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Herbal Placebos

Herbal Placebos

The seven-year period within which member states must implement the EU directive on herbal medicine ends next month. In the UK, the government last week announced that herbalists will now be regulated by the Health Professionals Council (HPC). The HPC is the body that currently supervises a number of health professions including paramedics and physiotherapists. The effect of the decision has been to trigger concerns, particularly from medical professionals, that the move will confer legitimacy on treatments with no proven benefit. But if the government is going to permit herbal medicine, then there are in fact grounds to make it as plausibly medical as possible.

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Civil Partnership, Religion and the BNP

The government is making plans to lift the ban on gay partnership ceremonies in religious buildings. Among the first to apply to perform such ceremonies are expected to be Quakers, and Liberal Jews. However, it is apparently “not clear whether the proposals will suggest that civil ceremonies in religious surroundings could incorporate elements such as hymns or Bible readings”. What justification could there be for preventing the incorporation of such elements?

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In Brief: New Evidence Shows Expectations Influence Pain

In the current issue of Science Translational Medicine, Oxford neuroscientists in Irene Tracy’s lab have published a new study of the placebo effect with dramatic results. In their experiment, test subjects were subjected to pain in the form of heat, while inside an fMRI brain imaging machine, and asked to rate their subjective feelings of… Read More »In Brief: New Evidence Shows Expectations Influence Pain

What is the Big Society?

When a lane is closed off for repairs, are you that driver who ignores all the  “change lane” signs as you zoom past the stationary line of traffic, then cut in at the very last moment? Are you someone who loves to go to the beach or park to enjoy the scenery, eat a picnic, and leave your rubbish strewn behind you? Are you a bank trader taking risks for profit that would be ridiculous – were it not for the fact that your bank is “too big to fail” and the government will have to step in and raid the public treasury to save it if the gamble goes the wrong way? Do you cheat on your taxes? When your country goes to war, are you one of the brave legions of Keyboard Kommandos who tirelessly blogs (and comments on blogs) in support of it, yet wouldn’t even dream of signing up and risking your life to fight for what you believe in? Do you never buy a round of drinks at the pub, or pick up the tab at a restaurant, though you can afford to do so, and enjoy it when others buy  for you?

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Pulp Friction in Tasmania: when is a little dioxin to much dioxin?

When is a little dioxin too much dioxin?

Dioxin is a persistent organic pollutant (POP) that accumulates in the food chain and is highly toxic to living systems. The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants commits signatories to ‘reduce or where feasible, eliminate the production and environmental release’ of dioxin.

So we know that dioxin is not a good thing to be releasing into the environment. And we also know that particular human activities, such as the smelting process that produces certain metals and chlorine bleaching of wood pulp in the paper industry produce dioxin. The question is when is it ‘feasible’ to eliminate the production and environmental release of dioxin?Read More »Pulp Friction in Tasmania: when is a little dioxin to much dioxin?

Intolerance we ought to encourage?

by Anders Sandberg

Government Chief Scientific Adviser John Beddington goes to war against bad science: Selective use of science ‘as bad as racism or homophobia’.  He argued: ‘We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality…We are not—and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this—grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method’. Is he right that we should be intolerant of bad science?

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Should we breed smarter children?

Last Sunday’s Melbourne Herald-Sun published an article reporting Julian Savulescu’s argument for enhancing the intelligence of babies through genetic modification. The argument turns on the social benefits of enhancement. Economic modeling has mounted a powerful case that widespread enhancement of IQ would produce a broad range of benefits. The work builds on previous research demonstrating the effects of reduced exposure to environmental lead. Public health measures aimed at reducing lead exposure caused a small but significant rise in IQ across the population, and brought social benefits including less welfare dependency, less imprisonment, fewer orphaned children, and so on.Read More »Should we breed smarter children?

Affirmative Action in Social Psychology?

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has attracted some controversy recently over his call for affirmative action in social psychology. Haidt polled his colleagues over their political affiliation during a lecture and found that only a tiny minority identifies as conservative. Of course, as he well knows, this isn’t strong evidence for the claim that social psychologists are overwhelmingly ‘liberal’ (in the American sense of that word), but the available data would suggest that this is overwhelmingly likely to be the case. If this is correct, social psychology would be unrepresentative of the general population (given that around 40% of Americans identify as conservatives). Hence Haidt’s call for affirmative action: aim to have at least 10% of the membership of the professional organization be conservative.Read More »Affirmative Action in Social Psychology?

Good Grief?

In book 4 of Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’s son Telemachos arrives in Sparta to quiz Menelaos on whether Odysseus is still alive and if so where he might be. Menelaos reduces everyone (including himself) to tears by telling everyone how sad he is that Odysseus hasn’t made it home. He then says it’s time for them… Read More »Good Grief?

Moralism and Reproduction: Ten Infringements of Liberty

One of the great success stories of British science in the last 30 years was the introduction of In Vitro Fertilisation by Steptoe and Edwards in 1978. They should have won the Nobel Prize. Around 3% of babies are now born after IVF. Testing of and experimentation on early human embryos offers great prospects for improving not only the health of the next generation but how well their lives go. Today, a wide variety of genes which cause or contribute significantly to disease can be tested. Soon, it will be possible to test for all the genes an embryo has and choose embryos which start life with the least prospects of disease and greatest range of talents, abilities and capacities. And IVF has allowed individuals and couples to have children in new ways, expanding procreative liberty. Experimentation on embryos is yielding important knowledge of human development and contributing to the development of regenerative medicine, or stem cell therapies.

Assisted reproduction, including embryo testing, and research involving the embryo has been controlled by the Human Fertlisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). I recently wrote an evaluation of the performance of the HFEA. I argued that the HFEA was set up on the wrong premise: the embryo was said to have a special moral status. Regulation should be set up on the basis of preventing real, tangible and direct harm. Destroying some embryos but not others is not an example of preventing harm. Secondly, it has operated to enforce public morality, imposing moralism not preventing harm. This was kind of objectionable moralism that was employed by Lord Devlin to justify a ban on homosexuality. Thankfully, HLA famously disposed of that bad justification, at least in the case of homosexuality. Moralism, however, has been alive and well in the case of reproduction.Read More »Moralism and Reproduction: Ten Infringements of Liberty