It is interesting to apply current thinking to decisions taken years ago. Whilst our greater knowledge today can make previous behaviours and thinking seem odd or plain wrong, there are also instances when applying todays approach would have stopped progress. In the...
The much-anticipated House of Representatives committee report on e-cigarettes and personal vaporisers – in other words, vaping – was tabled on March 28, 2018. Very predictably, the majority of MPs came down in favour of the status quo: we don’t know the long-term...
It is little wonder that people are confused by health messages and the latest discovery. As I have observed before when you are certain that what causes cancer this week was a cure for cancer last week, you are not imagining it. We need medical research as it does...
Fairly quietly the effectiveness of this year’s flu vaccine in different ages groups has been released. Previously, Australis’s chief medical officer Professor Brendan Murphy, said this season’s vaccine, selected by the WHO, gave “moderate to good”...
There was a time when we believed the earth was the centre of the universe. To be honest, it was not unreasonable for people in the dark ages to accept this. The technology of the time was limited. When Galileo Galilei proposed that the earth revolved around the sun...
A recent paper in the Medical Journal of Australia (here) provides a nice overview of the biases that lead doctors to overtreat and overinvestigate, but also offers useful solutions that we need to act on. A cognitive bias is where existing beliefs persist in the face...
