http://www.wddty.com/viewpoint en-gb http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 20 ''Nuns and midgets, that’s the ticket,'' American author John Gregory Dunne was advised as a fledgling journalist by his editor at Time magazine. Dunne took his mentor’s advice, and the oddity - in the form of the flotsam and jetsam of the human race - became his life’s material. http://www.wddty.com/your-metabolic-roots.html http://www.wddty.com/your-metabolic-roots.html Wed, 1 Mar 2006 12:00:00 GMT Health It all began with a fever. So begins The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s extraordinary account of the events of 2003 and 2004, and memoir of her marriage to writer John Gregory Dunne. http://www.wddty.com/trusting-the-process.html http://www.wddty.com/trusting-the-process.html Wed, 1 Feb 2006 12:00:00 GMT Health Every so often, a person with a terminal illness defies the textbook description of his disease and the gloomy prognoses of the experts, and beats it virtually overnight, without the aid of modern medicine. As our main feature notes, most recently, this happened to Andrew Stimpson, a 25-year-old AIDS patient who completely recovered without conventional treatment. http://www.wddty.com/happy-thoughts.html http://www.wddty.com/happy-thoughts.html Sun, 1 Jan 2006 12:00:00 GMT Health The most fearsome bogeyman of our troubled dreams is not a serial murderer or Al Qaeda operative. It is a microbe out of control. Nothing strikes more terror in the heart than the idea of an epidemic. Every confident assertion by the medical great and good that humans - with our Genome Project, our state-of-the-art technology, and our latest new and improved vaccines - have got things under control is reduced to so much hot air. http://www.wddty.com/vital-bogeymen.html http://www.wddty.com/vital-bogeymen.html Thu, 1 Dec 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health The most fearsome bogeyman of our troubled dreams is not a serial murderer or Al Qaeda operative. It is a microbe out of control. Nothing strikes more terror in the heart than the idea of an epidemic. Every confident assertion by the medical great and good that humans - with our Genome Project, our state-of-the-art technology, and our latest new and improved vaccines - have got things under control is reduced to so much hot air. http://www.wddty.com/vital-bogeymen_1.html http://www.wddty.com/vital-bogeymen_1.html Thu, 1 Dec 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health P.T. Barnum would have been proud. The giant conglomerates that process soy have managed to transform a bit of Frankenstein manufacturing into the very epitome of natural and traditional - and, most recently, into a preventative of some of the West’s deadliest diseases. http://www.wddty.com/the-selling-of-frankensoy.html http://www.wddty.com/the-selling-of-frankensoy.html Tue, 1 Nov 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health What, exactly, causes cancer? What mechanism could it be that enables outlaw cells to shut down our immune systems with the flip of a switch and run riot through the house? http://www.wddty.com/finding-the-cancer-soul.html http://www.wddty.com/finding-the-cancer-soul.html Sat, 1 Oct 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health For a long time, I’ve been trying to figure out how exactly aspirin, a simple pain-reliever and anti-inflammatory, was transformed into a miracle preventative for all cardiac and vascular diseases. http://www.wddty.com/seeing-pink-flamingos.html http://www.wddty.com/seeing-pink-flamingos.html Thu, 1 Sep 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health For a long time, I’ve been trying to figure out how exactly aspirin, a simple pain-reliever and anti-inflammatory, was transformed into a miracle preventative for all cardiac and vascular diseases. http://www.wddty.com/seeing-pink-flamingos_1.html http://www.wddty.com/seeing-pink-flamingos_1.html Thu, 1 Sep 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health Like watching a train wreck in slow motion, we who have dreaded this moment for two years, who have jumped up and down in protest over the European Food Supplements Directive (FSD), have now been eyewitness to the full-on crash. Although an Advocate General of the European Union had declared the Food Supplements Directive illegal last April, in a surprise reversal, the European Court upheld its legality on 12 July. As planned, the FSD will become law across Europe at the beginning of August. http://www.wddty.com/sifting-through-the-ashes.html http://www.wddty.com/sifting-through-the-ashes.html Mon, 1 Aug 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health In a list of the most shameful aspects of modern medicine, psychiatry must come at the top of the heap. This is the discipline that has given us - in the name of ‘first-do-no-harm’ hippocratic medicine - electric shock treatment, the lobotomy, forced incarceration, prescription-drug addiction in many guises, false-memory syndrome, the drugging of healthy children and the suppression of spirited women. Just think of T.S. Eliot’s first wife, who spent her life in a mental institution when her only problem, it eventually turned out, was a severe case of premenstrual tension. This, above any other branch of medicine, is the sector that has given us the label. Given that their sphere of influence is a slippery one like the mind, which doesn’t lend itself to hard-and-fast biological examination like a mole, an ear or even an internal organ like the liver, psychiatrists have had to improvise when attempting to determine why someone is staring blankly into space, throwing a toaster out the window or even refusi http://www.wddty.com/name-and-shame.html http://www.wddty.com/name-and-shame.html Fri, 1 Jul 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health Every so often, a person comes along who demonstrates that power and even money often pale against that unstoppable powerhouse envisaged by Margaret Mead: a small group of “thoughtful, committed citizens. The latest such person is Dr Robert Verkerk. Several years ago, he discovered that the European Union was planning to pass the Food Supplements Directive, which would ban many forms of supplements and put a low-dose ceiling on others. Under the guise of ‘consumer safety’, the clear intent of the directive was solely financial: to help pharmaceutical companies produce vitamin products in bulk to sell across Europe and to crush the opposition. Verkerk had no personal interests to protect; he holds a PhD in sustainable farming. Nevertheless, knowing that our modern soils are so depleted of vital nutrients, he simply believed that this planned directive and others like it were disgraceful and wrong. He decided to create the Alliance for Natural Health, and spent many months in Brussels, attempting to http://www.wddty.com/when-quiet-commitment-prevails.html http://www.wddty.com/when-quiet-commitment-prevails.html Wed, 1 Jun 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health Nothing is more frightening that the realisation that modern medicine has not defeated infection. Doctors were convinced they had that one licked; indeed, antibiotics have been medicine’s one real success story. But with increasing outbreaks of MRSA and other ‘superbugs’ in hospitals, we are forced to admit that the bugs have returned, and we have nothing in our conventional arsenal to vanquish them. In 2003, aerobiological researchers at the University of Leeds wondered whether changing the air might affect hospital infection rates. They decided to study the effects of air ionisers on infections caused by Acinetobacter. Besides staphylococci (MRSA) and streptococci bugs, some 1100 cases of hospital-acquired infection every year are due to Acinetobacter - many of them fatal. http://www.wddty.com/out-of-thin-air.html http://www.wddty.com/out-of-thin-air.html Sun, 1 May 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health A little more than a hundred years after Thomas Edison first worked out how a bit of carbonised sewing thread could continue to light up an incandescent bulb, electricity has insinuated itself into every aspect of our daily lives. Edison's eventual development of a cheap, safe and long-lasting lighting system would eventually revolutionise the way we live, delivering us heat, cold or light at the flip of a switch. Fifty years on from Edison, three scientists from Bell Labs developed a transistor and, in the blink of an eye, electricity was miniaturised: a scant few years later, a host of transistors could be baked onto a single silicon chip. http://www.wddty.com/clever-invention.html http://www.wddty.com/clever-invention.html Fri, 1 Apr 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health One of the medical myths we live with is the notion that eye disease arises as an inevitable consequence of growing older. This month’s cover story concerns eyedrops given for glaucoma, a condition that, with cataracts, has been considered as inevitable in the over-50s as the sprouting of grey hairs. However, some fascinating new research underscores how much eye disease results from the stress of particular environmental insults and that age only figures because the damage is cumulative. http://www.wddty.com/seeing-clearly.html http://www.wddty.com/seeing-clearly.html Tue, 1 Mar 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health Hard on the heels of the COX-2 debacle, the US Food and Drug Administration, which somehow seems to have developed a conscience, has recently issued a Public Health Advisory targeting all non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) as worthy of investigation. http://www.wddty.com/vioxx-redux.html http://www.wddty.com/vioxx-redux.html Tue, 1 Feb 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health The thrust of our New Year's issue this month is that the way to health is not a superhighway on which all of us can motor in the same direction, but a dirt road that we have to navigate to and tread along single-file. The incalculable contribution of William Wolcott, like William Kelley and Weston Price before him, was to determine that each of us is metabolically individual. Discovering our own biochemical fingerprint is one of the keys to good health. http://www.wddty.com/looking-on-the-bright-side.html http://www.wddty.com/looking-on-the-bright-side.html Sat, 1 Jan 2005 12:00:00 GMT Health The withdrawal of a drug from the market would hardly seem grounds for Christmas cheer, but it may be simply an indication that the winds of change are finally upon us. http://www.wddty.com/ho-ho-ho-just-say-no.html http://www.wddty.com/ho-ho-ho-just-say-no.html Wed, 1 Dec 2004 12:00:00 GMT Health