It would appear that the western black rhino has bitten the dust. Not a western black rhino, but the western black rhino. There’s no more of them. It’s sometimes hard to say exactly what causes an extinction – something like predation might be the effective cause, but if the population of a species is not […]
Category: Thinking Aloud
Winston Churchill and the Spirochaetes
Did you hear the programme about syphilis on Radio 3 on Sunday? If not, you can catch up on it here – and I’d thoroughly recommend doing so: it was superb. One bit in particular caught my attention; it had to do with the use of penicillin to treat the illness during World War II. […]
Cigarettes and Plain Packs: The Ad Campaign
Blogging here has been light for a little while, and probably will be for a little while longer because of Stuff and Things – but something caught my eye in Sunday’s Indy* that struck me as worth comment. It was a full-page advert placed by JTI, which describes itself in the small print as “a leading […]
Are Biomedical Ethics Journals Institutionally Racist?
So there’s this letter published in the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry that moots the idea that the top biomedical ethics journals might be institutionally racist. In it, Subrata Chattopadhyay, Catherine Myser and Raymond De Vries point out that the editorial boards of a good number of journals are dominated by members who are located in the global North – countries officially listed as […]
Torture and Fitness to Practise
I’m running a bit late with this, but the BMJ reported last week that Mohammed Al-Byati had been suspended from the medical register for 12 months for complicity in torture. So far, the decision hasn’t been uploaded to the list of Fitness to Practise decisions, but the outline of the case is available here, on the […]
Gay Conversion “Therapy”: Might the CMF have a point?
Spoiler alert: Almost certainly not. But hear me out for a bit. The Christian Medical Fellowship blog had an article posted yesterday about what it praised as a balanced documentary concerning “sexual orientation change efforts” – gay conversion therapy to you and me – on Radio 4 on Sunday. Actually, it wasn’t a documentary – it was […]
Cochlear Implants and Minority Cultures
A bit more on the cochlear implant thing that I’ve been mentioning off and on for the past couple of months. William Mager posted a link to something a little while ago on why some members of the deaf community are against CIs. This attitude had always puzzled me. Anyway, this, by Christina Hartmann, is the […]
Crime and the Less-Polluted City Solution
People who listen to Today may have heard an article in the prime 8:10 slot on the 9th about the correlation between a drop in the use of leaded petrol, and a drop in violent crime rates. (Mother Jones actually beat the BBC, having published a piece on the same research last week: I meant to post something […]
Cochlear Implant: On!
A few weeks ago, I linked to a post on William Mager’s blog in which he said (a) that he was about to have a cochlear implant fitted, and (b) that he’d write about the experience as it progressed. I don’t know how many readers of this blog followed the link or subscribed; for those […]
We Read the Mail, so You Don’t Have To
There’s a couple of things that’ve been playing on my mind since the post about the Daily Mail‘s coverage of the Liverpool Care Pathway a couple of weeks ago. One of them is the letter that Fiona Godlee, editor of the BMJ, sent to Paul Dacre, editor of the Mail. It points out to him […]