Current Posts – 18 May 2015

‘Health and safety gone mad’ is a tabloid stock response to absurd rulings such as demanding a pensioner wear protective clothing while gardening or forbidding the audience at a Tom Jones impersonator concert to throw knickers at the stage. But one of the richest seams can be found in health advice handed out in doctors’ surgeries. Often it’s more mad than sensible as the campaigning GP Dr Malcolm Kendrick reveals.

Anyone who works seriously with vitamins and mineral supplements knows how effective they can be when used carefully on people who are deficient. Nutritionists also have to put up with a constant drip of articles claiming that vitamins are both ineffective and can kill you. What’s most infuriating about them is evidence they offer in defence of their claims is so poor. This post shows just how weak the evidence is in the latest attack.

How are we going to beat cancer? We’ve bet the farm – hundreds of millions of pounds – on targeting cancer genes with drugs. But is this a dead end? A radical new book reveals that cancer genes are far more chaotic and random than the theory predicted. But there is another target – the way cancer cells make energy. Cutting off tumours’ energy supply could be a whole new approach.