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GM Lobby Will Damage Australian’s Health Future
On Tuesday, 9 September 2015 I tuned in to the ABC broadcast of the address given to the National Press Club , by John Entine, described as a “journalist, scholar, skeptic and GMO advocate. I have followed the genetically modified organism (GMO) debate for some years and had personally arrived at a conclusion that GM…
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Get Up Advert banned
As government becomes secretive and undemocratic and mainstream media aids the process, it generates a climate that allows for the formation of equal and opposite alternatives, and to mobilise affected communities. These manifest as a range of “whistle-blowers”, online polls and surveys, blogs published over the Internet and news aggregators that attempt to provide a…
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The Final Statistic
There is no more ‘final’ statistic regarding drug use than overdose deaths. And in England the official figures go back to Victorian times, then often involving opium, laudanum and other strong drugs including alcohol. The British Coroner’s Act of 1844 was ahead of its time and even pre-dated the famous Broad Street Pump reports of…
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PSA Media Releases – Pharmacists have a real role in advising on use of complementary medicines
September 10, 2015 Pharmacists have a real role in advising on use of complementary medicines The Pharmaceutical Society of Australia, the peak organisation representing pharmacists across all sectors of the profession, has issued a position statement recognising that complementary medicines may have a role in the management or treatment of some conditions and that pharmacists…
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Medibank moves to emulate US health insurers – New Funding Models Needed!
Health insurance in the US has always been a contentious issue because of its limitations and high cost. Because of the cost factor it often formed part of a benefit in a salary package with the employer, better able to access to negotiate and manage health insurance discounts. Aggregation through a multiple of employees gave economic…
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‘Marketing Based Medicine’ steamrolls ethics and science in proposed Victorian vaccine laws.
What some people are terming ‘Marketing Based Medicine’ has just won a huge victory in the state of Victoria, trampling rough shod over medical ethics and good science. The Labor government plans to exclude children from daycare and kindergarten, who are partially or fully unvaccinated, marking a big departure from the more considered approach of…
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Peer- Reviewed…..really?
The Editor-in-Chief of the Lancet has recently declared that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with obsessions for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness”. Interesting,…
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Vitamin C Infusions – where’s the evidence?
Soon after finding an engorged tick in my hair, during a recent visit to northern New South Wales, I found myself nursing a sore head in the waiting room of a busy ‘Integrative Medicine Clinic’. This was not the first time I had experienced a tick bite, so, as a cancer patient concerned about infection,…
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Vitamins and Surgery: The Real Story A Report from the Front. Well, Maybe a Bit Lower.
Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, August 24, 2015 Over 100 million Americans will undergo surgery this year, and I was one of them. Not a big deal: a routine outpatient hernia repair, caused by sure-I-can-lift-that-extremely-heavy-box syndrome, the tendency towards which is almost certainly carried on the Y chromosome. In their personalized how-to-prepare-for-surgery instructions, both the surgeon…
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Pharmacists – Who Works for your Best Interests?
Now that the dust has settled around negotiations for 6CPA and that word “certainty” has crept back into the vocabulary once more, we are supposed to now relax and get on with the job of future-proofing the profession of pharmacy. But what “certainties” can we count on? With the current business model still having a…