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...
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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...
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On the buses with Boris Johnson…
Last week, Boris Johnson claimed to relax by making model buses in his spare time, which were met with some incredulity. It was widely reported, and the general reaction seemed to be it was yet another bizarre interview, with commentators...
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Tory 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...
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Colour-blindness in Sweden: Revealing the veiled truth
“Our fight against right populism is needed in Europe” The quote above was the campaign slogan of the Center Party (Centerpartiet) in Sweden during the recent EU election, which clearly positioned the party as having an anti-right populist political stance at...
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Simple Solutions for Complex Needs
Magical thinking and multiple, complex needs in the UK In the UK at present, we appear to have an epidemic of magical thinking about the lives of the unhoused victims of universal credit (UC), the ‘20%’ with multiple and complex...
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Her bloody project – managing menstruation at work*
Recent legislative limitations placed on women’s rights to abortion in the US, similar to those in Northern Ireland, are a timely reminder of how certain aspects of society hate and want to control women, and the ways in which that...
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The Colonisation of Pondering and Pottering
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows. No time to see, when woods we pass, Where...
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We’ve Been Here Before…..
Last week’s post by Lesley Henderson on the contemporary anti-vaccination movement’s use of social media, Charlie Davison takes a look at the history of the battle between Public Health and the ‘Anti-Vaxxers’, and finds that things haven’t changed much in over...
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The Anti-Vaxx Movement and New Media
Communicating Public Health in the Changing Landscape of the Anti-Vaxx movement Some of you may already be aware of the latest Netflix documentary Behind the Curve. It focuses on a group of conspiracy theorists who persist in believing that the...
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Urban Nature
There has been a resurgence of interest in the need for more green space in our cities. Being near nature lifts the mood, and there is hard evidence of the positive mental health effects of time spent with nature. However,...
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Doctors as border police: what happened to ‘first, do no harm’?