Big health data should be on sale in supermarkets. It offers great promise to inform our future health. To be able to assess the benefits of different treatments for each of us as individuals – both in the short and long term would be good shopping – if only we could access and read the […]
Category: Research
Wherever I go my body always comes with me and as a doctor I am fortunate to know a little about what goes on. Anatomy showed me what I might look like inside. Microscopy led me further inside and let me understand the pathology. I learned about diseases. Unfortunately, the disease-friendly approach is now letting […]
Sleep. Most of us can’t get enough of it. At least every second person in the Western world experiences some kind of disturbance and one in five of us have long standing problems with sleeping. If, for three or more nights a week it takes you longer than 30 minutes to get to sleep; or […]
One in four people in the USA have at least one tattoo and in Europe there are about 100 million tattooed bodies. Permanent skin adornment is growing in popularity especially amongst the younger generations. Tattoos like laser treatments are on the cusp between medicine and beauty. Medically tattoos have a variety of uses: to imitate […]
Having more than one health problem is more common than we think and potentially deadly. Almost one in every four of us has two or more health conditions. With each additional disease morbidity, mortality and polypharmacy increases. Some think multimorbidity can be cured by focusing on the whole patient. Research shows the opposite. Multiple health […]
Just as dinosaurs became too big to roam the earth the demand for quality in health care has spawned enormous and unfathomable datasets that have outgrown their usefulness. I can live with that if I know that the reams of raw data are being used to underpin realistic, reliable, decisions. But they’re not. Right now […]
New evidence suggests that taking a combined cocktail of preventive medications can help us live longer. In these times of soaring health expenditure this should be good news to public health. But governments seem reticent to invest in combined preparations even when they can potentially extend life, minimize morbidity and deliver cheap pharmaceuticals. The problem […]
Between cure and death a lot occurs. It has a name: plateauing. And in treatment it means: do nothing and for some diseases it’s the perfect therapy. Take the Zika outbreak. We now know that patients with Zika and accompanying paralysis, Guillain-Barre syndrome, seem to go through a plateau phase (three to 10 days). The […]
The battle against obesity is as relentless as the fight against sugar. The difference is that the fight against sugar is one of global economics rather than public health. And that’s a problem based in the history of research. Obesity first emerged as the blockade against bad fats in our diet and quickly became confused […]
Bloating is becoming a major contemporary health issue largely because of the social stigma attached to a gaseous expulsion that Western culture refuses to accept is a normal part of our digestive process. A study of university students found the majority were embarrassed by their flatulence. We spend a lot of time looking at what […]
Hospital stays in the UK are at an all time high, in part, because geriatric and palliative care wards have become default locations for patients with multiple health problems who rotate in an in an end-of-life, time-share mode until they die. But patients with multiple and complex problems such as diabetes, poor circulation and depression […]
Doctor numbers and dissatisfaction with working hours are foremost in the minds of clinicians and health politicians these days. We’re in short supply of the former and burdened with the latter, which may explain the resurfacing of non face-to-face (F2F) clinician/patient initiatives. The CHAT program, an initiative of a team of Australian anesthetists, is one […]
A recent study found that the following terms – used by media to attract our attention especially on quiet news days – are no more than pollutants: “breakthrough”, “game changer”, “miracle”, “cure”, “home run”, “revolutionary”, “transformative”, “life saver”, “groundbreaking” and “marvel”. Researchers identified 36 drugs associated with these terms in press releases where the hyperbole […]
Reaction to my last post revealed that few are ready to let health die with dignity and rest in peace. Fair enough. But despite impassioned attachment it’s not apparent why health, in its dying throes, must attain a semi-hubristic status; or why the jettisoning of health is so threatening to humans; or why we no […]
In 1978 the WHO produced the Alma Ata Declaration and by promoting health, as opposed to treating illness, radically changed the face of healthcare. Today its lofty aspiration: “the attainment of the highest possible level of health” is just another 21century commodity with goods and services traded by governments, insurers and providers. But the more […]
It could be said that much of the health research done in the past three decades has been lost in a tsunami of health information. Just try iterating health data through even the most sophisticated search engines; your result will almost always be a sticky mass of disjointed facts. And once you’ve piled them up […]
The UK’s recent summer budget was certainly operating on summer time when the Chancellor reiterated his commitment to 8am to 8pm GP service delivery despite professional resistance and continuing evidence warning of the risks of such an edict. The extension of working hours is, at best, a band-aid solution to a festering wound, which could be lethal if its […]
In this day and age few among us could claim to be in the dark about the value of exercise to our wellbeing and longevity. The fitness industry mushroomed during the latter half of the last century; today our marketplace is flooded with watches and other gimmicks to help us track measure and maintain our […]
Last century saw public health advance from what was essentially a communicable disease surveillance activity to a public health and help entity. Public health activists not only described problems in a global way but worked with governments and agencies to prioritise so that real change could occur. In short it became the motivator and effector […]
The noun invasion has its origins in the 12th century Latin word invadere: to walk, to go into, to fall upon. In the 15th century we adopted the Old French term invasion, which is steeped in negative concepts like attack and assault. This definition, ubiquitous across healthcare, remains in use today. It stands to reason […]
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