Travels of a Fish Nut

Parts 1, 2 and 3 can be found here , here and here . Background When I started this little investigation I had to decide how to go about it. What would be the premise for me visiting a chiropractor? Something must have made me decide to visit. Would I make up conditions, would I exaggerate minor problems or would I be truthful? I decided to go with truthful, not least because I'm a terrible liar and have a bad memory so would probably forget a key point and get found out. The only thing I did do was give a false surname as I didn't want them to associate me with my sister, mostly because I didn't want anything to reflect badly on her if things went wrong. Fortunately I've been having some issues that could arguably warrant investigating. I get pins and needles in my left hand when I wake up some mornings. It's completely dead and like I'm wearing a very large glove over it, but after a few minutes of consciousness (usually accompanied by rolling off the...

You can find parts 1 and 2 here and here . Cracking Backs We left the last post having had an "explanation" of the nervous system and how it relates to chiropractic treatment. We begin this post with the chiropractor explaining why patients get their backs "cracked".  The chiropractor explains that the cracking - the noise - is just gas being released from the spine in the same way as we hear a noise when we crack our knuckles. His job is to "find where those misalignments are so that when [he cracks your back] the rest of the body can sort itself out" and the healing process can begin. He gives an example of sciatica, which he says is due to "too much pressure building up in the lower back". The cure is to take pressure off that area so that "the brain can send the information to the right areas".

Part 1 can be found here . The story so far... A bad case of sciatica had driven my sister to the chiropractor. Knowing little about it other than what I learned during the British Chiropractic Association vs. Simon Singh libel case a decade ago, I decided to do a little investigating and see what modern chiropractic treatment entailed. I headed to a local chiropractor to find out. I had a half hour consult, with the report to follow (which will be discussed in a later post). At the end of the consult he recommended that I attend a talk they give explaining chiropractic because they have found that "when people understand why they are coming to see us in the beginning, they tend to respond a lot faster and stay well for longer". They call it a "new patient talk" or a "health talk" and suggested that I attend before my report so it will be in context of the modality. The story continues...

It's been a decade since a libel action was brought by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA, the main association that regulates chiropractors in the UK) against science writer Simon Singh for a piece he wrote in the Guardian during Chiropractic Awareness Week where he said that the BCA " happily promotes bogus treatments ". The case was eventually dropped by the BCA and it led to much-needed revisions of UK libel law, but not before chiropractic underwent a level of public scrutiny it had not faced before. It was an excellent example of the Streisand Effect .

As I was getting ready for bed last night a friend shared a tweet that immediately caught my attention. https://twitter.com/sbattrawden/status/1143465003409915905 The tweet was of a paper that has just been published online, titled "Does physician gender have a significant impact on first-pass success rate of emergency endotracheal intubation?" and showed the abstract which began, It is unknown whether female physicians can perform equivalently to male physicians with respect to emergency procedures. Understandably, this got the backs up of a lot of people, myself included. Who on earth thinks that's a valid question to be researching in this day and age? Are we really still having to battle assumptions of female inferiority when it comes to things like this? Who on earth gave this ethics approval, let alone got it though peer review? I then took a deep breath and asked myself why a respected journal, The American Journal of Emergency Medicine , would publish ...

I was perusing the news over lunch today when this article caught my eye (I can't imagine why!), I had a read and my eyes began to involuntarily roll. This was another of those terrible evo-psych papers I've written about in the past , wasn’t it? After having read the paper the article is based on, and after rescuing my eyes after they fell out of my head and onto the floor from rolling so much, I regret to inform you that yes, it is. The basic set up for the research is that they have a series of photos of men and they ask people to judge the strength of the man in the photo based on the physique of his torso and rate his attractiveness. (I'll get to the 'why' later). The first thing to note is that it's all a bit of a mess. I will try and be brief with the explanation of the method as I know it's incredibly tedious to read, but it really has to be seen to be believed. They have two separate sets of photos, both taken from prior research. The f...

It’s often said that the way to really know if you understand something is to try and explain it to someone else. You’ll soon realise the gaps in your knowledge and the areas you thought you understood but really don’t. 

Has human evolution been influenced by our tendency to fight? If you’ve read the science headlines in recent days you would be forgiven for thinking so. Headlines such as “ The human face developed over 5m years of fisticuffs, scientists claim ” and “ Male faces 'buttressed against punches' by evolution ” have been proclaiming to the world that violence has literally shaped the evolution of our faces. But has it really?