Every year, I’m an invited lecturer at the University of Ottawa to talk to future science communicators about pseudoscience. I use a number of increasingly muddied examples to show these students...
Both groups struggled with the same problem. How to extract and purify a chemical that is part of a complex mixture? For researchers led by Dr. Frederick Banting at the University of Toronto in...
Four hundred years ago Belgian physician Johann Baptist Van Helmont was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church for promoting the use of the “Powder of Sympathy” that was supposed to treat wounds...
In the fight against pseudoscience, the idea that simply providing more information works every time has been questioned these last decades. The thinking used to be simplistic: when non-experts...
I continue to be amazed by science. The ability to predict to the second when an eclipse will occur at a specific location in the world, the know-how to build a jetliner that requires the cohesive...
This past week on October 16 we celebrated National Ether Day. If you missed it, here is why you should not have. Rarely does a single event alter the course of medicine, but that is exactly what...
In the first episode of the television show The Resident, a nurse tells the young protagonist that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the United States after cancer and heart...
Alzheimer’s is a terrifying disease. Since no new medications for this condition have been introduced for about two decades, it is certainly understandable that any new drug that receives...
As more and more people “do their own research,” some end up consulting a website called PubMed. An argument I have encountered is that if a scientific paper is listed on PubMed, it must mean this...
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