vivweb01

Editor's note: Herewith a reissue of an amusing aside I wrote in 2022 after experiencing a particularly perplexing series of announcements, most of which seemed to defy common sense.......enjoy ! --------------------------------------------------------- Pondering the recent article about the close down of the world’s largest online eBook library  by the US authorities earlier this year led me back to the question asked increasingly often nowadays:   “ Where has all our common sense gone ?” I thought this might be a good opportunity to take a light-hearted 'tongue-in cheek' look at the logic (or lack of it) underlying human behaviour. What is it ? First of all, what is ‘common sense’ – and how do we define it ? To start with, here's a bit of personal history to help 'set the scene'.... I can well remember from my early childhood the frequent exhortations I received from my parents in response to what I thought was perfectly reasonable behaviour: ‘…for g...

  Many of us find ourselves prescribed one or other of the Statins by our GPs nowadays, often as a result of a routine health check. But are they really necessary, and what are the risks of taking them ? In this article, we’ll try to explain exactly what the statins, as a group of pharmaceuticals, actually look like chemically, how they work, and why the medical profession are so keen on prescribing them for us ‘en masse’. I’ll jump ahead a bit and start with the ‘why’, to try to put the need for these key drugs into context…. Our modern diet is rich in carbohydrates and fats, and often takes the form of highly processed 'ready meals', which also contain a lot of salt. The problem is that this type of ‘challenge’ to our digestive systems and physiology on a continuous basis is an issue for us – our guts, brains and metabolism simply weren’t designed for it, and the excess salt that most of us consume in our modern diet is also likely to compromise our circulatory he...

An interesting news item on 'universal' vaccines appeared in March in the BBC News Health Section....  As someone with an active interest in vaccine development, the report certainly attracted my attention, and I think the methodology merits wider discussion as a possible 'game changer' in our approach to preventing human disease…. The concept of a ‘universal’ vaccine has been on the minds of those in the vaccine development field for many years, but the recent announcement is the first suggestion that such an intervention might actually be possible…and effective. I should add straight away that the Stanford research project alluded to in the above linked article is still very much in its early stages, and positive results have only been shown in lab mice to date. The methodology is nowhere near entering human trials yet, and this will be the only way to demonstrate whether a more universal approach to vaccination would be viable in the human population.  Acquir...