From yesterdays PM, Radio 4: Professor Peter Elwood, epidemiologist at Cardiff University: “I have always held that it is for the individual himself or herself to decide whether or not he or she would take aspirin – they should be told the risks or the benefits and it should be the patients or subjects value […]
Continue Reading →Selling health to the public
for the BMJ, article here.
Continue Reading →Healthcare charities and the uselessness of GPs (again)
..and so, again and again, that GPs are in some way ‘undertrained’. We aren’t specialists – we are generalists. It’s a different job, with different skills. But it’s a myth to repeat that just because a GPs doesn’t have specialist training somehow means that the doctor is incompetent or lacking in training. GP training consists […]
Continue Reading →The NHS, complaints, and data
I’ve said it so many times I am boring myself, but if you want to save money in the NHS it’s not so hard to do it. Choose and Book, all NHS logos and branding, all NHS advertising health promotion campaigns, NHS Direct for all except acute care, the electronic records system, etc, etc, etc. […]
Continue Reading →Health insurance – on a TV near you
It was actually quite hard to track down the adverts for this piece from the BMJ. Thank goodness for Youtube
Continue Reading →The advertising policy for this site
has just been written. I have been approached by several suppliers over the last few months asking for advertising of their health related products or “even better”, guest posts on this site. Never mind that these are things which usually come with very little evidence attached – and the answer is of course no. To […]
Continue Reading →Peter Wilmshurst, free speech and libel
An article in TheHeart.org – Dr Wilmshurst is now being threatened with libel over a radio interview he did a year ago. I interviewed Dr Wilmshurst for the FT at around the same time. It was a shortish interview, discussing the reasons why he’d spoken out about the research he’d been involved with and the […]
Continue Reading →The myth of the male menopause
….an article at the BMJ, toll free here
Continue Reading →Breastlight….the never ending story….
apparantly the MHRA are still looking into whether or not this product should be allowable in current form. I am told that there may be restrictions placed on advertising it compared to what we have at the moment. However the final decision has not yet been reached. It’s November; the issue was raised in January; […]
Continue Reading →Is CT screening for lung cancer a good idea?
Lots of media coverage would say that it is: the Independent puts it: “Screening heavy smokers with low-dose computer tomography (CT) instead of X-rays can reduce deaths from lung cancer by 20 percent, a massive US study released Thursday shows. Previous studies have shown that helical CT scanning can identify small tumors in the early stages […]
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