What I’ve been doing recently Since August 1995 I've been a freelance, writing books and features, and occasionally teaching journalism at university. At the science journal Nature I was a member of the team that exposed an attempt to publish faked research, which led to an official investigation. I have written for newspapers (Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror); for numerous magazines including Nature, Best, Men's Health, Shape, New Woman and Health & Fitness; and for websites including Channel 4.

How it all started I began work as a reporter on London local newspapers, covering crime, politics and flower shows. Then I went off travelling around Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. I lived on freelance journalism and casual employment, including working for an Aboriginal organisation in central Australia, as a stringer for the ABC (Australia's equivalent of the BBC ) and teaching English in China.

Meanwhile, I wrote on all kinds of subjects. Some of my favourites were a story about Chinese opera (my passion at the time) and a series for the national press about the way Aboriginal groups were taking up computer use faster and more creatively than the general population.

My favourite interviewee? For Vogue: the writer Jessica Mitford, who shocked aristocratic London in the 1930s by running off to the Spanish Civil War and who gave me an interview at dawn on a trip to Sydney in her 70s.

Why I ask so many questions My newspaper background shapes the way I research and write. The question at the back of my mind when interviewing an official expert or reading a report is still "What am I not being told?".

An issue that interests me is: how much can we trust claims made for products, or even published research? How reliable is a study of, say, a new drug or product, when it's funded by the makers of that drug or product?

I've seen enough evidence to believe that complementary therapies can do a lot of good -- much more than we've yet discovered -- but that those on offer cover the spectrum from admirable to absolute rip-off. I've found a similar range in orthodox medicine, from breakthroughs to lethal 'remedies'. And I've learnt how to pick up clues that a claim is not all it seems.