June 3rd, 20190300It has not been a good week for big public health. In a massive backdown, the Australian Heart Foundation has pulled a series of advertisements which suggests that people who don’t get a “heart check” don’t love their families. I did not see the TV version but heard them on the radio.
One has a plaintiff sounding woman claim...
March 25th, 20190415Recently I had the great privilege of being part of the Australian launch of the Global State of Tobacco Harm Reduction (GSTHR). In the 50 years to 2013, smoking rates in Australia fell sharply. In the 1980’s we led the world. However, a sense of “we know best” has seen smoking rates become static since 2013. This is in spite of...
November 19th, 20180633The vaping debate has reached an interesting point. We seem to have moved on from arguing the merits of vaping as being 95% less harmful than smoking. Most of the more recent debates has focussed on funding of charities dedicated to reducing the death and disease toll from smoking and conspiracy theories.
To better understand this...
August 27th, 201801969Recently I made my first sojourn to Europe. This surprised many people given that clearly my family hails from there (on both sides). Aside the history and scenery, it is interesting to see different countries approaches to universal issues. Europe has the reputation for being overly bureaucratic with too many laws, but when it comes to...
August 6th, 201802237Recently I had the honour of giving the Michael Russell Oration (click here to watch) at the Global Forum on Nicotine. This event was all about helping reduce the disease and death toll from smoking. Like many industries, the quit smoking one is ripe for disruption and new technologies are doing this. In most established industries,...
July 23rd, 20181807It was a great honour to be invited to give the Michael Russell Oration at GFN 18. The talk is about communicating tobacco harm reduction to different audiences. Ultimately our aim is to reduce the harm from the combustion of tobacco.
Dr Joe Kosterich is a Medical Doctor, author, speaker,...
June 19th, 201814365It 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 1960’s it became apparent that seatbelts reduced harm from use of...
March 26th, 20180762In the Orwell classic Animal farm there was a binary notion that the animals lived by – “four legs good, two legs bad”. This eventually morphed into “four legs good, two legs better” as the pigs who became the lead animals began walking on two legs like the evil farmer they had replaced.
Binary thinking has a role in areas...
March 5th, 20180926An advance over the last three decades has been evidence-based medicine. No longer do we do what we think is best or, heaven forbid, use clinical judgment. Trials and evidence inform us of best practice. This means everyone always gets ideal care with the system benefiting from cost benefit analysis as part of best practice guidelines...
