Anthony Campbell's Blog

Richard Gombrich is an academic with a refreshingly colloquial style who has written some of the best books about Theravada Buddhism. How Buddhism Began has a lot of detailed textual criticism but would nevertheless interest non-specialist readers who already know something about Buddhism.

I've just posted reviews of two new books on evolution by Nicholas Wade: Before The Dawn and The Faith Instinct. Both are well written and readable though I have reservations about some of Wade/s arguments and conclusions.

My essay, Religion as Parasite, Parasite as Religion, won joint third prize in the recent competition in The Skeptic magazine.

The Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons concluded in February that homeopathy is a placebo treatment that should no longer be provided by the NHS, mainly because it entailed deception of patients which could do damage to the doctor-patient relationship. In its official response, published on 26 July, the government said: "... we do not believe that this risk amounts to a risk to patient trust, nor do we believe that the risk is sufficient enough for the Department to take the unusual step of removing PCTs' flexibility to make their own decisions."

Whatever on may think about the government's view (which seems to me to be a first-class example of buck-passing), "sufficient enough" is an absurd pleonasm.

The current issue of the BMJ has a long article by Klim MacPherson, visiting professor of public health epidemiology at Oxford, on mammography. The article finds that the present situation of screening is unsartisfactory and there is inadequate evidence to reach firm recommendations. "The misplaced propaganda battle seems now to rest on the ratio of the risks of saving a life compared with the risks of diagnosis."

For the individual woman, deciding whether or not to go for screening is difficult. "Arguments that polarise are unhelpful and render women, many with strong preferences, more helpless. For too long they have been misled and confused by too much agenda driven analyses of these data." The article, which is quite long and complex, deserves to be read in its entirety.

If women are likely to be confused by the propanda, men face a possibly even more contentious issue when thinking about screening for prostate cancer. The same issue of the BMJ summarises a paper in Arch Intern Med 2020;170:1256-61 which finds that in the USA most men with low-risk prostate cancer opt for invasive treatments that are likely to do more harm than good. This is largely due to widespread use of screening for prostate specific antigen (PSA). PSA is a poor test for cancer; indeed, as I reported in an earlier post, the discoverer of the antigen says that it should never have been used as a test.

I haven't posted here for a few weeks - we're in Greece and are just back from Arcadia (literally). Doing some reading and reviews will follow shortly.