Fail!

The newspapers are notorious for their abysmal reporting of medical matters, and the daily mail in particular is well known for it's failure to get anything right or in perspective. But the other papers are guilty too, as this article in the Independent today illustrates.
Quoting a Dr Cahill at Harvard it appears that skipping breakfast is potentially lethal. But one of the statements attributed to Dr Cahill caught my attention. "When your body is fasting it goes into a protective drive.................raising levels of insulin."
Now the first part of that statement is just pseudo scientific nonsense of the type used by quacks. The second part however is contrary to everything I was ever taught going right back to my days as a medical student. I'm pretty sure that if, in my final exam, I'd stated that insulin release increases  in response to starvation I'd have got a well deserved fail.
So has Dr Cahill been totally misquoted by the Indy or is he someone so ignorant of physiology that he should be sent back to resit his finals? Either way I think this is yet another newspaper health article that we can safely ignore.

Huh???!

Conspiracy theories were once the bizarre lunatic ramblings of a very few isolated loons. Today, thanks to the internet these people can communicate with each other and so publicise their paranoia so that all of us probably know one or two people who strongly believe implausible notions. I'm not going to go into a list of conspiracy theories  here but you will all be familiar with what I'm talking about.
Recently I came across a new one. I was at a party and heard someone holding forth some of the well established nonsense about "Big Pharma" There was the usual stuff. The pharmaceutical companies are paying doctors to prescribe their drugs, cancer cures are known but hidden so that cancer can be kept going as a cash cow, and then came an assertion, stated with absolute conviction that caused even cynical old DZ jaw to drop to it's anatomical limit. As proof that cancer cures are known but suppressed he said "Have you ever noticed that rich people don't get cancer." Fortunately the young lady he was boring came back with the perfect response. "Really, what about Steve Jobs"

BMA

Is it just me or does anyone else have the same impression of the BMA

WTF

In my last little post I refer to the apparent popularity of my blog in Germany as shown in my stats package. However there are inconsistencies that lead me to believe these thousands of hits are what are known as referrer spam. I am at a loss as to why anyone would want to do this as the object of the exercise is to improve the site rating on google search. There'd be no point in my doing that, as I do not monetise my site, and ads never appear, even in the comments. So who is it? And why? It doesn't bother me enough to do anything about it.

Guten Morgen

Warum ist DZ so beliebt in Deutschland im Moment?

Cut

 

http://www.jesusandmo.net/

Impartiality

I've commented before on the Mohamed cartoons, published in the Danish Jylands Post. No-one can forget the absurd and childishly petulant reaction to these cartoons in the islamic world. What many do forget is that, initially some of the world's most prominent democratic governments, including the UK, tried to suppress these cartoons despite the fact that such freedom of expression is enshrined in law, in article 10 of the human rights act (UK) or the first amendment to the constitution (USA).

Inevitably the Streisand effect came into play and the cartoons became widely available on the internet. Including here, and here.

Another example of this is here. The Catholic religion too has shown similar behaviour, with similar consequences.

Unable to learn from these examples, the Jewish religion has now shown itself unable to accept that they too can be the subject of valid criticism. DZ has made his view on the purposeless mutilation of unconsenting and defenceless babies previously.
This is the cartoon criticising the practice of circumcision, that has them up in arms, demanding that it should be removed from all media.  

They are, as is usual in these cases claiming that the publication is offensive, and constitutes hate speech. I don't think it does, and nor does the Crown Prosecution Service.