Daily Archives: July 13, 2012

Alan Cassels: Seeking Sickness

Alan Cassels wrote Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease, which is all:

Why wouldn’t you want to be screened to see if you’re at risk for cancer, heart disease, or another potentially lethal condition? After all, better safe than sorry. Right?

Not so fast, says Alan Cassels. His Seeking Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening, where well-meaning practitioners and a profit-motivated industry offer to save our lives by exploiting our fears. He writes that promoters of screening overpromise on its benefits and downplay its harms, which can range from the merely annoying to the life threatening. If you’re facing a screening test for breast or prostate cancer, high cholesterol, or low testosterone, someone is about to turn you into a patient. You need to ask yourself one simple question: Am I ready for all the things that could go wrong?

Desiree Schell will interview Alan Cassels before a live internet audience on Skeptically Speaking this Sunday night. Details here.

A Brief History of Infinity

Brian Clegg, author of A Brief History of Infinity: The Quest to Think the Unthinkable, was the guest on Skeptically Speaking last Sunday. I’m sorry I missed it, but I was recovering from several days hanging out with the very host of that show mostly working and hardly sleeping.

It will be available for download some time today (should be up by now).

Click here to get to the download link: #172 A Brief History of Infinity