Poor Mojo's Newswire

Mr Steer managed to excavate it using a rope to carry out the debris with the help of a friend before discovering an old sword. "It was hidden at a 45 degree angle and sort of just fell out. It looks like an old peasant's fighting weapon because it appears to be made up of bits of metal all knocked together," he added. According to Mr Steer's research, the land on which his house in Mannamead Road now stands was woodland until 1895, with Drake's leat running through it. The watercourse was built in the 16th century by Sir Francis Drake to carry water from Dartmoor to Plymouth. He said: "I've been doing lots of research into its history but I'd like to try and find someone to date it. "I love the well and think it's fascinating. I'd love to find out who was here before us. I've got a piece of Plymouth's history in my front room."

We don’t need to know how it works to know if it works. Acupuncture has been tested repeatedly and found wanting. Studies have shown that it doesn’t matter where you stick the needles, and it doesn’t matter whether you pierce the skin. Stimulating intact skin with toothpicks or electricity works just as well. The crucial factor seems to be whether patients believe they are getting acupuncture. The claimed benefits of acupuncture range from treating infertility to aiding smoking cessation, but the evidence argues against its usefulness for anything but easing pain and possibly nausea. A recent comprehensive review of the literature by Edzard Ernst found little evidence that acupuncture is even truly effective for pain. He also found 95 published cases of serious adverse effects, including death. There is a double standard here: The quality of evidence offered to support acupuncture would not pass muster for a proposed prescription drug. Some acupuncturists have accepted that the evidence is lacking and are now saying: “Maybe it’s just a placebo, but let’s use it anyway. Placebos are good.” But placebos amount to lying to the patient. Surely our troops deserve better. The Air Force is training its doctors in “battlefield acupuncture,” mainly due to the efforts of one man, Col. Richard Niemtzow. He reports that there are 40 physicians practicing acupuncture in the military, and that he and one other practice it full-time. He teaches ear acupuncture, a modern variant invented in 1957 by Paul Nogier, a French doctor. Nogier imagined that the external ear looked something like a fetus curled up in the womb. He imagined that every part of the body was represented on the auricle, the outer part of the ear, and that stimulating points on this homunculus could affect distant corresponding organs. (This kind of thinking was parodied in the BMJ in John McLachlan’s butt reflexology spoof, in which he pretended to have found that all parts of the body were represented on the buttocks and that inserting needles there was more effective than using the traditional acupuncture points.) Niemtzow has further refined ear acupuncture to five points on the ear stimulated with short needles that fit under a helmet. He has published no credible clinical research to show that this works. The Navy offers a training course for physicians that was enthusiastically described by Capt. Elwood Hopkins in a three-part article for Navy Medicine Live. It is a sad account of a doctor being led down the garden path by a charismatic acupuncturist. The teacher offered biased information, and the student succumbed to a series of logical fallacies, allowing himself to be seduced by anecdotal evidence.

The “Who’s Your Daddy” recreational vehicle is selling DNA tests, mostly to fathers who suspect their children may not actually be theirs. “They flag us down, they pull us over, they talk to us,” owner and operator Jared Rosenthal said Wednesday. “Sometimes, because of the nature of the services, they want to be a little more discreet about it, but they do come or they’ll call the number.” In this business, Rosenthal said he deals with all kinds of crazy situations all day, every day. “We have people that want to get the specimen from their spouse without them knowing about it,” Rosenthal said. “We deal with a lot of drama, it’s constant drama.” There have been instances where men have walked in with a baby to give DNA samples only to find out later they’re not related. When asked by CBS 2’s Dave Carlin why he was taking the DNA test from the traveling truck, one unidentified man explained, “I’m paying child support anyways and I would do it anyways. You just want to know.”