My First Thirteen Months

What do I remember?

I’ve just come back from holiday and it’s dawned on me that I’ve been blogging for just over a year now; so I thought I’d indulge myself with a bit of a retrospective.

What got me going?  I had been lurking, and then commenting on Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science blog.  I had got drawn into the site via his weekly column in the Guardian.  I found that the use of basic scientific principles to expose nonsense in the media really got me thinking about science more generally again.  It also started to remind me how much of the physics I’d studied for my degree I had forgotten as my career had drifted into a narrow branch of engineering. 

Dangerous delusions

[BPSDB] Professor Ernst’s recent exploration of the dubious ethics apparently demonstrated by some homeopaths, pharmacists and their professional bodies in, “peddling so-called ‘vaccines’ without any evidence that they are effective” set me thinking about the recent “Scientific Research in Homeopathy” conference.

What views, if any, did the speakers express on the issue of immunization?  Three of the speakers addressed this subject.  We shall see that one homeopath doesn’t think that vaccines are needed; another thinks that homeopathy can both treat people with malaria and offer effective prophylaxis; and the conference organiser is hiding behind a fig leaf.