Dorries, The Times and Abortion/Preterm Delivery

Short version: Another day, another example of Nadine Dorries talking absolute rubbish. Long version: There’s a new post up at Nadine Dorries’s pseudoblog about an article which appeared in The Times yesterday, which reports on the preliminary results of a new epidemiological study by researchers at the University […]

OfQuack to Regulate Witchcraft

Back in 2009, the Daily Mash greeted the launch of the Complementary and Natural Healthcare Council (aka OfQuack) with one of my all-time favourite spoof news articles: Complementary Therapists To Be Regulated By Witch Doctor. STRICT standards must be applied to alternative medicine, according to the voodoo priest […]

Dorries and BPAS – a Pre-emptive Fact Check

Tonight I’m going to try something that’s a little off the wall even by my standards – I’m going to pre-emptively fact check a ‘report’ before its even been released into the public domain and without having any advanced sight of its contents. How, I guess your wondering, […]

When Good Science gets Lousy PR

Across all the natural sciences no subject has stirred up more controversy over the last 150 years than that of the evolution of our own species, Homo sapiens. Much of that controversy stems, of course, from the corrosive impact of the neoDarwinian synthesis on religious beliefs relating to […]

Teenage Pregnancy: Fact or Fiction?

One of the most persistently popular articles I’ve published over the last year or so was a compendium of statistical information relating to rape, which I put together last November in an effort to put some reasonably reliable figures under this very important and, at times, highly contentious […]

Abstinence-only Sex Education: A complete failure on every level

The American Foundation for AIDS Research has published a new issue briefing, which fully deserves to be widely circulated, which assesses the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education programmes for HIV prevention amongst young people. The briefing pulls together the evidence from a wide range of published studies covering […]

The Quackvertising Standards Authority

Another week rolls by and another missive from the Advertising Standards Authority drops into my in-box leading me to yet another batch of informally resolved cases in which a variety of alt-med practitioners have had to remove health-related claims from their websites in order to comply with the […]

Pornography, Censorship and the Bailey Review

Before getting back to the business of chronicling Nadine Dorries’ spiralling descent into Palinesque fucknuttery, I need to take a bit of a detour via a recent post on the Bailey Review to respond to a moderately interesting comment, albeit one which nicely illustrates both the complexities of […]

The Madness of Nadine Dorries pt.1

It used to be said that a lie told often enough becomes the truth*, although not necessarily by Lenin as the the attribution of this statement to the artist formerly known as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov to him is, at best, apocryphal. Joseph Goebbels*, on the other hand, did […]

BBC makes piss-poor job of JRF alcohol report

If you’ve caught the BBC’s news output this morning on television, radio or teh interwebs, you’ll have seen this: Parents’ behaviour ‘can influence teen drinking’ Children who see their parents drunk are twice as likely to regularly get drunk themselves, a survey of young teenagers has suggested. Poor […]