smells and cancer dog sniffing at patch of skin disease turned out to be cancer reported in Lancet in 1989 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673689922575?showall%3Dtrue%26via%3Dihub followed by anecdotes http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(01)06065-2/fulltext 2004 study in BMJ – ‘proof of concept’ dogs using the smell of urine to detect bladder cancer 6 dogs, detected 22 out of 54 people with bladder cancer 2006 […]

    Here’s the book Here’s a podcast from the BMJ  why the NHS is now Westminster’s chew toy and needs to be liberated from it (Independent) and how calling non evidence based medicine ‘innovation’ will simply waste NHS money and resources (Guardian) Times – GPs who sell their services online   I’m grateful for […]

..and other such nonsense.   This report  led Owen Paterson convinced that the NHS is failing and Something Must Be Done. I think this report, or reports of this report, will be used to demonstrate why the NHS Must Be Privatised by some politicians and newspapers, and because of the coverage it has had I […]

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 […]