From the BMJ . I think very interesting: there is mounting evidence that salt is a problem, but the campaigns to tell us to add less salt to our food seem increasingly futile: you need manufacturers on board. I love salt, but I love it more because when I add it rarely it tastes better: […]
Continue Reading →Making Sense of Statistics
A new guide from Sense about Science, and a very good resource.
Continue Reading →and while on the GMC website
a practitioner of ‘live-blood analysis’ is to attend a Fitness to Practice enquiry this week. A quick google reveals quite a few other medical practitioners offering this non evidence based test in the UK; for example “Every person should have this test because it is the ultimate preventative medicine tool available today”; it costs about 150 pounds. […]
Continue Reading →David Southall restored to the medical register
After a very long time. Part of the problem with getting to the truth has been the media reporting of Southall’s work. This article by Iain Chalmers and the late Edmund Hey is hard hitting and worth reading.
Continue Reading →The end of the Prince’s Health charity. Three cheers
You couldn’t make it up. The Princes Foundation for Integrated Health is closing as a result of fraud investigation. Two people have been arrested on suspicion of fraud. Rather amusingly, the trustees are claiming that the aims of the Foundation (integration of what we might term non evidence into versus evidence based treatments) have been […]
Continue Reading →more on colorectal screening…
A couple of quotes from this weeks’ BMJ. “Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, called on the next government to add the test to the existing national bowel screening programme as one of its first priorities. “I think it is a no brainer,” he said. “This is the most important development in cancer […]
Continue Reading →Bowel cancer screening and noise to signal ratio
What a lot of media noise about a study just out in the Lancet on one-off bowel cancer screening using sigmoidoscopy, a test to examine the lower part of the bowel – usually in outpatients, with no sedation. It’s a well designed, large study, true. But no wonder about the fuss, given the press release […]
Continue Reading →The myth of the body MOT
continues. In yesterdays’ Daily Telegraph there is an enthusiastic large feature on how to spend 2,300 UK pounds upwards on having a what is billed as a full body check up. It’s depressing reading: scant attention is paid to the fact that this – including electrodes to the scalp to check ‘brain functions’ …’ a […]
Continue Reading →why the NHS isn’t so bad…
This article from the NYTimes is an illuminating discourse into what US psychiatry is like. The author describes himself as a psychopharmacologist and clearly is used to treating symptoms with medication. For all the faults of the NHS, this kind of approach in psychiatry is rare. No wonder healthcare costs so much in the States. […]
Continue Reading →The ongoing unethical non-publication of clinical trials
See here :http://www.trialsjournal.com/content/11/1/43 . An examination of trials of medication for stroke which were completed but never published. This problem, the non-publication of trial data, does not seem to go away. I quote: “Well designed clinical trials should be published because their results can benefit patients, justifying the risk to trial participants from experimental treatments. We […]
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