal medicine, and the giant conspiracy that is the medical establishment, and his rants are an endless source of amusement to me.

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The National Health Executive (”the Independent Journal for Senior Health Service Managers) asked for an article about quackery. This is a version of that article with live links.
Download the pdf version.

On May 23 th 2006 a letter was sent to the chief executives of 467 NHS Trusts. It was reported as a front page [...]

The Science Museum’s “mmr files” are generally excellent. As Dr*T and JDC325 have shown they could be better. I’ve written in to point this out. I also outline the evidence provided by Paul Offit in his excellent new book.

[bpsdb] Australian comedian Tim Minchin delivers an inspired piece of poetry about the alternative-medicine-loving girl he once met at a dinner party. Recorded at the London Apollo, apologies for the poor sound quality.

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Tim Minchin’s Storm from 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People.

I’ve seen this question touted around the internet a few times recently, in response to an advert for a car safety campaign that’s currently being shown in the UK. The advert suggests that wearing a seat belt protects your internal organs from impact, by depicting an unrestrained man who dies due to his organs being turned into something you’d use in gravy after smashing up against his rib cage. What people have been asking is, how on Earth does a seatbelt restrain your internal organs? Surely by restraining your rib cage in place it just makes the impact even worse?

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There has been some consternation amongst critics of Autism Speaks at the news that it has been designated a non-governmental organization (NGO) associated with the United Nations Department of Public Information (DPI). Both LeftBrainRightBrain and The New Republic have articles explaining why this is not a good thing for the autistic community and their allies. Autism Speaks [...]

Fleps Orre has let me know that the post docs at DiscoveryMC have another rather good video out.  I’m fairly sure that #2 is taken verbatim from from the infamous ‘athiest’s nightmare’ video.

Christmas: A day when rich Westerners celebrate irrational beliefs while the rest of the planet are subjected to famine, war, disease and torture as a result of them. And with that merry thought, here’s John Lennon:

Holiday best wishes to all Dr Aust’s readers (all four of them).

As a bit of light seasonal fare, I decided on a Christmas song. Others may like to invent their own versions.

On the twelfth day of Christmas,
My true love sent to me

Twelve healers “healing”
Eleven chiros suing
Ten psychic surgeons
Nine worthless [...]

Some internet-bought diet pills, unsurpisingly, have turned out to contain potentially dangerous ingredients. I referred to contaminated supplements in my post on Jeremy Piven (although these related to levels of heavy metals in herbal medicines) and now the Daily Mail have printed a story about products “promoted as ‘natural’ fat busters, claiming to be new [...]

It was Christmas Eve, 1968, and the space race was in full flow. As people travelled to celebrate Christmas with their families on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 - Jim Lovell, William Anders and Frank Borman - circled the moon in their lonely capsule, and became the first human beings to witness the rising of the Earth over the horizon of an alien world. Apollo 8 will be remembered for countless generations to come for those first images of our fragile planet seen from space, but less well remembered is the atheist controversy that the astronauts triggered with a live television broadcast that momentous Christmas Eve, forty years ago today.

Earthrise, seen from Apollo 8, December 24th 1968

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As the year draws towards its end, what has become of one of the big Alt.Reality stories of the year in the UK – the back-crackers Chiropractors vs. Simon Singh libel action?

Well, legal blogger Jack of Kent has been keeping a weather eye on the procedural bubblings-under of this case, in which the [...]

The media seems to be very keen indeed to tell us all about the wonderful properties of red wine. Here is their latest effort. A Doctor who owns a vineyard is apparently producing red wine high in antioxidants and the Independent reports that he “calls them “vascular pipe-cleaners”, saying the antioxidant they contain - [...]

[BPSDB] As we come towards the end of 2008, North Korea’s inimitable national news outlet / propaganda machine brings us news of two amazing new medical breakthroughs that will surely keep the not-at-all brutally oppressed people - the ones that aren’t being slaughtered in concentration camps while the world turns a blind eye - in good health and spirits.

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