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- The same old schtick, Shift. 12/01/2026
- Frying pans and fires? 09/01/2026
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Category Archives: Medicine
Save the NHS
That slogan, together with “Stay Home,” has been dropped from England’s political messaging, but it’s an interesting one to focus on a little in the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 saga.
Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science
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Lockdowns, stable-doors, etc
This is really just recycling the work of others, but since such stuff gets little consistent press coverage, it’s worth pondering on the day when Boris Johnson is set to announce Lockdown v1.02. By all accounts this is more or less the same except for asking the airlines to function under a two-week visitor quarantine rule, and public transport to cover its costs with only 10% of its usual passenger numbers. The new normal, it seems, will have everybody walking and cycling to their old folk’s lunches. Who needs to leave the villages anyway, when the roads are in such disrepair because Road-tax dries up?
Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science
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The curse of care homes
Internationally much has been said in the last week about a wave of COVID-19 in care homes. My Canadian cousin said it showed how dangerous they are, though of course it just shows that they are full of the elderly, the main target group of SARS-CoV-2.
Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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Fie on your experiments!
The title is a (mis)quote I used back in 2011, here. I’m reminded of it by a typical headline in the Telegraph today: “Watch: Will Sweden’s coronavirus gamble pay off?”. But as a spokesman from Sweden said not too long ago, the real gamble – or unevidenced experiment, to be more precise – is being conducted by the other nations, including America and Britain. Sweden has just based its response on universal precedent.
Posted in History, Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science
2 Comments
It’s the same the ‘ole world over…
It’s the poor wot gets the blame. I’m increasingly of the opinion that the “precautionary principle” that’s so prevalent in the current crisis, and in many other recent public applications of science, is a highly dangerous one.
Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science
4 Comments
Lying for Jesus = lying to Jesus
In my former life as a doctor, I was a GP, but ended up specialising in back pain, for a variety of contingent reasons.
Posted in Medicine, Science, Theology
2 Comments
Cancelling society to save lives
A wise retired surgeon said on a radio phone-in yesterday that, just a few years ago, we wouldn’t even have known about COVID-19 until the pandemic was past its peak, and we would probably have concluded that it was just a particularly bad winter for elderly deaths from respiratory disease. Maybe ignorance is bliss.
Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Uncategorized
6 Comments
Facts without theories are cars without engines
… or how streptomycin proves, or disproves, God I’m still interested in showing how God appears to be hidden in the workings of the world more because the prevailing materialist worldview is blind to him than because he is intrinsically invisible. There was a long (and ongoing) discussion on BioLogos recently based on a case-study I gave of a healing in response to prayer. I could have perhaps sorted the materialists (believing as well as unbelieving) from the atheists better by choosing a less “religious” example, such as the kind of phenomena pretty familiar in everyday life, but absolutely verboten in serious discourse, such as premonitions, knowledge of being watched … Continue reading
Posted in Creation, Medicine, Science, Theology
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Let me tell you all about about my disease…
Spoiler alert: this is a change of tack from recent serious philosophical posts. The only real conclusion will be, “What an interesting world we live in”, with a slight flavour of that old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”
Posted in Creation, Medicine, Science
5 Comments
Everyday miracles and methodological naturalism
I’ve written before that miracles are not the most important theological issue I have with methodological naturalism: special providence is, because Scripture describes it as all-pervasive in the affairs of both man and the natural world. God is constantly active, according to the Bible, in managing his household, including by the answering of prayers, and I remain unconvinced that we can properly understand the physical world without somehow accommodating that truth. But nevertheless I want today to consider specifically miracles of healing rather than daily providence, because I’ve been reading about them recently.
Posted in Medicine, Science, Theology
5 Comments