Publish or Perish: a gravy train

The world of medical science is awash with predatory journals, and they seem especially prevalent in the USA. You may have seen my previous interactions with Global Advances in Health and Medicine, a journal which publishes any kind of quackery you care to invent. Then last week, I received this puzzling email from The Gazette of Medical Sciences:

Evidence: Is it whatever you think it is?

Last evening I attended the annual Sense About Science lecture. Perhaps the most important outcome of any lecture is that it made the audience think, and Professor Steve Rayner certainly achieved that. His title, “Science, Technology and Democracy: Dissecting the anatomies of controversy”, promised much, and I was not disappointed. As an anthropologist by training, and having morphed into something of a social scientist, Rayner has become an authority on interactions between science – and scientists – and society, especially politicians.

How hard it is to see the mote in one’s own eye

The ability of people in a position of responsibility to be blind to biasses and canards never ceases to amaze me. On 4th June last the Royal Society of Medicine hosted a symposium on `Integrated Oncology’. This was originally a three-day event, organised jointly by the RSM and the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health, until the latter sank into its own financial Sargasso Sea.

A Plethora of Fallacies

I am indebted to the moderately well known irrational American physician Dr Frank Lipman for drawing together most of the commonly held misconceptions about real medicine. He writes regularly for a generally ethical and altrustic website, which naturally tends to attract a very wide range of views, sadly rather more irrational ones than I would like. Anyway, Lipman gives me the opportunity to address all of his strange claims in one place. Here are the 18 things he says are wrong with modern medicine, with my answers.

How rational will your next MP be?

It really is of little consequence which party forms the next government. Of immensely greater importance are the thinking skills of the members of parliament.