I have spent almost a quarter of a century as a conventionally qualified doctor practising two forms of complementary medicine, acupuncture and homoeopathy, within the NHS. I have always felt it was an important part of the job to tell patients what ...

Far from "scientific evaluation" providing an objective and disinterested means of clarifying the relative efficacy of "scientific" and "complementary" medicine, such a methodology, steeped as it is in the ideologies of modern technocratic science, i...

It is, of course, exporters who make the most noise, while estate agents slap another pounds 10,000 on the asking price in silence, which makes it sound as if things are worse than they are. Nor should we be too distracted by the illusion that the As...

For all the talk of a brand new body, one hears of many people being invited to apply including members of the old council, one of whom has already served 11 consecutive years. My fear now is that some art forms will continue to be represented on Cou...

This is rather a good moderniser's account of what happened to the 1974- 79 Labour Government. (Even without adding the words "including calling in the IMF" at the end of the first sentence in the quotation). It conjures vividly the spectre which hau...

JOHN A DAVIS Cambridge

In the meantime, how can I ensure that my clients are getting value for money? First, I ask them some detailed questions about their health problem and how it affects them. Second, I ask how they would know if their problem was to improve. Third, I c...

"Norman Lamont is after my job," according to Tory Euro leader Edward McMillan-Scott, as reported in Wednesday's Daily Telegraph. "Not helpful," was the Boy Wonder's response to this accusation. "Not true," was former Tory MP Lamont's riposte. But wh...

That an unfit 31-year-old with a nicotine, alcohol and kebab dependency is so vital to the team demonstrates the weakness both of our national squad and the game in this country. The tears of the nation are not for Gazza, but for the dearth of real f...

The strategy of sanctions will not work, as they hit the poor and will simply exacerbate the many problems facing South Asia. It reflects the neo-imperialist attitude of some Western countries. We need to identify the urgent problems in the context o...

Despite these cost-cutting strategies I was very hard up. Each day I calculated whether or not I had enough money for the return bus fare between digs and college, a packet of ten Park Drive, a cream cheese sandwich, a cup of coffee and two games of ...

Recently a call to my local cinema to reserve seats resulted in a peak- rate call to Inverness which cost almost 10 per cent of the price of the tickets. I am increasingly attracted to companies which offer Freefone numbers. R S LETCH Maulden, Bedfor...

The ills you describe are not apparent in New York, which spent pounds 138 per person last year, Norway a similar amount and Massachusetts pounds 322. The difference is that all these hugely successful lotteries did not need to lose hundreds of milli...

Thus it was in Croatia. Thus it was again in Bosnia. And now, it seems, we are seeing a repeat performance in Kosovo. None can say that this is an unexpected war. On the contrary, there have been predictions of conflagration ever since the Balkan war...

Of the many inaccuracies in his piece, which reads as an apologia for some of the more extravagant Hindu nationalist claims, one could cite the image of Tamberlaine as a Muslim fundamentalist hell-bent on slaying Hindus; a claim which ignores the fac...

No. Paul Gascoigne is yesterday's news. Yesterday's news is here today and gone tomorrow. And gone for ever? Certainly not. Yesterday's news always comes back when you have forgotten all about it. Sometimes it comes back as "Where Are They Now?" Some...