Category: Health

  • Daily Mail “could cause cancer”, warns expert

    Reading the Daily Mail could cause every conceivable kind of cancer, and massively increases the risk of breast cancer, experts fear. While other newspapers are also dangerous, the middle-market tabloid is particularly dangerous for women. The new study, published in the journal Bigmouth Strikes Again, found a horrifying gap in current research. “We’ve looked at…

  • Smoking bans, again

    Looks like the Scottish Executive isn’t the only group of politicians acting like complete and utter bastards over smoking: the Department of Health is considering a Westminster council request that it should be allowed to create smoking “exclusion zones” outside bars, restaurants, clubs or workplaces so those caught smoking there could be punished. [Via Tim…

  • As unhappy as a man with two dicks

    Diphallus. Eek! An Indian businessman born with two penises wants one of them removed surgically as he wants to marry and lead a normal sexual life, a newspaper report said Saturday. [Reuters, via MetaFilter]

  • Only in America?

    In Arkansas, lawmakers are considering making it a crime for a pregnant woman to take a drag off a cigarette. …”What we’re seeing is a political trend in which the fetuses are coming first, and the rights of women… are coming last,” said Lynn Paltrow, executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women. “I…

  • Scots politicians (warning, includes swearing)

    If it didn’t mean moving away from family and friends, I’d move out of Scotland and go somewhere sunny. Seriously. Mr Eugenides prints a story from the Mail on Sunday: Scotland is set to become the first country in Europe to ban alcohol for under-21s as part of a radical shake-up of licensing laws. The…

  • Science finally catches up with my lifestyle

    Good news part one: For many men, a finding by Oregon researchers sounds too good to be true: an ingredient in beer seems to help prevent prostate cancer, at least in lab experiments. The trouble is you’d theoretically have to drink about 17 beers a day for any potential benefit. And no one’s advising that.…

  • Burns night

    There I was: sitting in the pub, minding my own business, when my leg started to burn. I hadn’t dropped a cigarette on it (smoking ban, remember?), nobody was using a magnifying glass to focus the sun’s rays on it, and it was safely esconced in a pair of jeans. Nevertheless, my leg was burning.…

  • Arse malarkey

    Ah, the things you find when you’re tidying up your hard disk. Back in 2002 I took the mickey out of various daft Web things for The Friday Thing, and while most of the sites I wrote about are long gone, some still survive – including this excellent cure for depression: Web Celeb: Hiroyuki Nishigaki…

  • Doctors attack NHS homeopathy

    There’s a good letter in Today’s Times from doctors who urge NHS trusts to stop paying for alternative medicine. As Tim Worstall puts it: If as and when double blind trials are done to show that “alternative” treatments work, they then stop being alternative and become conventional, evidence based medicine. Which is as it should…

  • Journalists are bad for your health, again

    As I’ve mentioned before, some of the health articles in magazines are wrong at best and dangerous at worst. The current issue of womens’ title R contains a particularly blatant example: under the banner headline “Is Salad Making You Fat?” it spends three pages singing the praises of the Novo Programme. The Novo Programme is…