This is really appalling—“Doctor Yourself”:

DoctorYourself.com

World’s Largest HEALTH HOMESTEADING website

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. This especially includes your health.

What is this, hmm? This is the work of one “Andrew Saul, PhD”¹ and what a piece of work it is. Every piece of woo medicine you’ve ever read about is contained in this one website. Homeopathy? Yep. What about vitamin C as a cure for AIDS (and HPV! Double whammy on the sexually transmitted diseases there!)? Oh yeah, we got that too. Maybe throw in magnesium for epilepsy too.

But this is all run of the mill stuff. What about his assertion that “the germ theory was complete bullshit” to really throw the cat among the pigeons?

We do indeed have a proper nutcase here. And he appears to have a love affair with vitamin C. Really, there seems to be nothing it can’t be applied to that won’t be fixed within the week. (I exaggerate, but only slightly.) He’s even got a full guide to strong-arming your doctors into giving intravenous vitamin C.

Unfortunately I don’t really have the medical knowledge to go through this site page by page. This is a lifetime’s project for someone.

I’ll leave you with the knowledge that Dr (or should that be “Dr”) Saul is “Assistan Editor of the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine”, which is probably about as well regarded as Homeopathy. Ho hum.

I’m getting really fed up and pissed off at these utterly heartless bastards who would sacrifice someone’s health for the sake of their own paranoid fantasies.

By the Daily Mail’s own admission in the article, HPV is responsible for 700 deaths from cervical cancer every year. But they “revealed”, in their best stoke-the-controversy fashion, that the NHS is paying for this treatment “at the cost to the taxpayer of £241 per course of treatment”. So little to prevent death from cancer, but too much for the Daily Mail and the absurd arguments of the “National Family Campaign” or “Family & Youth Concern”.

The argument that being vaccinated against a sexually-transmitted disease makes you leap into bed is so silly on the face of it that it’s difficult to comprehend the kind of person that could believe it. Every single statement made in that article makes me want to reach out and slap someone, hard.

“It could be seen as helping to promote or encourage sexual activity in girls before they are physically or mentally mature.” (Hugh McKinney, National Family Campaign)

There are two points here, neither of which follow from the facts. First, that being vaccinated promotes sexual activity. Strange that the MMR vaccine doesn’t promote teenage pregnancy — even though mumps is a cause of male sterility and rubella causes developmental defects during pregnancy. Second, that vaccine can make someone have sex before they are mature. The only thing that will prevent that is adequate sex education and fewer religious twats turning sex into a forbidden fruit.

“Why should we spend so much money on vaccines against diseases which are totally preventable in other ways? We should be discouraging young people from having intercourse at an even younger age rather than promoting it.” (Dr Trevor Stammers, Family & Youth Concern)

The “other ways” hinted at here are not listed. I can only guess he means that great placebo panacea, abstinence. Of course, abstinence doesn’t prevent HPV transmission, unless what Dr Stammers really advocates is lifelong celibacy. If no-one had sex until the age of twenty five, then it would take longer before infected people spread the virus — but it would spread. There is no magical cut-off point of maturity past which HPV is no longer a threat.

Family & Youth Concern’s statement is completely irrelevant. They’re only there to issue their default opinion — promoting moral panic about the “permissive society” — which happens to align quite nicely with that of the Daily Mail.

Thankfully the commenters on the article are pretty much on the ball (for a change). There is one nutcase who seems to think that Nu Labour (sic) are doing this to “breed” the next generation of voters (!). Even amongst Daily Mail readers that’s a minority opinion. Bookdrunk also has more and some interesting links to previous HPV and sex education stories.

What do you think — are these anti-HPV campaigners seriously deluded or simply scum?

I have only one thing to say about this film:

What they did say: “Rotate that 75 degrees around the vertical”. Apparently that kind of thing is okay in the movies, when they want to know what happens on the blind side of the room. What they didn’t say was: “Rotate that 90 degree around the horizontal”, when they wanted to see Gene Hackman’s face from the satellite photo.

Cos that would just be silly, right? I enjoyed it though.

I was introduced to the Micriobiology Bytes blog the other day. It contains interesting looks at microbiology stuff written for the layman.

It also has a podcast, which I subscribed to. In fact it has two: a normal MP3 feed and an ‘enhanced’ feed for iTunes sufferers users. The latter includes videos and stuff which standard MP3 players wouldn’t be able to cope with.

So I was listening to the latest download from the unenhanced feed, which sounded something like this:

Welcome to the Microbiology Bytes podcast for (insert date), “In Praise of Yeast”. This is a video podcast. To view the video go to the blog home page or use the enhanced podcast feed.

This isn’t really the kind of thing that will keep me entertained on a commute to work. If you’ve got nothing interesting to say, don’t make me download you saying it anyway.

Two funny things to round off the day:

1. There was a column in the paper about a 104-year old lady who uses the internet from her nursing home. Go old people! She insisted on calling the mouse a rabbit though, which is terminology I think we should all adopt in solidarity.

2. The opening paragraph from this paper about knowing the limits of your own abilities:

   In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o’clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras (Fuocco, 1996).

I’ve never really understood why the US date system works the way it does (month/day/year) but it’s just one of these things. It probably comes from some obscure fact of translation or ‘reform’ undertaken by an American printer or something.

Anyway, it reminds me a bit of the URL schema for http://thedailywtf.com. I know that it’s a bit of a cliché to talk about “real WTF being the forum software”, but my oh my, it is…

The URL for some topic is of the form

/forums/thread/NNNNN.aspx

where NNNNN is some arbitrary number to identify the conversation. The completely stupid thing is that if there’s a second page (or more) in the conversation, it can be accessed here:

/forums/P/NNNNN/ShowThread.aspx

where P represents the page number. (Note also that if P is 1 then it is equivalent to the URL given above. Eh?)

Forums, then page number, then thread — what? I can’t imagine what would happen if these people were made to design something that wasn’t as inherently flexible as software. How about a book of short stories where all the opening pages of each story appear at the beginning of the book, then all the page 2s after that, then all the page 3s. Like a self-assembly story.