Gender Dysphoria: A Societal Mania

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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Transgenderism: Neurosis or Delusion?

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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Make Tobacco Obsolete!

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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Visions, Consciousness, and Brain Diseases

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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The Misfortunes of Keira Bell (continued)

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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Bad Language

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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Opaque Medical Research

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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Urge WHO To End Lies About Vaping!

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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Further up the Garden Path

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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Banning Menthol Cigarettes in the US

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 Successes of the Tobacco Controllers

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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How to Solve the Tobacco Problem

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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