The proposals in the US at the moment seem to be ranging between extension of a non-exclusionary scheme like Medicare to anyone that wants it on the one hand and public health co-operatives on the other. Whether that would be a single co-operative for the US, one for each state or many more remains to [...]

I wonder if Dan Hannan’s posturing over the NHS might end up being the Tories’ undoing. The #welovetheNHS hashtag on Twitter and equivalents on other social media thingummies suggest not only that the NHS, for all its problems, is popular but also that the NHS forms part of our national identity. I know that this [...]

Conservatives for Patients’ Rights (CPRights) have a video up decrying government healthcare. The NHS has its problems; no-one would say that it is perfect. However, it does a pretty damned good job and it does so regardless of someone’s ability to pay. While we don’t see the faces of private healthcare – or those who [...]

I’m sure a lot of people saw the Louis Theroux programme on the problems of meth addiction in Fresno, CA. Following on from that, it seems worthwhile to point out the Montana Meth Project, a very hard-hitting series of advertisements that started as a privately funded initiative, only in Montana, but has since become publicly [...]

A little while ago, Ben ‘Bad Science‘ Goldacre had a little bit of a run-in with anti-vaccination scaremonger Jeni Barnett; I wrote about it here. The Independent carries a series of pictures of medical ephemera of yesteryear on its website in conjunction with the Science Museum’s ‘Brought to Life’ exhibition and website. One of the [...]

Teddy Roosevelt referred to the Presidency of the USA as a ‘bully pulpit‘. He used the former word in the (Famous Five) sense of ‘bully for you’. In other words, it’s a great platform from which to promote an idea or ideology. Any elected representative can, eventually, be removed from office in a reasonably-functioning democracy. [...]

There’s been a lot of stuff about the fact that detox remedies are a load of rubbish, not least from the excellent Ben Goldacre on the Today programme (mp3 courtesy of BadScience.net). If anyone wants to do something useful to ‘detoxify’ by not putting nasty things into their body as part of a new year’s [...]

Without the full facts and familiarity of a situation, it is generally hard to comment on a medical case. However, a quick look at the diagnostic criteria for bipolar disorder and guessing that it takes time for symptoms to show themselves and, for a meaningful diagnosis, you need to be able to talk. This quote, [...]