Medicine is an inexact science, which is rather a contradiction in terms, but in dealing with patients’ problems doctors can seldom be absolutely certain of anything. That is why medical students are taught to be wary of using the words ‘always’ and ‘never’. Indeed, general practice has been called 'the art of managing uncertainty,' because one often sees [...]

There was a news item on the BBC recently about a trial of cannabis in patients with Parkinson’s disease who also have visual hallucinations. Parkinson’s disease is undoubtedly a brain disorder but are visual hallucinations also abnormal? One such patient was presented, an elderly man who had hallucinations – they might better be called visions – of his [...]

What has Professor David Nutt been up to lately? He’s been appointed Chief Research Officer, no less, to an organisation with the unpronounceable name of Awakn [sic] Life Sciences. And what will his role be? It’s as muddled as the name and repetitively set out thus: Prof. Nutt Will Drive Progression of a Pipeline of New Psychedelic Medicines, [...]

Many medical research papers are difficult to understand: they're written in an opaque style replete with jargon, commonly use non-standard abbreviations, and contain many unnecessary words. Often the sentences are so long that it’s difficult to hold in one’s mind the ideas being presented at the beginning until the end, so there's a tendency uncritically to accept what [...]