So why would a retired professor of public health decide to write a protest song, get his kids to help him record it, his wife to help him with the graphics, and take his first plunge into the dangerous world of YouTube? Isn’t this the fellow that usually writes dusty academic works about evidence-based practice? The answer is that the song was indeed an attempt at evidence-based practice, just one more tool in the struggle to prevent a major threat to the people’s health, namely Andrew Lansley’s Health and Social Care Bill. more…

Biology A level classes in the 1970s often involved frogs making the ultimate sacrifice for the benefit of their dissector’s knowledge of what lies beneath the amphibian skin. As far as I remember, it was not however common practice to test the widely-held belief that a frog in a water bath would tolerate a slowly rising temperature and die from heat exposure before attempting to escape. Dedicated scientists have proved that this is not the case. Hot frogs jump. more…