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Weekend death rates; confusion and hype

The Today programme have said that there is  ” fresh evidence that people who are admitted to hospitals in England at weekends face a significantly increased risk of death.”  4 days ago, the Telegraph reported that Andrew Lansley had decided to fund hospitals to work 24/7 with no weekend change to staffing, and the report cites […]

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False hope and real living

The Quackometer has had some rather unpleasant emails following his criticism of the Burzynski clinic. The issue is that some people wanted to kindly raise money for a child with cancer to be treated there, when the evidence for the proffered interventions is questionable. Other people have examined the science very well. There is something […]

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NSAIDs and cardiac arrhythmias

I am beginning to understand Twitter a bit. I was intending to go and write about the headlines earlier this week, about NSAIDs and the risk of cardiac arrhythmias, which made several front pages earlier this week. The Metro put it like this ” popular painkillers such as ibuprofen can put patients at risk of heart […]

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Is the US waking up to the harms of screening?

Thanks to Joe Stirt for this. This Washington Post article seems to suggest that there is at least a little bit of light emerging in the debate about breast screening. But they don’t go far enough – breast screening causes harm, tangible, real harm, to women who are diagnosed with tumours that would never have […]

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