Dr Jason Rafferty, a Pediatrics Specialist at the disconcertingly named Thundermist Health Center in Woonsocket, Rhode Island in the US, has attracted a one-star review: My child described him as ‘weird’ and ‘creepy’ after he repeatedly grilled her about her gender identity. She said she didn’t identify as anything, so they put ‘genderqueer’ on her […]
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I have written previously about the problems of using puberty blockers in adolescents. In this post I’ll look at what the NHS has to say about gender dyphoria in adults. As I mentioned, the NHS defines gender dysphoria thus: A sense of unease that a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological […]
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I wrote a critique of the so-called New Nicotine Alliance (NNA) in March 2018. What have they been up to lately? NNA Board of Trustees’ Bios Let’s start with the Board of Trustees on their website. Five names are mentioned, but of one, Mary Stamp, we are told nothing except that her bio is to […]
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First, a definition: the word ‘stonewall’ as a verb means to delay or obstruct someone or something by refusing to answer questions or by being evasive. Second, a very brief history lesson: the Stonewall riots were a series of violent confrontations in 1969 between the police and patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar […]
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The Tobacco Advisory Group of the highly esteemed UK Royal College of Physicians has produced a report called Smoking and health 2021 with the intriguing subtitle, A coming of age for tobacco control? It’s an impressive document, written by fifty-one contributors, running to 169 pages, and includes 1,295 references. The authors are all highly qualified […]
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There was a news item on the BBC recently about a trial of cannabis in patients with Parkinson’s disease who also have visual hallucinations. Parkinson’s disease is undoubtedly a brain disorder but are visual hallucinations also abnormal? One such patient was presented, an elderly man who had hallucinations – they might better be called visions […]
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What’s the difference between sex and gender? It’s like a question that’s reputed to be asked of those wishing to qualify in accountancy: what’s the difference between residence and domicile? Residence is where you live; domicile is where you think you live. Thus, sex is whether you’re male or female; gender is how you ‘identify’, […]
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What has Professor David Nutt been up to lately? He’s been appointed Chief Research Officer, no less, to an organisation with the unpronounceable name of Awakn [sic] Life Sciences. And what will his role be? It’s as muddled as the name and repetitively set out thus: Prof. Nutt Will Drive Progression of a Pipeline of […]
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I have just read a book called Allen Carr Easy Way To Quit Vaping. But taking a second glance at the cover one can discern in small print the words ‘with John Dicey’. Did they both write the book? Obviously not, since it was published in 2021 and Allen Carr died in 2006 (ironically, from […]
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Vapid thinking about the vaping problem is shown in a seven-author Research Letter in an online publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association called Network Open (2 April 2021). Six of the authors are Doctors of Philosophy and one has a Master of Science degree. (It’s part of the PATH study about which […]
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Allen Carr—he of Easy Way to Stop Smoking fame—published a book in 2004 called The Easy Way to Control Alcohol. There have been later editions but since he died in 2006 if the text has been rewritten it would have been by someone else. Easy Way to Stop Smoking, in spite of its shortcomings—I describe […]
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There’s something faintly ridiculous about sitting like a lemon for forty-five minutes while expensive vitamin-laced salt water is dripped into a vein in your arm. Yet this is what will happen if you fall for the blandishments of clinics offering to boost your immune system, detoxify your body, and abolish all your unhappiness. These claims, […]
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Wouldn’t you like to strengthen your immune system, detoxify your body from the inside out (!), reduce your stress levels, and be helped to recover and rehydrate quickly after exercise? All these so-called benefits, and a lot more besides, are available—for a nice fat fee—at private clinics springing up in cities in the UK, USA, […]
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How difficult it is to write well! Even something as simple as a parking notice requires thought and care. As for a letter to the editor of a medical journal, one should make sure one has something worth saying before sending it. In today’s post I offer examples of the pitfalls in both kinds of […]
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To help smokers in London stick to a New Year’s resolution to quit smoking, a campaign was announced towards the end of December 2020. It was called, appropriately enough, ‘Stop Smoking London’, though it’s not clear what’s so special about London in this regard as opposed to the rest of the country. Alas, the campaign […]
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Many medical research papers are difficult to understand: they’re written in an opaque style replete with jargon, commonly use non-standard abbreviations, and contain many unnecessary words. Often the sentences are so long that it’s difficult to hold in one’s mind the ideas being presented at the beginning until the end, so there’s a tendency uncritically […]
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Vaping—the activity whereby you repeatedly inhale a nicotine-laced aerosol—is big business. And as one would expect, there’s an online publication which promotes the interests of the vaping industry, the Vaping Post. In a recent edition I came across the headline, ‘Asia-Pacific Groups Create Petition Urging WHO to End Lies About Vaping.’ Well, there’s a challenge! […]
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The WHO, bless their cotton socks, in December 2020 launched a ‘year-long global campaign for World No Tobacco Day 2021 – “Commit to Quit” ’ and as part of this splendid effort we are informed that ‘The campaign will support at least 100 million people as they try to give up tobacco…’. Come now, Dr […]
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What would Freud have thought of this? Keira Bell is a young woman who has bravely revealed her story to the public in the hope of saving others from getting into a similar heart-rending mess. Her problem was what is called gender confusion—but it turned out that that was only on the surface. When she […]
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Since I first wrote about the PATH (Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health) study (https://www.nicotinemonkey.com/up-the-garden-path-to-reduce-tobacco-related-death-and-disease/) how far along have our intrepid researchers got? They now proceed, we are informed, not in steps or stages, but in waves. We’re now at Waves 1 – 3 with a paper released in March 2020 by Saul Shiffman and […]
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Potential progress in the fight against smoking was announced The British Medical Journal (10 September 2020) with the headline, ‘US doctors support bid to ban menthol cigarettes.’ We learn that the American Medical Association together with the African American Tobacco Control Leadership Council and the UK charity Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), have brought […]
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The American Cancer Society, whose answer to the question ‘Why is it so hard to quit tobacco?’ I critiqued earlier this year, poses another question on its website: ‘How do I get through the rough spots after I stop smoking?’ So you can expect to have rough spots. Thanks for the encouragement. Now for the […]
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This was my first impression when I glanced at a headline of the venerable ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Daily News of 19 August 2020. But then I realised I was indulging in wishful thinking. The actual wording was, ‘Pow threatens tobacco firms over litter.’ Pow is the surname of the British Conservative MP […]
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Thanks to the ASH (Action on Smoking and Health) Daily News of 18 June 2020, we are informed of a new tactic to get smokers to quit: fear of Covid. Dr Ruth Sharrock, a specialist in respiratory medicine in the English city of Gateshead, is involved in a new campaign launched by an organisation with […]
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You could be forgiven for thinking that it’s almost impossible to quit tobacco if you look at the website of the cheerfully named American Cancer Society: A subheading raises the ominous question: Why is it so hard to quit tobacco? Well, that’s encouraging for a start. Quitting tobacco is so hard. Now we find out […]
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An earnest young woman, Kylie Lindorff, gazes out at us from a photo in the 2019 Annual Report of the Framework Convention Alliance (FCA). This is made up of the organisations – there are nearly 500 of them – which work on the ‘development, ratification, and implementation’ of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on […]
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The current woeful state of understanding of the smoking problem is shown in the online Daily News (10 March 2020) of the UK charity, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH). According to this, Mr Ciaran Osborne, who as ASH’s director of policy and communications ought to know what he is talking about, apparently thinks that […]
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This idea is set out in an eighty-two page Guidebook commissioned by the Framework Convention Alliance on Tobacco Control (FCATC for short), written by an outfit modestly calling itself Sovereign Border Solutions. The latter name reminds me of a company proclaiming it deals with ‘fluid transfer solutions’ instead of saying they sell hosepipes. Let’s take […]
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One of my smoker patients said to me, ‘The pleasure of smoking may be an illusion, but it’s a very nice illusion!’ It is really? It’s no illusion, and certainly wouldn’t be nice, if you contracted a smoking-induced disease. Yet it’s extraordinary the lengths to which smokers will go to justify their smoking. Here’s what […]
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It is a truth that appears not to be universally acknowledged that in order to stop doing something you have to start doing it first. People are not born smokers. Public health organisations are much exercised to appeal for funding to run stop-smoking clinics. They have a modest success with smokers who seek their help […]
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