Ask a Homeopath a Question…

The Guardian has a feature in its “Ethical Living” feature called “You Ask, They Answer”.  This provides a forum in which readers can put questions to firms, people and so on.  This week, the subject was Neal’s Yard Remedies, purveyor of… um… “remedies” to the kind of people who go in for aromatherapy and homeopathy […]

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Engelhardt Lecture, Cambridge: Can Someone do me a Favour?

Tristram Engelhardt is giving a lecture entitled “Moral Pluralism and the Crisis of Secular Bioethics: Why Orthodox Christian Bioethics has the Solution” at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at Wesley House in Cambridge on the 3rd June.  It’s a provoking title – and my guess is that I’d probably disagree with just about every word after “Good evening”.  Notwithstanding this – […]

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Drug Policy Transformed?

I’ve spent the morning looking over the Transform Drug Policy Foundation’s consultation paper, A Comparison of the Cost-Effectiveness of the Prohibition and Regulation of Drugs, which was published today.  The full report is available as a .pdf here (note the filesize – at 445k, it’s HUGE) – or there’s a summary on Transform’s blog, here. […]

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Cancer LOL!

Cancer’s the sort of thing in respect of which a lot of people are very, very earnest indeed.  It’s a pleasure, then, to discover Cancerous Capers, a blog about cancer by someone with cancer, that is light and funny and… well, not earnest: I’m Jamie Ross. I’m twenty, and I was an English student until […]

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Steven Pinker and his Genes

The psychologist gives a brief essay on genetic analysis and the possibility of consumer genomics in the New York Times.  He makes a number of interesting points about such analysis, concerning everything from Brussels sprouts to Jewishness to hair.  But a couple of the points he makes about health markers are worth noting.  First, in […]

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Must read opinion piece on Ouch! (the BBC web-site on disability)

Sir Thomas William Shakespeare, 3rd Baronet of Lakenham a.k.a. Tom Shakespeare the sociologist and disability activist is recounting his experiences of NHS rehabilitation after spinal surgery. This is a must read piece for anyone interested in the irrationality of health care systems and will also be an excellent basis for a discussion with students about […]

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Bioethics Briefing Book

The Hastings Center has produced Birth to Death and Bench to Clinic: The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book for Journalists, Policymakers, and Campaigns It contains 36 overviews of issues in bioethics of high public interest, such as abortion, health care reform, human and sports enhancement, organ transplantation, personalized medicine, medical error, and stem cells. The […]

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