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...
We all like good news. It is human nature. But not all news is good. This fact does not mean we can simply ignore it, tempting as that may be. In fact, it is often the case that we learn more when things go wrong. So, you might think that in medical science findings...
Some weeks it is really hard to know where to even begin. Just when you think that health policy and the actions of governments have reached their lowest, they out do themselves with even more stupidity. Seriously, I do not understand how this happens and whilst as a...
