Health Visiting and the MMR: a matter of mutual decline
The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is reported to be concerned about the falling level of Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccination in the United Kingdom. The country has now lost its measles-free status, just three years after this was recognized... More…
Anti-stigma campaigns in mental health: what gets left out?
Over the past two decades, stigma for people with mental health problems has become an increasing concern for researchers, practitioners, service users and politicians. This has led to several international government funded campaigns to increase public awareness of the realities... More…
Atalanta the Greek Amazon: revisioning gender equality in STEMM
In a previous blog in 2015, commenting on the film ‘Suffragette’, I compared the situation for women in science depicted in the film with modern times. One of the main characters, Edith, was a qualified pharmacist but had been denied... More…
Doctors as border police: what happened to ‘first, do no harm’?
Building trust and acting in the patient’s best interests are guiding principles of medical practice. This is especially true when caring for vulnerable and marginalised people, such as undocumented migrants. They often delay going to the doctor and find it... More…
The Fragility of the Enterprise
I’m at a medium-sized conference, one I’ve attended several times before and I am in a deep depression*. An anthropologist I don’t know is looking at me, intently. She has just told me that she’s especially interested in what I... More…
Nudging behaviour is ineffective, naïve and unethical
Interventions to ‘nudge’ people into desirable behaviours have become popular with policy-makers internationally. In the UK, the Behavioural Insights Team – established under former premier David Cameron – are prolific nudgers, designing (amongst many others) inputs to reduce meat consumption, protect... More…
Promoting health without promoting stigma?
Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is again under fire for its campaigning on obesity. There was a lot wrong with their most recent posters, which equated obesity with smoking as a cause of cancer. The debates that followed highlighted the vital... More…
Mortality rates are still rising in the UK
And everyone is ignoring how many more people are dying When the UK’s annual mid-year population estimates were released in late June 2019, much of the media coverage focused on the fact that the population had risen, but growth rates had stalled. The... More…
On the buses…
Last week, Boris Johnson’s claims about making model buses in his spare time, were met with some incredulity. It was widely reported, and the general reaction seemed to be it was yet another bizarre interview, with commentators arguing it once... More…
Student Mental Health, Social Class and Insecurity in Sally Rooney’s “Normal People”
ISBN 9780571334650 Format Paperback Published 02/05/2019 Length 288 pages Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People (recently published in paperback) has drawn a great deal of praise being suggested as a “future classic” for its zeitgeisty insights into the relationships and... More…
Leadership Blues
As Britain descends further into the dystopian nightmare that Brexit has become, the latest instalment of our journey from serious country to sick joke is the Tory leadership contest. That a country, that considers itself a democracy, can choose a... More…
Predictive Genetics For All – Minister Hancock’s big idea