Category Archives: Research

A sense of deja vu: the advertising of e-cigarettes

Leave a reply

Glamourising smoking, targeting advertising at young people, using imagery of healthy, sporty smokers – all old, outlawed techniques for the tobacco industry. But the advent of e-cigarettes has lit the embers of this debate again. The BMA has complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about a television advertisement for e-cigarettes, saying it breaches two of the new rules that were announced by the Committees of Advertising Practice in October. They came into effect on  Monday 10 November, the same day the ad was aired for the first time.

The manufacturer, VIP Electronic Cigarette, says this is the first time the act of using an electronic cigarette – or vaping – has been shown on television. It appeared in an ad break in Grantchester, ITV1’s smoke-wreathed drama about a 1950s country vicar who falls over corpses in between lighting cigarettes. Continue reading →

Opening the evidence up to policymakers

Leave a reply

A group of UK academics and researchers is planning to launch a UK Evidence Information Service (EIS) for politicians. It is now asking members of the public to volunteer to interview local elected politicians, providing feedback that will help shape the service. Continue reading →

Bridging the gap between evidence and policy

Leave a reply

Nature recently published an excellent list of 20 things policymakers should understand about interpreting scientific claims, by William J Sutherland, David Spiegelhalter and Mark A Burgman, academics from Cambridge and Melbourne. Included are reminders that “scientists are human” and that “correlation does not imply causation”, as well as practical examples explaining why “regression to the mean can mislead” or how to “beware the base rate fallacy”. Continue reading →

Women of science: worthy of note

Leave a reply

Post banknotegate, the row about the absence of women on Bank of England notes, about which Anna Jenkin has a different take, highlighting the limits of a focus on individuals in
history, I came across some interesting blog posts about women in science. In one, Vanessa Heggie chronicles the extraordinary career of Dr Ida H Hyde, inventor of both the
micro-electrode and an octopus restraint system. Of course. Continue reading →

Dripping with melancholy: depression and historical heroes

In 2009, Alistair Campbell and Nigel Jones wrote A World Without: The Fantastic Five, asking what the world would be like if ‘five giants of history’ had been prevented by prejudice from making their enormous contributions. Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin and Marie Curie: all brilliant, all shapers of the modern world, all lived with significant mental health problems. Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, said “His melancholy dripped from him as he walked”.

But could their illnesses actually have helped them in their work? Continue reading →

Health internet searches: early warning of drug safety issues?

Leave a reply

One common use of the internet is to search for health information. Could an analysis of search terms, and a little detective work, help provide early clues about drug side effects, before more traditional methods such as official reporting systems have kicked in? Continue reading →

AllTrials not SomeTrials: no more invisible evidence

1 Reply

To assess the evidence, you need to know it is there.

Properly conducted clinical trials provide the best evidence for whether drugs work and are safe. But about half have never been published, and trials with positive results – where the drug concerned is shown to be safe and effective – are more likely to be published than negative ones. Patients can be harmed – for example if a treatment found to be harmful in an invisible trial is then given to patients in a new one – or medicines used ineffectively or wastefully, as a result. Researchers can’t plan research properly because they don’t know what has gone before. The problems with this situation have been well documented for years, but things may now be going to change.

Continue reading →

NHS Choices: homeopathy is a ‘treatment’ without evidence

Leave a reply

It’s official: homeopathy is a ‘treatment’ not a treatment.

The homeopathy entry on the NHS Choices website has been rewritten, following the media storm resulting from the revelation that the Department of Health censored accurate information about homeopathy after lobbying by the Prince’s Foundation.

The new entry starts by saying, “Homeopathy is a ‘treatment’ based on the use of highly diluted substances” and is bracingly frank in the evidence section: “There is no evidence for the idea that substances that can induce certain symptoms can also help to treat them. There is no evidence for the idea that diluting and shaking substances in water can turn those substances into medicines”. The evidence appears to have triumphed.

Is the speed with which this entry was rewritten a record?

Smoking bans may reduce risk of preterm births

Leave a reply

Bans on smoking in public places are linked with reductions in preterm births, says a study from Belgium published in the BMJ, which introduced smoke-free bans in three steps. Each time a ban was bought in, the risk of babies being born before 37 weeks fell. There were no downward trends in the period before the bans – and other factors such as ‘flu epidemics did not seem to explain the differences either. So, good news for the public health benefits of smoking bans as premature birth is an important health risk factor.

NHS Choices: based on the evidence, except when it isn’t

1 Reply

Closer examination of the NHS Choices website, following the remarkable revelations about its article on homeopathy and the Department of Health’s insistence that homeopathic feathers are not ruffled, shows up something rather interesting. Continue reading →