Doctor and activist
29/04/2020
15 November 2019 The battle continues. Here is an article telling how some academics run a little sideline in testifying that smokers understood the risks of tobacco as they smoked themselves to death. Needless to say the academics do not say much about their work. Years ago, Dr Ann Woolcock, founder of the Woolcock Institute […]
26/04/2020
Dr Ben Ewald from the Hunter, who has been working with Doctors for the Environment has been lobbying for a Federal EPA and wrote a submission on the load-based licensing system, which is another name for polluters paying a levy per tonne of pollutant that they produce. There is some charge for each type of […]
26/04/2020
CT Scans increase the risk of cancer by 24% for one scan and 15% for each subsequent scan. This is based on a 2013 Melbourne study published in the British Medical Journal, which looked at people who had had CT scans at least a year before they developed any type of cancer. The method used […]
25/04/2020
Taiwan’s Response to COVID-19- not perfect, but better than anyone else’s. An article in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) of 3/3/20 outlines the effective approach that Taiwan took to the COVID-19 crisis, which is why they have so few cases despite their close proximity to China. It is instructive to look at what […]
25/04/2020
There has been a general acceptance that the COVID19 coronavirus came from the Wuhan Seafood market from some of the wild animals there, with a pangolin, a type of scaly anteater. It was a wet market which means that species are sold there raw. This seemed more plausible than the various conspiracy theories that it […]
25/04/2020
24 March 2020 I am bombarded by posts warning of the dangers of 5G transmission towers. There were similar dire warnings when microwave ovens came out, so I was inclined to dismiss this, but decided that I should read up. This is the result. We need to put all this into its theoretical framework. Electromagnetic […]
22/04/2020
22 April 2020 The COVID-19 crisis highlights the failure of market mechanisms. The lack of good health care in the USA will highlight how private medicine simply does not deliver the health care people need. The same can be said in Australia, though we still had a bit more public system to build on. But […]
02/04/2020
2 April 2020 This is now a current question because of a French trial. When a new disease comes there is a rush to test existing substances to see if they work. When AIDS arrived, many drugs were tested. One drug, acyclovir was found to help. Acyclovir had been developed as an anti-leukaemia drug but […]
25/07/2018
25 July 2017 It is good to have a health record available for a complicated case. It saves doctors a lot of time. When Records started to be computerised in the early 1980s the people at North Shore Hospital where I worked had a working party. I offered to help, but they said that they […]
28/09/2017
28 September 2017 People who see the world from a very narrow perspective generally get it wrong, however clever they are in their own specialty. If the only problem in health were smoking, perhaps vaping could be justified. But the realities of money and marketing is that a whole industry will try to get the […]