3 February 2025
There is wide acceptance that the evidence provided by randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that are conducted to high standards is at the top of a hierarchy of evidence. Some web sources are listed below that, because they base their advice on careful and transparent evaluations of the available evidence, can be trusted.
17 July 2023
So, I'm a Diet Coke drinker. I don't drink hot drinks, and never have for my whole life. At least from my teenage years, when hot drinks were introduced in the form of tea, I always found them too hot and would burn my mouth. So, at least for the past few decades, I've consumed a reasonable* amount of Diet Coke.
28 October 2018
Herbal remedies are very popular these days, with many pharmacies in New Zealand happy to promote products that don't work as treatments for medical conditions, or even just as a preventative measure - a way of keeping healthy.
4 June 2017
A new alternative therapy has become popular recently - grinding up oak galls and putting the paste in your vagina. Oak galls are woody balls created when a wasp larva grows inside an oak tree's leaf bud. It is being claimed by sellers of this remedy that it can tighten and clean your vagina and improve your sex life.
1 February 2005
A Christchurch mother who fed her five-year-old son raw beans was surprised when he fell ill. Because they had not been sprayed, she reasoned they should be a natural, healthy snack. But natural, as Jay Mann makes clear in this highly entertaining guide to the contents of your dinner plate, doesn't necessarily mean safe. Beans for example contain lectins, which have no bad taste to warn unwary consumers, but destroy the lining of your small intestine. Alfalfa contains canavanine, which disrupts DNA and RNA metabolism, though you would need to eat a lot of alfalfa to be poisoned by it. Lots of common foods are laden with poisons, all perfectly natural of course, but best consumed in small doses only.
1 February 2005
The battle between the Enlightenment and Romantic traditions is far from over, though it has taken on new forms. This article is abridged from a presentation to the NZ Skeptics Conference, 2004.
1 May 2004
Consumer response to the outbreak of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy has involved a complex balancing of risk and price
1 November 2002
Mind the Gap! The book title is intended to remind all who have waited on curved London Underground railway platforms of the risk a careless step poses. The risks Dr Trask warns of are those which can label the writer as illiterate, ignorant of the nuances of English usage, or at least possessed of cloth ears. In offering this review to New Zealand Skeptic I do not imply that readers are particularly in need of the author's advice; rather, his comments have a distinctly skeptical slant, which should be music to skeptical ears (see entry: cliches). Consider the following entries in his alphabetical list.
1 August 1998
Chances are, you're worried about all the wrong things.
1 February 1998
Some problems cannot be resolved by just "getting it all out of your system", reports Nigel Hawkes.
1 August 1994
What is the link between chemicals and cancer?