Category Archives: Medicine

How hard can prevention be?

Posted on 11/01/2016 by Jon Garvey

One of the more glorious moments of my not especially glorious medical career was that I was, quite accidentally, instrumental in catalyzing a medical conference on prostate cancer screening in our town. Here’s how it happened.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 10 Comments

Placebo and personhood

Posted on 02/07/2015 by Jon Garvey

The placebo effect always interested me when I was in medical practice. After all, it’s the only treatment that works across the entire spectrum of illness and the standard against which all other drug effects are judged. I caught the repeat of a BBC documentary on it here (unfortunately UK readers will only be able to catch it for a couple of weeks and those in foreign parts not at all. Sorry).

Posted in Medicine, Philosophy, Science | 4 Comments

Against method

Posted on 01/04/2015 by Jon Garvey

A nice story in The Independent: A new (old) cure for MRSA? Revolting recipe from the Dark Ages may be key to defeat infection. The story, as I hope you’ll read, speaks of a “stomach-churning potion…”, a mediaeval eye-salve which nevertheless has been found to treat MRSA. The journalistic aim of the piece is to amaze one that the Neanderthal ignorance of the Dark Ages could accidentally produce something which, though inevitably Dark and Horrible, pluckily rivals the infallible results of Science™.

Posted in History, Medicine, Science | 11 Comments

More on the sociology of science

Posted on 16/02/2015 by Jon Garvey

Last week I wrote about a recent sociology paper that has revealed a significant social grouping in the US, which they call “Post-secularists”. I suggested that the most interesting thing is not so much the nature of the new demographic as the fact that it was only after someone changed the kind of questions being asked that the phenomenon become visible to science. Here’s another instance of how science cannot be separated from sociology.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 8 Comments

How moral absolutes evolve by punc eek

Posted on 18/07/2014 by Jon Garvey

A shift in tack today, prompted by the UK parliament’s current discussions on the euphemistic “assisted suicide” (meaning your doctor is ordered to kill you). I’ve actually lost count of the number of times this has been debated nationally. Certainly I made a submission to the House of Lords Select Committee in 2004, and during a previous incarnation of the bill I discussed the matter with my MP Simon Burns, then the Shadow Minister for Health (and later the real one), whose opinion was that there was no significant support at all for such a move in Parliament.

Posted in Creation, Medicine, Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 6 Comments

Scientism as individual pathology

Posted on 27/01/2014 by Jon Garvey

An interesting snippet caught my ear on the BBC news today. It was about a poetry competition organised by Yale University and London’s UCL for medical and engineering students. The iniator was cardiologist and published poet Prof John Martin, and his motivation for doing so: “Medical students are at risk of becoming ‘intellectually brutalized’…conditioned to focus upon the microscopic at the expense of the holistic.” 

Posted in Creation, Medicine, Science | 4 Comments

In the beginning…

Posted on 11/10/2013 by Jon Garvey

… according to the undirected-evolution TEs, God created chance. Like everything else he sustains it in being moment by moment. But he’s somehow still able to catch himself out with it. It’s a bit like being able to laugh when you tickle yourself, or to pick a random number and then be unable to guess it. It’s not so much that it’s remarkable to be able to do it, but remarkable why he’d bother.

Posted in Creation, Medicine, Science | Leave a comment

Wits and Woo

Posted on 15/09/2013 by Jon Garvey

Blogging has still been rather down my list of priorities recently. This is partly because of the need to clear a huge swathe of brambles and nettles on the Garvey estate – Genesis 3.18 has been much in my mind, though with theological nuance added by my being able to wolf large quantities of sweet blackberries from the former. I passed on the nettle soup. The other reason for not posting much has been the continuing need to work on new material for my band and, associated with it, the realisation that my equipment has needed work to keep it up to par.

Posted in Medicine, Music, Science | Leave a comment

Consensus and sense

Posted on 13/05/2013 by Jon Garvey

It seems people are capable of believing anything. On a current BioLogos thread there was some discussion of the range of cults, therapies and conspiracy theories around – and I confess I rubbed in a little that most of them come from America, the land of progress and science. But my last post was about fundamental disagreement not at the fringes, but at the centre, of established science.

Posted in Creation, Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

It’s all in the mind, maybe

Posted on 12/05/2013 by Jon Garvey

The publication of the US dictionary of psychiatry, the DSM, got into some of the usual blogs I read because of people’s doubts about its perceived medicalisation of “human distress”. Now I see the furore has spread across the Atlantic by a critical report against clinical psychiatry by the Division of Clinical Psychology, representing (the Guardian says) 10,000 practitioners.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 37 Comments