BC HEALTH
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Folks, we need to talk about this Vitamin D trial. I have no stake in this game - take Vitamin D if you want but this pre-print is super sus.

The paper is presented as a randomized trial of vitamin D supplementation in hospitalized patients with COVID. Interesting and important question! And the results appear dramatic:
If true, this would be one of (if not THE most) effective treatments for COVID. But there are problems...
The first clue something is up is that the randomized groups aren't the same size:
It took me a while to figure out why this was, then I saw in the text that INDIVIDUALS were not randomized, WARDS in the hospital were.
OK - 8 wards, 5 randomized to Vitamin D, 3 to usual care. (Why not 4 and 4?? - but whatever). So this is actually a CLUSTER-randomized trial. That means you need to use CLUSTERED statistics to analyze it. They do not.
This is a big problem. But there is more. It seems that, even if the wards were randomized, the PATIENTS weren't randomized to the wards.
In other words, some hospital wards take different patients than others (different risk factors, etc). This is why we see this really weird finding in Table 1:
Baseline vitamin D levels dramatically lower in the "non-treated" group. Why? Preseumaby because different types of people got admitted to the wards than were randomized to usual care.
You'd expect people with low levels of Vitamin D to do worse - that has been shown multiple times - perhaps because higher Vitamin D levels are associated with less comorbidities.
Here's their Kaplan-Meier curve. It doesn't make sense. What do they mean by 'cumulative hazard' of mortality? What units are these? The overall mortality was 10% by their report.
I get frustrated with peer-review too, but this is why it's so important. This is super basic stuff - you don't call your study a randomized trial when it's a cluster randomized trial. And peer-reviewers would 100% have asked them to go back and redo the stats.
The authors could solve this, btw, by releasing a de-identified dataset (including the ward number) for this study. We could analyze it in about an hour at least for topline results using appropriate stats.
And again, is there harm from Vitamin D? Minimal honestly. The harm from promotion of studies like this is tweets like this that try to dissuade people from getting vaccinated and doing other protective measures.
https://t.co/XVmsiajpBr
So please, read skeptically. Pre-prints have been a boon in COVID times but this study is just... not well done. Be aware. (/END)

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THIS IS A CATCHY & ATTENTION-GRABBING TITLE

Today, the Province will likely announce what zone of the reopening framework we'll shift into as of Tuesday. Whatever is announced, though, doesn't change what we need to do. Why?

Kindly read these 14 tweets & we'll tell you. (1/14)

Fun fact: COVID-19 does not follow us on Twitter. COVID doesn't know, or particularly care, if we're in the Red or Orange zone.

The behaviours of the virus do not depend on the current ‘zone’ of public health restrictions. And, to be perfectly candid, neither should ours. (2/14)

Once upon a time we used to say #WeAreInThisTogether in our messaging. Here's the thing: we are, but we aren't. Not everyone is experiencing this pandemic the same.

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Some thoughts on this: Firstly, it might be personal preference, but I am not keen on this kind of campaign as I feel like it trivialises cancer. Sometimes the serious message gets lost because people are sharing pics of cats or whatever and the important context is gone.


More importantly, the statistic being used in the campaign is misleading. It says 57% of women put off cervical screening if they can't get waxed. But on further investigation, that's not accurate.

The page here goes on to say "57% of women who regularly have their pubic hair professionally removed would put off attending their cervical screening appointment if they hadn’t been able to visit a beauty salon."

So the 57% represents a concern not across the whole population of women, but only those who regularly get waxed. So how big of an issue is this across the whole population? And what else is stopping people getting smears?

I think campaigns for cancer screening are really tricky because there is so much nuance that often doesn't fit into a catchy headline or hashtag. It's certainly not easy and is part of a bigger conversation.
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Ashtangha Yoga or the eight limbs of Yoga-


Many people think Yoga is just an Indian physical exercise but that's wrong. Yoga is a way to connect with the Supreme in Hinduism and attain Moksha(liberation).
The proper yoga as described in Hindu scriptures consists of 8 limbs:

1) Yamas- They are the 5 ethical rules of Hinduism. The 5 Yamas are:
i) Ahimsa: Nonviolence (this also includes not eating meat)
ii) Satya: truthfulness
iii) Asteya: non-stealing
iv) Brahmacharya: chastity, sexual restraint
v) Aparigraha: non-avarice, non-possessiveness

2) Niyamas- They are the 5 "do's". The five Niyamas are:
i) Shaucha: purity of mind, speech and body
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3) Aasana or the physical yoga-
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