The State of Medicine – keeping the promise of the NHS I am furious, sad and scared for the state of the NHS…. The NHS is ‘the closest thing the UK has to a national religion’. No wonder: it has worked secular miracles. Before the NHS, sick children could not see a doctor before a […]

Testosterone https://www.nice.org.uk/Guidance/NG23 Click to access MenMed_0512.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3474615/ http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0707302#t=article

public-health-paper-receptionists The media coverage today has been ridiculous. The paper asked people what might happen, not what had happened. experiment: here’s storify from earlier on twitter  

Conservative party speech.    I’m not going to check every sentence. I’m going to examine the bigger claims that I am concerned about. “But the truth is that for many years we have had the lowest cancer survival rates in Western Europe.” The most recent EUROCARE study published in 2015 examines the cohort of patients […]

Midwives in NZ – study  headlines here and here  Cochrane review  NICE guidance  Pathways for maternity care  RCT examples   Aspirin, stroke units stroke units 

report on lack of equal access to treatments original meta analysis in Lancet   Early consensus statements http://m.annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/01/28/annonc.mdv617.short?rss=1

Things I said: GP Forward View, again raising concerns that there is a lot of non evidenced policy in there. This seems to be pushing ahead despite a lack of evidence to say whether this is safe, effective, or ends up pushing more resources at people who already had more resources and could potentially widen health […]

Things I said: GP Forward View, again raising concerns that there is a lot of non evidenced policy in there. This seems to be pushing ahead despite a lack of evidence to say whether this is safe, effective, or ends up pushing more resources at people who already had more resources and could potentially widen […]

Realistic medicine report  Prudent practice  Choosing wisely  JAMA study MRI in normal people  and here  NNTs for codeine NNTs for gabapentin I didn’t ask to be ICE’d   Measuring medicine RCT from the US  paracetamol sliding scale  

NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens ‘obesity is the new smoking’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-29253071 https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/31/obesity-new-smoking-nhs-england-chief-executive parallels smoking in 70s 1974 half of men smoked now 22% women 41% 1974 now 19% http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/risk/tobacco#heading-Three obesity in 2010s 1993 about 14% men and 17% women obese 2014 – 25% of each https://www.noo.org.uk/NOO_about_obesity/adult_obesity/UK_prevalence_and_trends smoking – difference more than double in highest […]