Helen Jaques

I was looking through my blog stats today and spotted that I had a few referals from http://onespot.wsj.com/health/2009/01/29/270945597-health-bloggers-bite-back-as.  Check it: Yup, it looks like The Wall Street Journal website has aggregated the blog post I wrote this week about the Wellsphere kerfuffle. A quick bit of research and I have discovered that OneSpot.com is a [...]

Wellsphere, a health community website that brings together information from more than 1,500 medical experts and bloggers, has been sold to HealthCentral Network, a collection medical information websites and condition-specific portals. Dr Geoffrey Rutledge, Chief Medical Information Officer of Wellsphere, generated content for his site by sending flattering emails to thousands of medicine and health [...]

Although the schoolyard rumours that masturbation causes blindness or hairy palms aren’t true, a new study published in BJU International has found that too much playing solo in your twenties and thirties can increase the risk of prostate cancer. The study of more than 800 men found that a high level of sexual activity or [...]

Domestic violence against women, more specifically violence perpetrated by a partner or spouse, is an important problem worldwide.  A 2005 study by the World Health Organization that assessed 24,000 women in 10 countries found that between 15% and 71% of women had experienced physical or sexual violence, or both, at the hands of their partner.  [...]

Last week the US Food and Drug Administration ruled that the pharmaceutical industry could promote drugs for uses that haven’t been cleared by the regulatory body.  The new FDA guidelines permit the “dissemination of medical journal articles and medical or scientific reference publications on unapproved uses of drugs and medical devices.” In order to be [...]

A study published in Annals of Internal Medicine has found that men with a stressful job are twice as likely to have a stroke than are men with less demanding jobs.  Interestingly, there was no correlation between job stress and incidence of stroke among women. A stroke occurs when the blood supply to the brain [...]

The British Heart Foundation has launched a new advertising campaign that features an amazing real-time simulation of a beating heart. The campaign confronts viewers with the perhaps gory but nevertheless fascinating reality of the most vital of vital organs, and challenges them to think about heart and circulatory disease – Britain’s biggest killer. British Heart [...]

A study of nearly 1,400 adult and pediatric cancer patients published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology has found that 19% of children taking chemotherapy drugs in outpatient clinics or at home were subject to some sort of medication error.  In addition, 7% of adult cancer outpatients also were on the receiving end of chemotherapy [...]

I recently blogged about the alarming rates of obesity among children in England, with one in four 4-5 year old children and one in three 10-11 year olds in this country obese or overweight. The Foresight report, published in 2007, ominously predicts that by 2050 90% of British children will be overweight or obese. The [...]