Saw the webpage headline. First thought: ewwwwww. Second thought: ooooh, I wonder what that's all about? Answer: a little filiarid worm. FIliarid worms are roundworms (nematodes). I knew about the one that causes the disfiguring disease known as elephantiasis, but hadn't heard about the 'eyeworm', or Loa loa. Elephantiasis is due to lymphatic filiariasis, where the […]
Continue readingMonth: May 2015
‘slapping therapy’ for diabetes, and a child dies
I've heard it said more than once that complementary & alternative medicine (CAM) 'does no harm' – here's just one example. I suppose that could be true of a healthy person using something like homeopathy, where the only harm is likely to be to their wallet. But time and again, forms of CAM have been shown to do harm, […]
Continue readinga learning experiment, and a pleasant surprise
On Wednesday we ran our first whanau tutorial with the first-year students – a class for those students who identify as Māori. The driver for this was the observation that a disproportionate number of the Māori students in my first-year class didn't do well in our first test, & as a result I asked Kevin, our Faculty's senior […]
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