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Category Archives: Medicine
The teleology that dare not speak its name
I’m a bit remiss on posting at the moment – partly that’s because of music commitments, and partly, maybe, because I’ve lost the stimulus of BioLogos, which seems to have blocked all my comments since the start of the new year and which hasn’t responded to my querying e-mail. But there you go. There’s a textbook example in the popular press today of how things in biology make perfect sense without evolution, but it gets dragged in gratuitously anyway. I heard it on BBC news, and it’s in all the British dailies, though the original short article was published in Biology Letters as an MSc project. Its public appeal seems … Continue reading
Posted in Creation, Medicine, Science
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Mixed messages
I was listening to national radio on the way home the day before yesterday, when I heard the Vice-Chairman of NICE (the government’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) flying the flag for greater regulation of food manufacturers. He is Prof Simon Capewell, a public health physician from Liverpool University, and he has been appointed to NICE since my retirement. It was good stuff – he knows what he is talking about, and isn’t afraid to challenge powerful industries and governments serving vested interests. We need more like him.
Posted in Medicine, Theology
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The right to death
Alan Fox asked me for my thoughts, as an ex-GP, on the question of euthanasia, assisted suicide and whatever. I can probably do no better than to link to the submission I made to the relevant House of Lords Select Committee in 2004. For completeness here’s a link to the 1982 article I quote there.
Posted in Medicine, Theology
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Donald Nicholson and the charts
The Daily Telegraph carries an obituary today of Donald Nicholson, who lived to the ripe old age of 96. He it was who developed the wallcharts of metabolic pathways to be seen on many a medical student’s wall.
Biologists and theodicy
I finally had time to catch up on the detail of a long thread on Uncommon Descent in which theistic evolution and theistic evolutionists were vivisected at length. At over 180 posts the subject of the original article is probably irrelevant. At one point a discussion about the prevalence of physicists over biologists in theistic evolutionary theory developed, and Ted Davis suggested the following reason as one possibility:
Posted in Creation, Medicine, Science, Theology
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Easter changed everything
Didn’t it?
Posted in Creation, Medicine, Music, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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Prof Terry Hamblin
I was saddened to see the obituary of Prof Terry Hamblin in the paper today, his death occurring at the early age of 68. His name as a haematologist was still in the air at Poole Hospital when I started my medical career there, whence he had recentlydeparted to become the consultant at Bournemouth. Incidentally the Poole haematology department itself was run by Jeremy Lee-Potter, husband of Lynda Lee-Potter the journalist, and the long-haired technician with whom I dealt most, “Rog”, had not only played bass in a band with Robert Fripp of King Crimson fame, but had discovered no less than two rare varieties of haemoglobin.
Threatened worldviews and their effects
Challenges to ones worldview assumptions usually come from exposure to a different culture. My assumptions about the place of talking about ones faith in medical practice received a jolt in the early nineties when I first read Richard Baxter’s 1650 spiritual classic The Saints’ Everlasting Rest.
Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology
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Epigenetics goes mainstream
I was woken from sleep by this this morning. The EU are investing 30m Euros (if the currency doesn’t disintegrate beforehand) in a project to understand human epigenetics. Several references in the piece view this as the successor to the Human Genome Project, with the implication that the latter delivered, in medicine at least, a lot less than was promised, as the clip of Francis Collins demonstrates.
Posted in Creation, Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science
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Science and Conformity
This article gave me that “I told you so” feeling. Before I retired in 2008 I railed against younger doctors for advising parents to use alternate ibuprofen and paracetamol to bring their kids’ fevers down. My grounds were that fever is physiological and useful, not pathological (surprising how many docs haven’t clocked this), that drugs (especially NSAIDs) have side effects, and that no evidence existed that using two antipyretics does more than one. Indeed, at the time there was no actual research to show that using even one to reduce temperature reduced the only significant complication of fever, convulsion, though it’s highly probable they would.