Annette Taylor learns it's not enough to have your cake, you have to test it too. The Yuletide has well and truly washed up at our place, much food has been eaten and we are still in recovery mode, ... (520 words)

Selenium - Too Much of a Good Thing? New Zealand soils are deficient in selenium and this can cause serious health problems for animals. A 500kg animal needs about 1mg selenium daily. There is no ... (1259 words)

ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE FOR DUMMIES, by James Dillard and Terra Diane Ziporyn. Hungry Minds, Inc. These books are all subtitled "A Reference for the Rest of Us!". Perhaps I'm prejudiced but as far as ... (783 words)

The Painted Apple Moth spraying programme in the western suburbs of Auckland has generated considerable controversy. An alternative programme was evaluated at last year's Skeptics The Painted apple ... (952 words)

Mass screening programmes have generated considerable controversy in this country. But these programmes have inherent limitations, which need to be better understood In 1996 the Skeptical Inquirer ... (2096 words)

Alternatives to Evidence Based Medicine I will detail these seven alternatives in forth-coming issues of the magazine. For now here is Eminence based medicine: The more senior the colleague, the less ... (1166 words)

The placebo effect has long been of interest to skeptics for its presumed role in alternative medicine. The Skeptics' Dictionary (http://www.skepdic.com) has a lengthy entry, describing a placebo as ... (527 words)

If I Could Talk to the Dead Animals Pet psychic Carol Schultz of Chicago has been gaining a lot of international attention, with identical reports featured in June editions of the Cairns Post and ... (914 words)

Hypnosis TV3 on 20/20 at 8.30pm on Monday 19/06/95 screened an American story titled "A State of Mind". Extravagant claims were made about the medical significance of hypnosis and its therapeutic ... (1059 words)

Surprising results from a US study of the effectiveness of counselling on reducing juvenile crime. In the March NZ Skeptic, Dr John Welch's excellent column mentioned an article in the British ... (832 words)

No Medical Ghetto In the last issue I warned of the dangers of a medical ghetto developing on the Auckland North Shore. Fifty new doctors set up practice in Auckland last year and even more overseas ... (1361 words)

A Menu of Dietary Delusions Neither Nutrasweet nor sugar-rich diets produce any change in children's behaviour. (New England Journal of Medicine 330:301-307, 1994) The subjects were tested in a ... (1871 words)