Bad Coffee

We haven’t talked about the badness of some coffees recently so here is a reminder of the league table of shame some far,

1) TGI’s, Tower Park, Poole
2) Wetherspoons, Dorchester
3) Service Station somewhere in the North that I can’t remember the name of
4) Toni and Guy, Dorhester

Well the good (or bad, depending on your out look) news is that we have a new entry.

We were shopping in Bournemouth on Sunday, Significant Other did well (lots of really nice clothes) and I bought 2 new albums. I got Mumford and Son and the new Eels albums (they are both fantastic). We decided to pop into the Slug and Lettuce for lunch. Ok so it is not the world’s finest catering establishment but never the less you expect some standards.
I asked for a double espresso because a single is never enough, although it was in this case.
The problems started when I saw how much coffee was in the cup. It is supposed to be a small cup, that’s sort of the point, the concentration of flavours, but this, in comparison to a normal espresso cup, was a veritable bucket. Please take note at this point oh high street purveyors of caffeinated beverages, the amount of liquid that we get is not the important thing, it should taste nice! Or in the case of some of the larger chains of coffee shops, it should taste of something!
Of course, if you dilute something quite a lot you get less of the thing that you started with and this does not make it more potent (quick dig at homeopaths there. The 10:23 mass overdose is tomorrow, 30/1/10, by the way.) and so the flavour was almost non-existent.
I am not a coffee snob, I drink instant sometimes and I only have a cheapish espresso machine, but I do like coffee and it’s not that hard to make well. This is all I ask for and I don’t think that it’s too much; if you sell coffee then it should be nice coffee.

So here is the revised table, I think that the Slug and Lettuce go in at number 5,

1) TGI’s, Tower Park, Poole
2) Wetherspoons, Dorchester
3) Service Station somewhere in the North that I can’t remember the name of
4) Toni and Guy, Dorchester
5) Slug and Lettuce, Bournemouth.

TB and Homeopathy

Now, it’s not my job to pick apart every link that Dr Nancy Malik posts on twitter and this is the last one I promise. I am only going to do this one because it is so easy. She posted a link to homeopathic treatment of TB. This pricked my interest because I used to work on a respiratory ward and so have seen the very successful treatment of this nasty disease.
The page starts out as review of TB, it symptoms and causes. This is all well and good, although it does look like and cut and paste job and a lot of the language is quite detailed Medical speak (I don’t wish to patronise Homeopaths but u suspect that many of them have not done 5 years at medical school followed by all the in Hospital training that follows that.)
There are several interesting parts to this article, the first being in the section headed “Case Finding Tools” by which I think they mean “Diagnostic Tools” but I’m being picky. In hospital, if we suspected TB due to symptoms such as persistent cough, high temperature and Haemoptysis (all included it this section), we would do a chest x-ray and do Sputum culturing. Sputum culturing is a bit dull but is very easy. You just get the patient to cough some flob into a pot first thing in the morning on 3 successive days. Send them off to the lab and a couple of days later you get a nice result. Here’s what the article says about Sputum culture “culture of sputum is only second in importance in a case finding programme. It is not only difficult, tedious, lengthy and expensive but also needs special training and expertise.” Difficult and tedious? Not really but “needs special training and expertise”? Does not all diagnosing of disease? Are homeopaths not specially trained? Do they not have expertise? After all Dr: Felix James claims to be an MD(Hom), I’m assuming that the Hom. is homeopathy, is that not special training or did he just save up tokens form the back of cornflakes packets for his MD? Personally I would like my health problem diagnosed by someone who has had special training.
I think that this shows the lack of intellectual rigour that pervades the whole homeopathic community; medicine is a bit hard so let’s just make something up.

The other part of the article that interested me was the numbers bit. I love numbers; they can tell you so much. In this case they can tell you the Medicine works very well thank you very much.
Here is the Data they present for the UK,

MORTALITY DATA:
England and Wales:
346 / 1,00,000 in mid 19th century
126 / 1,00,000 at beginning of this century
31 / 1,00,000 in 1951
6.7/ 1,00,000 in 1960

Note the large drop off in deaths from 1951 to 1960. The reason for this is two fold. 1) in 1953 the BCG vaccine against TB was introduced into the UK and there was a wide take up. 2) in 1952 Triple antibiotic therapy was bought in. You see, we got on top of it without the use of magic water. Science at work there people. Oh and Anti-Vax idiots, proof I think you’ll find that vaccines do save lives and they do work.
Whilst we are at it let’s look at a few more numbers, here is a link to the Health Protection Agency. This table shows morality rates up to 2007 and it has fallen to 0.7 per 100,000 in 2006.
We reached this level in the mid-80’s and it hasn’t dropped of any more which is annoying but can be explained, I think, though population migration.

There then follows the list of things that can be treated and by what, is one of those things Cancer? Does it say that? I’m not sure but let’s point them in the direction of the 1939 Cancer Act just to make sure they are not claiming that.


I’ll stop now; I’m beginning to bore myself.

#ten23 Lead Me Here

Whilst I was enjoying a spirited defence by Dr. Nancy Malik of homeopathy yesterday on Twitter (I don’t agree with her but she is allowed her say no matter how stupid it is) (you can view the posts by searching #ten23 or @DrNancyMalik, she is currently promoting homeopathic AIDS/HIV treatment) she linked to some cartoons that she thought were a) funny and b) so satirical that they would bring down all of established science. They weren’t. I wouldn’t have minded if they had at least been funny but here is a prime example,

 

 Ho ho, see now we who work in Medicine (all shills of Big Pharma by the way) are actually trying to kill and even if we’re not trying to kill you we don’t give a fuck about you anyway. As an aside, I hate big pharma. They don’t give cheap medicines to countries in need, they medicalise sociological problems and they have been caught manipulating results. However, quite a lot of their products actually work and do save lives.

 Back to my point. I found this cartoon quite offensive as it portrayed people who work in health care as heartless bastards, which is a little unfair. Maybe U.S. Doctors are in it for the money and do prescribe things because they get money from the patients health insurance (another good argument for socialised health care there, appropriate prescribing) but that doesn’t really happen here and I am certain that nurses aren’t in it for the money.

 The cartoon lead me to this article  on the same website about why you (woman obviously) shouldn’t get a mammogram. It’s delicate title is “Mammograms cause breast cancer”. Now I am not going to argue that radiation is good for you or that mammogram is perfect but I can assure you that it saves lives. Whilst, as we know, the plural of anecdote is not data, we are dealing with homeopaths here were anecdote is data and data that doesn’t agree with them is ignored (rather like Ann Coulter and transitional fossils. Robin Ince joke there.) Several friends of my mother have had their lives saved by mammogram and chemo and radiotherapies. Homeopathic proving.

 What the article sets out to do is to scare woman into not getting an examination. For example “Since mammographic screening was introduced, the incidence of a form of breast cancer called ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) has increased by 328 percent. Two hundred percent of this increase is allegedly due to mammography.” Ok this may be true (they sight no reference for this number and it seems that most of the references throughout the article are to other articles on the site. Intellectually rigorous then) but 128% of the rise wasn’t caused by mammogram and they give no survival rates for this cancer and no rates of detection for this cancer by the test. If you’re interested 80% of this type of tumour is detected by mammogram alone as “very few cases of DCIS present as a palpable mass”.

 My biggest problem with the article (apart from the fact that it is written by someone described as a Citizen Journalist. So, just some person then, not a specialist then. It is quite a serious subject after all.) is the complete lack of context in which the numbers are presented. From the article I have learnt that one examination gives you 1 rad of radiation. Well that’s helpful if you are trying to weigh up risk. Perhaps they could compare that to say, radiation exposure whilst on a trans-Atlantic flight or just from living in Cornwall. Or the amount Peter Parker received from that radioactive spider (it was a girl spider and had recently had a mammogram. True story, to quote Pat Robertson). If you believe the Daily Mail, which I know we all do, if lightening goes off near your plane the X-ray exposure will be 400 times that of a chest X-ray.

 Percentage rises are quoted throughout with no context and, again, only referencing the site. This is a just unhelpful. I know they want to sell their product and promote their dangerous and unhelpful philosophy but this is so one sided as to be almost lying. Quote away with your statistics by all means but reference properly and give context. Oh and offer some alternatives. At they end they refer to some new technology that does sound good but is also being produced by the same people that bought you the mammogram, you know the sort of people describe in the cartoon that start me off.

 If you are not aware of the 10:23 campaign click here and have a read.