Category Archives: Medicine

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The teleology that dare not speak its name

Posted on 09/01/2013 by Jon Garvey

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 →

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Mixed messages

Posted on 30/08/2012 by Jon Garvey

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.

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The right to death

Posted on 04/08/2012 by Jon Garvey

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.

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Donald Nicholson and the charts

Posted on 27/07/2012 by Jon Garvey

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.

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Biologists and theodicy

Posted on 19/05/2012 by Jon Garvey

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:

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Easter changed everything

Posted on 06/04/2012 by Jon Garvey

Didn’t it?

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