Edzard Ernst is a leading campaigner against alternative medicine and is also highly intelligent and hardworking, so is a person of interest to me. As a high profile, dare I say vituperative, critic of complementary therapies, it helps to know what sort of man he is. I won’t say “Know thy enemy”, because I believe ..read more

In a shameless ripoff of the back page of the Sunday Times money section, in which a different person each week was asked questions about their finances and how they managed them, I have decided that this would be a great idea for the blog. Osteopaths can find out about how other osteopaths manage their ..read more

How much do I know about hiccups? I do realise that hiccups are not caused by elves, as was thought in Olde England. I know that they are sometimes confusingly spelt hiccoughs, making me want to pronounce the word awkwardly as hick – offs. I have a hazy notion that the basic hiccup can be ..read more

A report from the Osler Lecture: Artificial Intelligence in Imaging, given by Professor Fergus Gleeson on the use of AI in medical imaging. September 20, 2024, Mathematical Institute, Oxford University Q: Is AI replacing human radiologists? A: No. We are not even close. But why ever not? When I saw the title of this lecture ..read more

It will come as no surprise to many osteopaths out there that there might be a link between head trauma, even in the distant past, and a patient’s current psychological state. It seems self-evident to those of us who have palpated many heads in our lives and heard the many histories that accompany them. However ..read more

I was lucky enough to sign up for a lecture at Kellogg College, home of Oxford University’s Centre of Evidence-Based Medicine, given by Professor Carl Heneghan, and Dr. Tom Jefferson. They promised to enlighten us on the subject of “Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM): Why it’s important and Why It’s Controversial”. I was nearly tempted by a ..read more

This blog post delves into the challenges faced by osteopathy according to the perspectives of Thomson and Macmillan. It highlights issues such as a weak theoretical basis, reliance on manual therapy, practitioner-centredness, and implausible mechanisms. The authors urge for critical self-reflection and embracing concepts from outside osteopathy to ensure the profession's development and legitimacy ..read more

The precise definition of the word “manipulation” to indicate a certain technique has always been quite problematic for manual therapists, and a recent paper attempts to pin it down to something neater which can be universally used and understood. here is the link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36918833/ What do we mean by manipulation? When I was at osteopathy college ..read more

Chris Whitty gave a talk in the Autumn of 2023 in which he touched on Long Covid. Hear what he has to say ..read more

This blog post delves into the challenges faced by osteopathy according to the perspectives of Thomson and Macmillan. It highlights issues such as a weak theoretical basis, reliance on manual therapy, practitioner-centredness, and implausible mechanisms. The authors urge for critical self-reflection and embracing concepts from outside osteopathy to ensure the profession's development and legitimacy ..read more