Health research: what happened to the charcoal?

The report warns against complacency, against the whiggish view that things can only get better; that older customary traditional practices must always give way to the new, modern, and progressive. Yet the report's language is far from a call to arms. Its buzzword slogans about "more research for better health" trade in mood rather than critical thinking. Colourful but indistinct, the use of "mood" is a way of engineering consent, of selling ideas; a method of getting the audience to feel rather than understand. Furthermore, "mood" is powerfully addictive; those who trade in the word find it irresistible that you never need to define what you mean. We believe that making health policy and systems more evidence-based requires more than mood.