Tuesday 11 September 2012

What kind of quackery is this?


Jeremy hunt, believer in homeopathy and the integrity of Rupert Murdoch, is the new health secretary. This has worried a lot of people.

Back in 2007, Hunt signed a parliamentary Early Day Motion which supported the spending of NHS money on homeopathic “medicines “. The idea that the NHS could ever possibly phase out any clinically tested drugs for overpriced sugar pills took an alarming shuffle towards reality.

Arguably, the concept of the Health Secretary supporting homeopathy is just as ridiculous as the Environmental Secretary Owen Paterson being a climate change “sceptic”. Oh wait…

Tory cabinet reshuffling aside, homeopathy is one of the largest fields of alternative medicine. It is also the subject of ridicule amongst scientists, and angry defensive statements from its supporters.

Homeopathic remedies involve dissolving a substance (anything from snake venom to charcoal) in ethanol, then diluting this into water many, many times before tapping the contained solution against a hard object, such as a Bible or a leather covered paddle. The hypothesis is that the water molecules “remember” the initial potent substance; so the pill is apparently effective no matter how dilute it becomes. This flies in the face of all known laws of chemistry and physics.

The limited effect that homeopathic pills have is based around the placebo effect. In a case of mind over matter, the brain tells itself that the injection (though in fact saline) was a painkiller so that some of the pain felt is ignored.

Homeopathic remedies have never been shown to be effective in any large, placebo-controlled randomised clinical trial (a test all medicines must go through). One placebo is as good as another.

There is an anomaly though, one brought up in by many supporters of homeopathy whenever their particular beliefs are challenged. Known as the Belfast Study and published in 2004 in Inflammation Research, a group at Queen’s University looked into the reaction of basophiles (human white blood cells involved in inflammation) to ultra-dilute concentrations of histamine.

A dilution at 10^-38M (such as that used in homeopathy) in all likelihood will not contain a single molecule of histamine. And yet the claim was made that the cells reacted as if histamine was present. 

The placebo effect could not be at play here, individual cells are not sentient beings with an unquestioning faith in a particular treatment.

The anomalous paper makes for interesting reading and makes a good case for “weirdest scientific phenomenon outside of physics” but is certainly not any reason for people to get over-excited and start putting their health in the hands of a little bottle of over-priced sugar pills.

In fact, many further studies and attempts to recreate the workings of the initial Belfast study have found no such behaviour. The most notable of these follow up investigations involving BBC Horizon and James Randi, the famous skeptic. Until they do, it’s just a curious anomaly worthy of some further study.

Furthermore, until a homeopathic treatment can be shown in a full, unbiased clinical trial to be as effective as any current medical treatment, the idea that the NHS should fund such a therapy is utterly ridiculous.

Friday 7 September 2012

I want to be a writer…


More specifically, I want to be a science writer.
Neither of those two sentence s come across well in front of a careers advisor. They conjure up awkward questions like “what have you written?” and “how much work experience have you got?”
Unfortunately my answers are the same as everyone else’s: a few things if the student papers and little, bordering on none. This does nothing to help me stand out from the crowd.
And so I am now trying to write for anything that’ll take me. Blogs, mini-articles, really long articles. Anything and everything. My portfolio is, gradually, expanding; although the veiw count on my blog remains embarrassingly low.
It is that coveted journalism work placement that I am after. And now it is crunch time. In just over six months, I will no longer be an undergraduate.  A terrifying thought. By CV is remarkably bare, and I haven’t updated it for over a year.
But all is not lost. The internet, as always, has come up trumps. I read an aarticle written by a man named Ed Young, in which he told how he and his coworkers  became science writers. Their routes were widely varied and, in many cases, circuitous. Some took formal training, others had had no previous experience  writing. Many took years to get a steady job, others landed one straight from university. Very few of the writers managed to live perfectly to the life plans that they made aged 18.
This is the point I’m trying to make. It doesn’t matter where you are now, as long as you are focused on where you want to be. Don’t make a set and steady plan for yourself, having a few goals and targets is good, but life is not predictable.
And, most importanly, keep updating  that CV, you never know when you’ll next get a chance to send it off.

Published grads.co.uk September 2012

Wednesday 5 September 2012

House-mates and Hazmat Suits

As part of the generation at university now, it is increasingly likely that we are all going to be sharing rented houses until we are well into our twenties and, for the unfortunate few who decide to remain in the world of academia for any longer, all the way to our thirties. From groups of undergraduate friends, to postgraduate acquaintances, to employed professionals who you barely know; house-mates can vary wildly.


 Sources of contention between house-mates are just as wide ranging. Fights can break out over anything from who sits where in front of the TV to why someone feels the need to hide all the teaspoons in their wardrobe. But these rows can really be boiled down to three basic root problems. They are money, food and cleanliness. Everyone has different ideas as to how to manage these three minefields based around their own upbringing and personalities. And as always, their way is the wrong way when compared to yours.

All of these issues, as with any problem, should really be tackled sooner rather than later but they rarely are. Instead house-mates are often seen to sink into passive-aggressive note writing and the light bulbs that break in the first week will never get replaced. Some really good advice can be given as to handling these issues, though it is unlikely to be taken. Instead here are my three top tips to dodging your way through the bigger issues (relatively) unscathed.

Money – Sort this out early on as it’ll only get more complicated as time goes by. Bills are the biggest spend in a shared house so it is important to make sure that they are all covered and not in just one person’s name. A responsibility shared is a damn good way of making sure fewer people successfully avoid their bills.

The bills themselves can either be dealt with as they come, or people can each pay a little money into the kitty once a month and the bills paid out of that lump sum. This latter method has the added advantage of all the remaining being money split between you on moving out day. As for shared shopping (covering everything from toilet roll to light bulbs), always get a receipt but try not to niggle over the pennies. Ten pence here or there will not bankrupt you.

Food – Don’t eat anyone else’s food. Simple. Ideally this would mean that they will refrain from eating your cereal, bread, fruit and precious, precious Nutella. That is however, not how the world works. If you know who it was who ate your last chocolate pudding, it is best to ask them to cease and desist with their eating habits as soon as possible. This may work, but you will be better off buying a mini-fridge and starting to hoard anything particularly yummy in the safety of your own room.

Cleanliness – Now, many people recommend setting up a household rota for chores such as vacuuming and scrubbing the shower as early on as possible. If your house-mates are all sane, reasonable humans then this should work. You would also be one of the lucky, lucky few with normal sane housemates – the rest of us aren’t so lucky.. Instead, do your best to keep your own personal area tidy (bedroom, kitchen cupboard and the like) and in extreme cases, you may find yourself having to keep your own stash of crockery to save it from being left to rot in the washing up pile.

Some people will have just left a home where their mothers clean everything and tidy up after them; these people will need help in learning how to use a vacuum cleaner and will not be aware as to what actually constitutes washing a plate. They may even be useless layabouts, but try to avoid becoming that one person who always does all the washing up because you will be vulnerable to being taken advantage of. However, remember that it is not below you to rinse out someone else’s coffee mug on occasion; they may then do the same for you.
The one thing that must be maintained in a shared house above all else is communication. Don’t sulk in your room because someone is playing their music too loud or have left two day old takeaway in the sitting room. Go and ask them to turn it down or pick it up. They will not resent your for it, and it will prevent your soul from becoming pickled in a sea of hatred for your house-mates. If the worst comes to the worst, you will all be able to bond over a shared hatred of your landlord.


Published Grads.co.uk August 2012