Starting a blog

Maybe I could use a space to put things up which will be searchable and linkable and which people can comment on. I'll try posting things here and see how it all goes.

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Review of Medicines Act 1968: Informal consultation on issues relating to the product licences of right (PLR) regime and homeopathy

There was an invitation to respond to this consultation. Here's the email I sent: Hi. This whole project is lunacy. Why are you wasting tax-payers money on it? Why don’t you waste your time licensing sunlight and lettuce? Even thinking about thinking about licenses for homeopathy is an insult to every hard-working NHS professional trying to alleviate people’s suffering using evidence-based practice. Anybody involved in such an endeavour should go take a long hard look at themselves in the bathroom mirror and then flush themselves down the toilet. There, that’s what I think. Regards -         Dave Curtis -- Professor David Curtis Consultant and Honorary Professor in Psychiatry Dept Adult Psychiatry 3rd Floor Outpatient Building Royal London Hospital
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To whom it may concern: Male circumcision in Germany

I had been looking forward to attending the World Congress in Psychiatric Genetics later this year. I had been looking forward to presenting the results of my research investigating genetic factors contributing to mental illness and to explaining the new methodologies I have been developing which could assist others in the study of mental illness, dementia and physical illnesses with a genetic basis. I had been looking forward to hearing at first hand the latest advances in the field, which with recent technological advances is entering a particularly exciting phase. Today, I'm wondering whether I should be going at all. I'm wondering how I can even consider setting foot in a country which has just decided to ban the circumcision of male children for religious reasons. And then to have what we would call the chutzpah to claim that this is not antisemitic. It is absolutely antisemitic to fail to acknowledge the significance of circumcision as having a central place in Jewish id...
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Chromosomal deletions and ADHD

A study in the Lancet seemed to imply that large chromosomal deletions could cause ADHD - children with ADHD were found more often to have such deletions than control subjects. However there is a flaw in the argument because according to the paper the children with ADHD also had lower IQ than controls. It is already known that large chromosomal deletions are associated with intellectual impairment. So a plausible explanation is that by selecting children with ADHD one obtains a sample with low IQ and such subjects can be expected to have more large deletions by virtue of their lower intelligence rather because of any specific relationship between deletions and ADHD. Of course, at one level it is true that ADHD is associated with large deletions. But if the effect is mediated by IQ then this is somewhat different from the notion that "deletions cause ADHD". To test this, one would need to study a sample of subjects with ADHD compared with controls who had been matched for IQ....
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