When I was a medical student, I went to lectures which told me that HRT was going to stop everything from dementia to heart attacks to teeth falling out. I hardly prescribe it now, such are the hazards, especially of breast cancer, and given that the long term benefits are not what we were sold. […]
Continue Reading →Tell me the truth about Fit Notes
So the big idea was that people who were off work due to illness might be able to do some work, perhaps not their regular work, or perhaps people returning to work while recovering from illness might be better having a graduated return. Rather than simply signing people off work while ill and then back […]
Continue Reading →Medicating children for ‘psychosis’
This very insightful article from the NY Times explores the consequences of labelling a pre-school child with behaviour problems with severe mental illness. This US view is disturbing, from the ease of which anti-psychotic medication is prescribed off-license, to the pharmaceutical company who supplied promotional building bricks to use in the waiting room. In the […]
Continue Reading →Avastin and cost effectiveness
I can’t understand the blame being apportioned in press coverage over NICE’s decision not to fund Avastin, or bevacizumab, for the treatment of advanced bowel cancer. Many patients groups are laying the blame with NICE. Is this fair? The important bit to me is ‘cost effectiveness’. It isn’t about either cost or effectiveness alone. While […]
Continue Reading →Religious doctors and death
A paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics is suggesting that non religious doctors “were more likely than others to report having given continuous deep sedation until death, having taken decisions they expected or partly intended to end life” . This seems to have caused some furore on Radio 4 this am with a discussion about whether […]
Continue Reading →Patient choice and doctor-mediated injury
So here’s patient choice for you. Rugby player, mid-match, asks his doctor to have a small cut made in his lip. Doctor says no. He asks again. So she makes a small injury, which means that he can be substituted and thus has repercussions on the competition: Dr Wendy Chapman, now obviously regretful of her actions now […]
Continue Reading →Sense on genetic screening from the USA
Great to see some straight talking common sense from the US. Just because you can have your genome dissected, doesn’t mean you should pay a few hundred pounds for your ‘genetic risk assessment’ as several UK and US websites currently offer. These tests may need FDA approval, says this piece from the New England Journal of […]
Continue Reading →Is your doctor a ‘high flyer’ or a ‘rule bound’?
The latest on AstraZeneca, who are having to pay 198 million US dollars to patients who have developed diabetes on the anti psychotic drug quetiapine is only one bit of a long story. The challenge being made is that the weight gain and tendency to diabetes for some patients was known by AstraZeneca but not acknowledged fully on the […]
Continue Reading →NHS cash for homeopathy
With all the cutbacks to NHS services, it’s worrying to note this job for a homoeopath in Dundee. Thanks to DC for drawing my attention to it – and applying …
Continue Reading →Is UK cancer survival so bad?
The idea that the UK is a bad place to get treated as cancer seems to have been accepted as truth by certain sections of the media. It just isn’t : I’ve been trying to say so for a while with no success whatsoever. Anyway this editorial in the BMJ looks at the reliablity of […]
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