Pulling Over
A kerbside consult is the oldest instrument in medicine. You catch a colleague in the corridor, describe the problem in ninety seconds, and get an honest answer without a referral letter. No fee, no formality, and — the part that matters — no reason to tell you what you want to hear.
That is what this is going to be.
I have been writing on the public internet since 1995, which in Malaysian medical terms makes me an antique. From March 1997 I wrote a monthly column called Cybermed in Berita MMA, under the name Cyberdoc. It ran for the better part of a decade and covered the 1997 haze, Japanese encephalitis, the Sarawak enterovirus outbreak, Nipah, SARS, avian influenza and the Indian Ocean tsunami — mostly while they were still happening, and mostly with a list of links at the bottom telling readers where to look for themselves.
The column has outgrown the newsletter. The pieces I want to write now run to two thousand words with fifteen live references, and a printed newsletter cannot hyperlink, cannot be corrected once it has gone to the printer, and cannot be found by anybody searching three years later. So it moves here.
Who is writing
I am Dr Muruga Vadivale. Forty years in Medical Affairs across Asia-Pacific — Servier, Aventis and Sanofi across ASEAN, India and Korea; Celgene and BMS in haematology-oncology in Seoul and Taipei; most recently building the Asia-Pacific medical function at Novavax. I co-authored Malaysia's Good Clinical Practice Guidelines in 1999 and again in 2004, and founded the SITE cardiometabolic registry, which followed more than 18,000 subjects across eight states. There is more about me here, if you want it.
What to expect
A monthly deadline is a useful thing. It gave me the discipline to produce something every month for the better part of a decade, and I doubt the archive would exist without it. I intend to keep to roughly that rhythm — an article a month where I can — but without the pressure of a printer's schedule behind it. Some months there may be two. Some months there may be none, and nothing bad will happen. That is the one real advantage of publishing this way.
Medicine, public health and health policy, with a bias towards Malaysia and the region — outbreaks, climate and health, road safety, licensing and regulation, and the recurring distance between what the evidence says and what gets announced at a press conference.
Every piece ends with an annotated list of sources worth your own time. That habit is thirty years old and it is not going anywhere.
How I work
Claims get checked against the primary source, not against the newspaper's account of it, and not against a review's summary of a study. In preparing the first pieces for this site I had to withdraw three statements and reverse one conclusion outright — in the last case because a study published in January 2025 pointed the other way from the literature I had been relying on. Where the evidence is genuinely contested, I will say so rather than picking whichever side makes the tidier argument.
These pieces are researched with AI assistance. Every factual claim is then checked by me against its primary source, and the sources are linked so you can check them too. The judgements, the arguments and the errors are mine.
Corrections and right of reply
If you find an error here, please write to me. I would far rather be corrected by a reader than left in print being wrong.
Every correction is checked. Where one is made, it appears at the foot of the article it concerns, with the date and a plain note of what changed, and the change itself is highlighted in the text. Corrections are not made silently. Anyone who points out an error is credited by name at the foot of that article, unless they would rather not be.
The same applies to anyone written about here. If you are named, or your organisation is, and you believe something is wrong or unfair, write to me and I will look at it promptly. Where a correction is warranted I will make it. Where we simply disagree, I will publish your response alongside the piece, in your own words and at reasonable length, provided it is signed.
Broken links are a separate matter. Sources cited here were live at the time of writing; where a link has since died I try to replace it, but I do not swap in a newer source to prop up a claim without saying so.
How I source. Where a claim concerns what a person, ministry or company has done or said, I link to the published record — a statement, a report, a court filing, a news account — rather than to my own characterisation of it. Where I am drawing an inference of my own, I say so. Where the evidence is contested, I say that too. Readers are welcome to follow every link and reach a different conclusion.
Reader correspondence published here is moderated. I do not publish allegations against named individuals or companies that I have not been able to verify myself.
I have no commercial relationship with any party mentioned in these pages unless I say so in the piece itself. Where a topic touches on work I have done or clients I have advised, I disclose it.
None of this is medical advice, and nothing here substitutes for your own doctor or for the judgement of the person actually treating you. I am writing for colleagues, and for anyone who would rather see the working than be handed a conclusion.
Pull up a chair. The kerb is free.