My mother always had at the back of her mind that a pandemic was imminent, even in the late 1960s. She was a child in 1918-19 when the Spanish flu swept through the world killing one in 10 or one in seven depending on where you lived (a few places had it lighter than that). [...]

There are quite a number of articles in the medical literature about vitamin D and cancer. A lot of them don’t show any impact of vitamin D on survival or avoidance of cancer. However when I burrow into the methods and results sections of the papers I usually find that the amounts of vitamin D [...]

This is another of my medical updates – this time looking at the effect of vitamin D on heart disease. Vitamin D is the vitamin you get from sunlight and from cod liver oil and a few other sources. It is largely associated in people’s minds with bone strength and ricketts in children (or it [...]

I am starting to find a whole lot of medical articles on the importance of vitamin D – that’s the vitamin that you get from being out in the direct sunlight. We have been very heavy here in Australia and New Zealand in applying sun screen to avoid skin cancer. In New Zealand it was [...]

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking – that’s one of my hobbies, thinking – about the issue of loneliness as one gets older, in fact at any time. You can be happy with your circle of family, friends and associates and then something changes everything. It could be that you have to shift for [...]

I’ve been busy writing, well editing to be precise. My book is now being read by people who are telling me which bits don’t read well and when I have written “which” when I should have written “that” and so on.
Way back in the early 1980s I started researching recovery from diseases that were generally [...]

I hope this is not a repeat of what I’ve written before, but I don’t think so.
A friend of mine was devastated to be told she had breast cancer. The diagnosis left her speechless and desperate for anything that could be done to help her. She was told that breast cancer killed more women between [...]