It’s not all fun and games in science, you know. There’s serious stuff too. Like this report from Professor Saeed Thabet in Cairo, “Reality of the G-spot and its relation to female circumcision and vaginal surgery”1: The G-spot is functional reality in 82.3% of women, an anatomical reality in 54.3% and a histological reality in…
Is orange juice a new superfood? Perhaps in some situations it can benefit the body. But the term ‘superfood’ often belies negligible effects in vivo. A paper by Husam Ghanim, Chang Ling Sia, Mannish Upadhyay, Kelly Korzeniewski, Prabhakar Viswanathan, Sanaa Abuaysheh, Priya Mohanty and Paresh Dandona at the State University of New York at Buffalo…
Whenever Richard Lipton releases a new migraine study I always receive it with interest. Partly because his work is pretty cutting edge and and he leads an excellent team, but partly because migraine science can sometimes sound like an encounter of the third kind in a science fiction novel. Migraines are typically defined as one…
A couple of interesting evaluations have made their way past my desk this week, both from Faculty of 1000 Medicine. The first evaluation is of a very interesting paper, originally published in German, which reports results of a questionnaire. The title of the paper is Uncontrolled placebo experimentation in a university hospital, and the results…
The media faces constant criticism from medical specialists and advocacy groups whenever it trumpets the latest new wonder drug to cure any form of cancer. Many spurious claims have over the years been splashed across the UK Daily Mail’s front page, prompting backlash from organisations such as the National Health Service, Cancer Research UK and…
It is well known that the average physician in training will be expected to work more than a few 24 hour shifts during their training. It is also well known that sleep deprivation affects performance (how much? Now that’s the real question, but I digress). I read a paper, evaluated by Faculty of 1000 member…
One of the things I love about scientific knowledge is that it is always in a state of flux. Theories are constantly being amended, rejected or confirmed by the community. In short, there is always room for more research regardless of how well trodden the ground may be. In this vein, I read an interesting…
I read an article recently in a well-known London newspaper which raised an issue I have been thinking about for a long time. What happens when unregulated medicine actually causes more harm than good? I won’t name names (although the original article does), but in a nutshell, a woman was prescribed pills by a practitioner…
A recent evaluation on Faculty of 1000 Biology highlights a novel advance in the fight against adolescent obesity. In what could be considered the first behavioural trial to treat obesity (i.e. not based on a drug treatment), a team led by Anna L Ford at The Bristol Care of Childhood Obesity Clinic found that by retraining the eating habits…
Cancer Causes Cancer! Well, that was the headline we should have gone with. It is of course a hat tip to the Daily Mail, a tabloid publication that is desperate to tell the UK population that just about everything causes cancer. (I found that website by googling ‘cancer causes daily mail’, which is in itself…
