lies Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science November 2010 "Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science." This is a lay press explanation of Ioannidis JPA (2005) Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. PLoS Med 2(8): e124. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 sick Living Sick and Dying Young in Rich America Chronic illness is the new first-world problem. December 19, 2013 "I guess it’s true that life is full of surprises, but for the three years since Joe’s crippling pain was diagnosed as the result of an autoimmune disease called Ankylosing Spondylitis, our life has been full of surprises like this one. Pill boxes, trips to the emergency room, early returns from vacation. Terms like “flare-up” have dropped into our vocabulary. We’ve sat in waiting rooms where Joe was the only person without a walker or a cane. Most of our tears have been over the fact that these aren’t the kind of surprises either of us thought we’d be encountering at such a young age."

flu Does the Vaccine Matter? November 2009 "We keep coming up against the belief that we've reduced mortality by 50 percent,” and when researchers poke holes in the evidence, people pound the pulpit." "Whether this season's swine flu turns out to be deadly or mild, most experts agree that it's only a matter of time before we're hit by a truly devastating flu pandemic—one that might kill more people worldwide than have died of the plague and AIDS combined. In the U.S., the main lines of defense are pharmaceutical—vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread of flu and prevent people from dying from it. Yet now some flu experts are challenging the medical orthodoxy and arguing that for those most in need of protection, flu shots and antiviral drugs may provide little to none. So where does that leave us if a bad pandemic strikes?" See also the Globe & Mail, Dec 29, 2009 article: "How the flu shot became big business"