free link to my BMJ article here. I am wondering if this is the first time the Daily Mash has been quoted in the BMJ, along with the excellent DC, Northern Doctor, and the Quackometer. DC has done a good job with the follow up in the BJGP, which I don’t find satisfactory; see here, […]
Continue Reading →The NHS opened up to devastation
Guardian: “He pointed out that the former prime minister’s abnormal heart rhythms could today be treated by using the telephone to measure the heart beats and give an instant diagnosis, followed by a call from a nurse advising on whether the patient needed to “go to hospital or not”. “You could cut dramatically the number […]
Continue Reading →BMJ: the scam of integrative medicine
Here. (I will take down the text once have toll free link from bmj.) There’s been a shift in the world of alternative NHS medicine. I know, I know, alternative so called medicine is only medicine that doesn’t work: so how come it’s still chumming up with our evidence aware NHS? It’s not, you see, […]
Continue Reading →Waterlogged?
an article in the BMJ following on from posts earlier about the Hydration for Health adverts on the BMJ website.
Continue Reading →DVT, uncertainty and hospitals
You and Yours today had a feature about thrombosis. They suggest on their website that “hospitals are failing to risk assess patients for DVT resulting in thousands dying needlessly”. The mortality issue around preventing DVT – blood clots – in hospitals is a very interesting one. NICE guidelines last year said that ” A note of […]
Continue Reading →Coalition loses it : the NHS really is for sale
“And in all these areas, the data will be updated regularly,” he said. Whitehall sources say that clinical audit data will show which GPs have never diagnosed a case of cancer, for example. The figures will be available from December. Information about individual GP practices will also be made available with patients able to judge […]
Continue Reading →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 […]
Continue Reading →New law on irradiating well people: will it stop screening companies profiting?
I don’t know. I hope so. An amendment has been made to the Ionising Radiation (Medical Exposure) (Amendment) Regulations 2011. It comes into force on July 25th. It says that “At the end of regulation 3(a) (application) of the Ionising Radiation (Medical Exposure) Regulations 2000(3) after “medical diagnosis or treatment” insert “, including any exposure […]
Continue Reading →The Surgical Checklist – twitter journal club
Quite excited about Twitter journal club, which is 8pm on Sunday @twitjournalclub The paper for TODAY(!) is “A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population“. At the time it was published ,in 2009 in the NEJM, I had concerns about it, here. A few other people did too, but criticisms […]
Continue Reading →Instantly diagnosing mild dementia; not possible/not desirable
Today GPs are no good at diagnosing dementia. Clare Gerada did good work on You and Yours today discussing a paper just out from Leicester University. The press release says that “general practitioners (GPs) are struggling to correctly identify people in the early stages of dementia resulting in both missed cases (false negatives) and misidentifications […]
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