Today in the office,  someone came out of left field and asked me what I thought about the use of cinnamon for the control of their hypertension.  Keeping a somewhat straight face, I said I would look into it, but hadn't heard much about it.

It's funny how the news cycle can turn regular people just doing their jobs into overnight celebrities.

The Chile quake, obviously, is a huge catastrophe, and it will be days before we fully understand the magnitude of the damage.  As a resident of a quake-prone part of the world, I commiserate with residents near Santiago.

What amazes me is that there is official funding for homeopathic remedies and even hospitals (!) in the British healthcare system, the NHS.

I applaud the NHS for issuing a strongly-worded statement about homeopathy.  Perhaps they are still smarting over the Wakefield MMR autism scandal, and looking for low-hanging fruit to go after.

Homeopathy is founded on several non-rational tenets such as the law of similars, and the concept of "miasms." 

A study undertaken by Dr. Mark Heaney and colleagues at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York published findings yesterday claiming that Vitamin C supplements may reduce the efficacy of cancer drugs including Novartis' Gleevec. Vitamin C treated human cancer cells were tested with chemotherapy drugs in lab dishes. The drugs administered killed between thirty and seventy percent less tumour cells than if the human cancer cells had not been treated with Vitamin C. The results were published in the medical research journal Cancer Research.