July 30th, 20180735There is increasing interest in the over use of medical tests, medications and procedures. There has been a belief that more medicine equals better health. In reality it does not. Whilst we absolutely can and do benefit from the advances medicine has made, too much of a good thing is a problem.
At a conference recently, some...
November 28th, 201631275We are constantly fed doom and gloom stories in health. There is a crisis of this or a tsunami of that. This is despite life expectancy continuously increasing for over 100 years. The claims of crisis are inevitably accompanied by a plea for government funding for whoever has found the latest crisis.
Yet when good news comes along...
October 3rd, 201601351Conflicting views have again emerged about statin medications in two leading British Medical Journals. Statins are used to lower cholesterol and have been the best selling drugs of the past 25 years with sales in the tens of billions of dollars.
The Lancet published a review claiming that the medication is safe, that side effects have...
September 26th, 201601399Much work has been done over the last few years on the dangers of sitting. Whilst claims that sitting is the new smoking are way over blown, it is true that in modern western countries many of us spend too much time being sedentary. The human body is designed to be active and has been so for thousands if years.
The New York Times...
September 23rd, 201301065If you dial the wrong number, forget where you left the keys or wonder why you went into a room, it is just a normal part of life and is NOT a pointer to anything.
March 25th, 20130963It is expected that a doctor will diagnose and treat you, but sometimes there is no diagnosis or effective treatment, and pursuing either may be harmful
December 10th, 201201178What’s your blood count? Blood pressure? Bone density? PSA? If it is abnormal, odds are that you will want it to be normal.Like much of what we do, treating the numbers is often naïve, and sometimes harmful, no matter how well intentioned
May 31st, 201221789The US Preventative Services Taskforce has formalized its previous advice that there was no benefit for routine PSA testing on healthy men. Surely finding more cancer early means saving lives. Except that the facts do not show that the routine PSA screening does this.
May 17th, 201221391 Nothing in medicine is a straight line. If a little is good more may be better, but a lot more is NOT necessarily better and can be worse. Collectively we are overdosing on tests.
