Hilary's Desk

(Anonymous)  Just recently our daughter had her B4 school check. I was told that this was a comprehensive check where I would be able to discuss my concerns. Not that I had any, but we still went. On that day, our daughter wasn’t feeling great at all. She was running a temperature which later that day went up to 39.8 and she also had quite a nasty cough. As we had stopped vaccinating her after her second shot four years ago I wasn’t concerned because I knew that she wouldn’t be receiving any vaccines. In the waiting room we filled in the forms and were soon called into the nurse’s office. On entering I told the nurse that our daughter was quite sick, she just replied “that’s ok”. She talked to her for about 30 seconds, weighed and measured her and told us that she had beautiful teeth. Well… I knew that already.  Read Full Blog

What epidemic? "Numbers have been on the rise since June this year, but they really spiked up in August," said Dr Alison Roberts, of the Ministry of Health' ... Hiding behind the word "epidemic", as a scare tactic, Alison Roberts continues: "We have been expecting an epidemic around now. New Zealand has a whooping cough epidemic every four to five years, and the last one started in 1999." Really?  has Dr Roberts read this from the ESR? which has a graph showing this:    Read Full Blog

Further to the superb piece in today's Otago Daily Times paper written by Otago Medical Schools Professor of Medical Ethics (and neurologist) Professor Grant Gillett, calling into question the ostrich attitudes of medical practitioners, Read Full Blog

 Professor Hemila quite rightly asks sciblogs why they blethered on about mice and cancer instead of actually DOING a literature review on vitamin C and Pneumonia....  Did Sciblogs...  actually put their brains into gear?  Professor Hemila's Finnish website is the BEST place on internet to find early and more recent published medical information on Vitamin C.  I'd like to think that Sciblogs might learn something from this airhead episode, but seriously, ...  I very much doubt it.  Here is Professor Hemila's post, for anyone interested: Read Full Blog

Watching TNVZ SUNDAY’s programme about the oral contraceptive pill, called “Wonder Drug”, my mind kept flitting back to the fair grounds of old. Merry go round horses, ever rising, and lowering and the ceaseless crackly potted music;  metal clown heads, swinging wide open mouths, and the croaky voiced candy floss man intoning his automated speil. This was how I perceived the surreal presentation which characterised Janet McIntyre's uncritical canonization of a British Medical Journal article published on 11 March 2010. She followed the rest of the media who described this study as “titanic”.... forgetting that the unsinkable Titanic,...  sank.   Janet was unblinkingly content to present people who thought that the Pill should be available over-the-counter, with no controls, to anyone of any age.  Caution and monitorring be damned. Let’s get with it, full speed ahead. Titanic, indeed. Which will of course, fix global warming!  Hurray.... Read Full Blog

How much medicine is actually ‘evidence based?” Nineteen years go, in a British Medical article called “Where is the wisdom?” the opening paragraph contained this information:  Read Full Blog

A friend of mine, has not long got out of hospital with her fully breastfed baby. She didn’t actually “want” to be in there but the doctor noted a mild fever, and instantly got “fever phobia” and insisted she go to hospital. ESPECIALLY as the baby wasn’t vaccinated. The mother had been quite content with dealing with it herself, but her mother saw the baby and wet her knickers, insisting that the slightest fever needed to be look at by a doctor! To keep her mother happy, (big mistake) she went to the doctor. She didn’t realise that he too, had conditioned fever phobia. Once she got into hospital, things started to unravel.  Read Full Blog