The importance of story

The people who come to see us bring us their stories. They hope they tell them well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives. They hope we know how to interpret their stories correctly. We have to remember that what we hear is their story.
Robert Coles in “The Call of Stories”.
Stories have [...]

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Response to another attack on homeopathy

Sunday 13th January, the Sunday Times in Scotland published an attack on homeopathy by one of their journalists, Joan McAlpine. (Sorry I can’t put a link in cos the Sunday Times doesn’t bother to put their Scotland-only articles on their website) The “stimulus” for the article was a written answer to a question in the [...]

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When you look at something from another angle, it completely changes

I just came across this ad. It’s clever.
Watch it right through. Then watch it again.

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Happiness the Confucian way

Psyblog has a good post about happiness from the perspective of Confucian teaching in the light of modern discoveries. I was particularly attracted to the quote by Confucius at the start of the post -
“The one who would be in constant happiness must frequently change.”
I’ve often said that one guaranteed “fact of life” is that [...]

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Healing trees – Cinchona

In an earlier post I wrote about significant trees and said I’d tell a couple of healing tree stories. Here’s one of them.
The Cinchona Tree is famous in the history of medicine. It’s a member of the Rubiaceae family (the same family of plants which coffee comes from). Actually there are 25 different species of [...]

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Think before we act? Turns out we don’t……and that’s the truthiness

How do you think the brain and body work together? A lot of people reckon we figure out what we want to do first, then our brain moves into a kind of second phase and make the body do what we’ve decided we want to do. Seems logical, huh?
Well, it turns out it’s not [...]

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Laughter and smiling…..two great medicines

Dr Tom Bibey’s blog is worth reading. He’s the kind of family doctor I like. He recently posted about laughter and I thought I’d post this just for him and his good wife. Hope you enjoy it!

While you’re here, and if you feel you need something to cheer yourself up try
this [...]

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Burns Day. A Man’s a man, for a’ that

It’s Burns Night. Robert Burns. Another of my local heroes. Well, not  Stirling man, but a Scot.
I think it’s good to have at least one poet as a hero!

Here’s a voice thread of me reading Burns.

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Blogger’s Code of Conduct

Science bloggers meeting at the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference have been debating the need for a code of conduct. You may have come across some pretty offensive and aggressive commenting from science bloggers – I know I have! (See my Commenting Policy bottom right). I think it’s a great idea. O’Reilly and [...]

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Drugs work best when diet and lifestyle is good

This rather technical study has suggested one of the reasons why drugs work better in some people than they do in others is down to the rest of that person’s life.
We’ve known for a long time that most drugs don’t do what they are designed to do for many of the people who take them. [...]

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