Welcome! Greetings. Pull up a drink and sit down.

At some stage I should probably introduce myself, I suppose. I'll let the Nihilist speak for himself, even if that speaking is likely to consist of drunken ramblings interspersed with the occasional cuttingly articulate dummyspit.

I'm a researcher, among other things, for a natural supplement company. I've been working in the alternative therapies industry for the last seven years or so, in a whole variety of roles, and I've encountered an ever surprising range of fuzzy thinking, poor logic, and blind optimism in the face of all apparent fact - as I expected.

What I didn't expect, in my naivety, is to encounter exactly the same thing on the more 'scientific' side of the fence. In my current role, I'm wading through more research papers than I care to think about every work day. And while I knew that medicine was a developing field, I didn't realise just how poorly thought out some of the research contributions were.

I managed to dismiss the first trial I read, that concluded a particular herb wasn't more effective than a placebo, when they used a placebo that contained the herb in it as well, as an oversight.

Then I started reading trials that concluded supplements were ineffective for conditions they weren't clinically used for. Trials that went for too short a time to show a difference in long-term conditions. Placebo-controlled trials that didn't actually say what active ingredient they were testing. And my personal favourite - a study that 'proved' several herbs had potentially negative effects on male fertility... by washing extracted sperm in an alcohol extract of the herbs, and trying to use it to knock up an isolated hamster ovum.

(I'll be pulling that particular study apart later, so if you have a roadkill fascination with drunken sperm trying to get a hamster egg in a testube into the sack, stay tuned.)

It was at this point that my ever patient partner (who I'm tempted to call Mr Flower, but I'd probably better find another nickname for him), pointed out I really should be blogging this shit.

So here I am.