The Lancet has run a Consensus Statement about preventing breast cancer. They say “Many risk factors have been established for breast cancer, the most informative of which are family history of the disease, especially at a young age, increased mammographic breast density, some menstrual and reproductive factors, and proliferative benign disease. Various models have been […]
Continue Reading →What medical intuition/sixth sense really is
rapid Bayesian reasoning. at least, I think so. Very interesting talk last night by John Gillies, chair of RCGP Scotland. of which more later.
Continue Reading →“Consent rituals”, meaningful decision making, and ethics
Gerd Gigerenzer and Muir Gray’s new book is out: Better Doctors, Better Patients, Better Decisions. The message is that patients have to be involved in making decisions about their health, and I couldn’t disagree. As Gigerenzer (one of my heroes) has pointed out in Reckoning with Risk, the numbers we base our decisions on, however, […]
Continue Reading →How useful are lifetime risks of disease?
Free access to an article in the BMJ about the hype over ‘1 in 8’ women will get breast cancer, here.
Continue Reading →Well enough to work
An article about Atos and their work capability assessments, in the BMJ, here. I am finding, often, a distinct lack of co-operation when it comes to polite and basic questions being asked of companies who are contracted to provide services to the Government. I wanted to know about Atos recruitment, audit and training; they didn’t […]
Continue Reading →Surgery for spectators
There’s a lot of press coverage about a piece by Simon Chapman in the BMJ. He describes a charity auction where one prize was to attend a neurosurgical operation. He thinks it was wrong to do so; so do I. Yet this is the logical outcome of so many voyeristic cameras in the consulting room. […]
Continue Reading →Ghosts in the machine
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 →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 →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 →If you’re over 65…
and you live in Scotland, you have something in common with people who have been imprisoned for 5 years or more, people who have been detained in borstal, and people on bail in connection with criminal proceedings. You are “not qualified for jury service”. I find this very ageist. Judges can go on until they […]
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