Pretty soon, it might well make more sense to ask who isn’t on statins, rather than who is. More than three million people are estimated to take these cholesterol-lowering pills – mainly to help reduce the risk of heart disease – and recent plans to offer everyone over 40 a cardiac risk assessment could more […]
Continue Reading →Nurses at the door
It was reported today that East Lancashire Primary Care Trust have a plan to deal with overweight schoolchildren. When the children return to school after the summer holidays they are to be weighed, and, if overweight, apparently they and their families will be ‘cold-called’ by nurses, who will then encourage them to lose weight. But […]
Continue Reading →Trials and tribulations
There’s an interesting comment piece by Professor Mary Dixon-Woods in the Lancet Oncology this week. The ‘Research Ethics Committee’ approval, which is required before a clinical trial can begin, has been criticised by some doctors as being too slow, too burdensome, and inconsistent. The concern has been that the process of gaining ethical approval for a study […]
Continue Reading →The latest wonder drug
The problem with so many ‘wonder drugs’ is that one is prone to wonder drug fatigue. So is the new prostate cancer drug, abiraterone, lauded on so many front pages today the real thing? “Cancer drug could save the lives of 10,000 a year” says the Times, and it’s a big ‘could’. It’s a bit unusual for a study containing only 21 patients […]
Continue Reading →Welcome
Hello. I am a GP in Glasgow and write the Second Opinion column in the FT magazine. My column used to be in the FT Weekend Life and Arts Section, and can be found here . I am hoping that this blog will be a forum for discussion of some of the myriad problems in healthcare, especially […]
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