Niqab experiments: don’t do it!
Someone asked on DeenPort earlier today for advice to give to a female Christian friend who wants to do an experiment by wearing niqaab, the face-covering worn by some Muslim women, for a day....
Category: Disability
When is an apology meaningful?
Earlier today I took part in a Facebook discussion about "apologies", in the context of the British government's decision to prohibit blood donations from people who had, or ever had, M.E., in which someone...
On Virginia Ironside, suffering and pillows
This morning, I witnessed an extraordinary exchange on the BBC morning discussion programme, Sunday Morning Live (in the UK, you can watch it on iPlayer here), a somewhat cheaply produced affair in which various...
Afghan gas attacks weren’t hysteria after all
From the New York Times: Blood tests have confirmed that a mysterious series of cases of mass sickness at girls’ schools across the country over the last two years were caused by a powerful...
Replicating spinal cord injuries in Saudi Arabia
Last week there was a news story about a man who faced the prospect of having a spinal cord injury inflicted on him surgically in Saudi Arabia as an Islamically-prescribed retaliatory penalty. The usual...
Daily Mail doctor notices sky is blue
This actually happened a couple of months ago, but I thought I’d comment on it now since it appeared again in Invest in ME’s August newsletter (top article): a doctor named Martin Scurr who...
M.E. and the ethics of testing on sick kids
This past week, two major British M.E. organisations, the Young ME Sufferers Trust and the ME Association, issued a joint statement ([1], [2]) condemning as "unethical" a study, scheduled to start in September, of...
The Court of Little Protection
Yesterday, the BBC station Radio 4 ran a feature on the so-called Court of Protection, the body set up to manage the financial affairs of those who are incapable of doing it themselves, such...
Which of these women looks sick?
ButYouDontLookSick.com is a website by a woman with lupus (she wrote the Spoon Theory I referred to in a previous post). In her biography, she says that, despite suffering a wide range of symptoms...
Review: Lost Voices
Lost Voices is published by Invest in ME, a British charity which concentrates on promoting research into the causes of, and a possible cure for, the debilitating neurological disease, myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME); they have...
Juneteenth and Helen Keller: fabricating a controversy
Just over a week ago, the team behind the blog FWD/Forward decided to hold a "blogswarm" dedicated to busting myths about Helen Keller and demonstrating that there was more to her than the "water...
Why wouldn’t you want to be autistic?
Last week a number of newspapers reported that scientists were "on track to establish the genetic triggers for autism, paving the way for earlier diagnosis of children who could be at risk of developing...
Wakefield, vaccines and ME
Earlier today, Dr Andrew Wakefield, who published a study in the Lancet, a major British medical journal suggesting that the triple vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) might be a cause of autism,...
Guardian on ME and retroviruses, and other press coverage
First of all, this past week has been ME Awareness Week as I mentioned several times in my last article. This fact has got lost in all the election talk as might have been...
Jeremy Vine meets Kay Gilderdale again
This week is ME Awareness Week ([1], [2]), and a number of media appearances and articles have been scheduled, including two appearances from Kay Gilderdale (on Radio 2 today and, allegedly, on GMTV tomorrow...
To extradite a bed-ridden woman
Earlier today I read that a woman from mid-Wales who is bed-ridden with fibromyalgia and also suffers from Crohn’s disease, epilepsy and depression has been refused an appeal in the High Court against extradition...
Me on the Late Show: transcript
Yesterday (Saturday) morning, I got to speak on the Late Show with Joanne Good on BBC London (94.9FM). She was doing a feature on bad comedy, specifically an incident in which Frankie Boyle, a...
Why don’t people abandon support groups with bad policies?
Recently I read an article by Jodi Bassett, a campaigner on ME issues who suffers from the severe form of that illness, on the Planet Thrive website (it’s also posted on her own site)...
Harassment “commonplace” for those with learning disabilities
Last Wednesday in Manchester, a 64-year-old man with learning disabilities, David Askew, collapsed and died after two youths broke down his garden gate and tampered with his mother’s scooter. He had not been physically...
Ricky Gervais on ME, and other bad comedy
Yesterday I had a brief exchange of tweets with Organica, who told me of her enthusiasm for the British comedian, Ricky Gervais, best known for writing and starring in The Office, his stand-up shows,...