Normally this blog is about relatively silly things, I’m happy to admit. Is red wine good for you? (No.) Are high heels good for you? (No.) I mean, it’s worth debunking that sort of nonsense when newspapers print it, but I don’t pretend that I’m fighting some moral crusade.
Most of the time, anyway. But there is a basic moral point to all this. The things we do have consequences. If we didn’t think, that in some way, the things we write affect people’s behaviour, then why the hell do we do it?
So imagine my surprise, then, when I read in the Daily Mail — the second most widely read newspaper in Britain, and purveyor of the most widely read newspaper website in the world — the phrase ‘Homeopathy CAN cure Ebola but red tape officials are stopping us‘ (that’s an online summary headline: the piece itself is titled ‘Homeopathy CAN cure Ebola’: Doctors attack ‘armchair intellectuals’ at World Health Organisation who refuse to let them treat deadly virus with snake venom remedy’).
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