Metaphors of illness and healing

BBC Radio 4 broadcast a really interesting programme this week entitled Metaphor for Healing. I don’t think you’ll be able to listen to it (unless it’s still on the BBC iPlayer) but they’ve put up a good page about it on the bbc website. There’s obviously a link between issues of metaphor and those of [...]

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A viral cause for chronic fatigue syndrome?

A study published in Science last week reports finding a high incidence of XMRV in patients with chronic fatigue. XMRV stands for “xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related” virus and is a retrovirus which seems to have jumped species from mice to men.
Dr. Mikovits and researchers from the National Cancer Institute and the Cleveland Clinic reported in [...]

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Placebo…..more complicated than you’d expect!

Oh how little we understand about the so-called “placebo response”. Here’s an interesting study to throw into the mix. Apparently, the actual symptoms experienced by “placebo responders” in clinical trials accurately mimic the drugs being tested. The likely ill-effects reported by those who took a placebo in a trial are likely to be just like [...]

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Causation

Was HPV vaccination responsible for the death of that little girl in England last week? We live in a society where simplistic and judgmental conclusions seem to be both valued and common. In response to that news story you’ll have read some people argue that the vaccine isn’t safe, and others argue that it had [...]

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Vitality + Resilience = Health

There really are many definitions of health, and that’s not a bad thing. Such a complex phenomenon cannot be wholly understood by the use of a sound bite, a mission statement, or a simple formula. However, a simple statement or formula can provoke thought, change a perspective, or shine a light on a poorly understood [...]

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Picasso on the subject of truth

If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme
I saw this quote at an exhibition of the work of Picasso and Cezanne in Aix en Provence. You only need to think about Cezanne’s paintings of Mont St Victoire to understand this. Or think of Picasso’s re-working of the [...]

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Infectious disease

The treatment of infectious diseases is often presented as one of the great success stories of modern medicine. There’s no doubt that antibiotics have the potential to kill many bacteria in life threatening situations and so have saved many lives. Antivirals don’t have as good a success rate as antibiotics (despite the strange current craze [...]

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Questions about the UK swine flu strategy

How accurate are the published figures about swine flu?
Once the decision was taken to skip swabs and diagnose on symptoms only, the figures have likely to have become very unreliable. Is anyone objectively studying the percentage of those who have a swine flu diagnosis from the questionnaire only, who actually have evidence of swine flu [...]

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to see ourselves as others see us

That famous line from Burns’ “To a Louse”…….Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us – lovely sentiment, but just not possible! I was reminded of it as I read two related articles by Emily Pronin recently (published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,Vol. 28 No. 3, March [...]

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Passions and Tempers

I’ve just read Passions and Tempers, by Noga Arikha (ISBN 978-0-06-073116-8)
I expect you’re familiar with the four terms, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic and sanguine. They might not be everyday words any more but they’re certainly still common enough currency for most people to have at least some idea what they mean. They are, of course, the [...]

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