Excellent piece on Bad Science about how ethics committees lead to real deaths of real patients due to delays and status quo effects.
Posts Tagged ‘health’
When Ethics Committees Kill
by Kavan Wolfe
Five Things that Make Gyms a Plague Upon Fitness
by Kavan Wolfe
You would think that a fitness center, of all places, would be exempt from the lethargic malaise that pervades western society. In most cases, you would be mistaken. The modern gym is a plague upon fitness. That’s right, the very place we go to improve our health is practically custom-made to prevent us from exercising [...]
Top 10 Injury Causing Machines in Gyms
by Kavan Wolfe
A typical modern gym houses hundreds of individual pieces of exercise equipment, some of which appear purposefully designed to injure as many trainees as possible. Here are ten of the most dangerous exercise machines. Avoid these, and avoid any so-called personal trainer who recommends them. 1. Smith Machine A smith machine is just a bar [...]
BS Forms of Exercise and their Athletic Alternatives
by Kavan Wolfe
Western society is plagued by obesity and general ill-health for many reasons: the raging incompetence of medical professionals; fitness snake-oil salesmen; belief in a variety of health-related myths; and desperate confusion about nutrition to name a few. Another serious problem is that people are generally confused about the meaning of exercise. Here are five non-exercises [...]
The Farce that is the Body Mass Index
by Kavan Wolfe
I was planning a post for today on why the BMI is bullshit, but Keith Devlin of NPR beat me to it. To summarize their arguments, the BMI is a 200-year-old mathematical hack, created by a man who wasn’t even versed in the anatomical sciences of the day, let alone what we know now. It [...]
Why Healthcare Must Be Public
by Kavan Wolfe
Others have said this before, but it’s worth repeating. The purpose of the healthcare system is to keep people from getting sick in the first place, and, if they do get sick, to make them better as quickly and inexpensively as possible. The purpose of business is to make money.
Top 5 Pastimes we have to Stop Pretending are Fun
by Kavan Wolfe
“What do you wanna do tonight?” “I dunno.” What follows these two fateful lines is inevitably an enumeration of common pastimes, most of which aren’t really fun at all. We just keep doing them because we want to get out of the house, and we don’t know what else to do. We are creatures of [...]
The American Work Ethic: Destroying Families for Decades
by Riley Firth
I recently had a discussion with a conservative acquaintance of mine about the nature of public assistance programs – him arguing that they are inherently evil, while I, of course, argued that they are absolutely necessary if a nation is to consider itself civilized. And of course, the issue that came up is what is [...]
The Crisis of Competence in the Medical Professions
by Kavan Wolfe
A crisis of incompetence has infected the medical professions. I’m not talking about that bullshit the scientologists spew about treating your own diseased kids or that religious nonsense about not taking a life-saving blood transfusion because it will somehow steal your soul. I’m talking about the silo-fication of medical education. Suppose you have a sore [...]
Tony the Tiger loses blog endorsement
by Riley Firth
That’s right, Tony the Tiger, you read that title right. Consider this your notice: I am officially cancelling my endorsement of all Kellogg’s products – not because of a picture your dick friends took, but because you’re an asshole. In case you haven’t heard, Olympic swimmer and possible comic book mutant Michael Phelps recently lost [...]