30 March 2026
Last week I was in the pub having a few drinks with a friend, and in the middle of a particularly heavy part of the conversation he mentioned how it's common knowledge that sugar feeds cancer. This statement is a common alt-med claim that comes along with the idea that if you have cancer you can treat it by reducing your sugar intake, starving the cancer cells of energy.
31 March 2025
On March 21st my Facebook feed brought up the following dire warning:
9 January 2023
It was a relatively well known practice in WW2 (and possibly before) that if your torch/flashlight battery was getting a little flat, a few quick touches to a vehicle battery would restore a fair bit of charge. This information became more public knowledge in the UK, post WW2 when times were tough, and a number of articles were published on it. I cannot now find any, but the earliest article I have read was a 1953 one in "Wireless World" by R W Hallows with some designs and an analysis of these simple methods.
3 May 2021
Normally I would be excited to hear that a prominent biologist is in New Zealand, but in this case the biologist in question is Dr Bruce Lipton - a figure who is well known to skeptics.
6 August 2017
Lori Harris from the UK has sold all her belongings to pay for treatment for her mother, Lisa, who has stage 4 ovarian cancer. The Go Fund Me page for the fundraising effort for this treatment, which asks for £200,000, talks of needing money for immunotherapy in Germany, and links to a great article describing how this new therapy has the potential to allow us to treat some cancers in a novel way.
1 May 2015
Sunday 26 April's Life/Style section in the NZ Herald (see Newsfront p6) brings us the latest 'beauty trend' to hit our shores: the snail facial.
1 November 2010
Alison Campbell finds some claims about raw foods hard to swallow.