Today’s medical practitioners are expected to perform more than clinical roles. They are expected to act as resource managers, clinical standards arbitrators, educators, researchers, and patient advocates. If all these weren’t enough, now tack on the additional role of green advocate. Little is known about the processing of less toxic waste once it leaves health […]
Health & Medicine
A neoteric’s view
Page 6 of 11
Does legislation really make a difference to the health of women? A quarter of a century ago, the USA legislated in the Women’s Health Equity Act to remove the inequalities between men and women in medical research. More recently, Health Canada recommended comparative studies in healthy male and/or female volunteers to minimize variability. Nonetheless, nothing has really […]
Two decades into our new century and the pieces of the medical puzzle still don’t fit together. Administrators, algorithm developers and funders each form a rigid static piece, promoting standardization of services, while physicians and patients desire developing more customized pieces. The prospect of any union is poor – unless the pieces can fit organically […]
Traditional wisdom about chronic diseases holds that they usually last for three months or longer and may worsen over time. They are supposed to occur more in older adults and can usually be controlled but not cured. Conditions, which we thought worsen with age, paradoxically provide some protection. As with preventable disease, identifying risks early in […]
Almost one in four of us has two or more health conditions. With each additional disease, morbidity, mortality and poly pharmacy increases. Some think multiple health problems can be cured by minimizing the uncoordinated care that comes with trying to deal with a number of health problems sequentially and that the focus should be on the […]
Creating a corpus of effective women leaders is the holy grail of health care. Everyone wants it, thinks it is a panacea, and reveres it almost as much as motherhood these days. Despite a plethora of strategies, the critical mass of women leaders required to ignite enduring change is elusive. In part, this is due […]
What goes in must come out – in some form or another. Our bodies are relatively efficient processing systems, so when we have extracted what we require from pharmaceutical agents, the rest is excreted in urine and faeces and finally makes its way to our wastewater. Seventy-two percent of these pharmaceuticals end up in our […]
Everyone knows that the economic value of medical research is difficult to measure but the returns for our communities are great. A global assessment of the return on investment in medical research would encourage even the most bearish of investors. In the UK, for example, a government spend of £1 can yield 25 pence of benefits […]
Health insurance is a misnomer. We can’t insure our health. It is not like motor vehicle insurance where the guarantee is that our damaged cars will be repaired. We need health pensions and trusts not health insurance. For humans, as opposed to cars, insurance provides no guarantees. We can’t buy insurance that will ensure that […]
The literature on what foods are good and bad has grown from a healthy weight to toxic levels of morbidity. It is time to take the protagonists to court and put them on trial using the available evidence. New strategies such as disruption are important. Let’s enter my dietary courtroom. There are a range of […]
There is a difference between wanting to die and not wanting to stay alive. For patients with terminal physical illnesses who are suffering, there is an acceptance that they do not specifically want to die, rather that living is no longer tolerable for them. We can’t conduct randomized trials to evaluate whether patients, would choose […]
Do drugs really lose their potency and if they do are they really a danger to us? The recent decision by the FDA to extend the shelf life of EpiPens beyond what is on the label has challenged conventional thinking about the long-term safety of stored drugs – and it’s about time. Unfortunately, there is very […]
A smorgasbord of promises to achieve weight reduction are proffered in the 200-plus articles published daily in the media. In the scientific world too, there is an overabundance of research literature. Just the word “fat”, let alone “obesity” or “overweight”, generates 55 research articles a day. The over-promising language used in the lay press doesn’t […]
About one third of the world’s population experiences at least 20 days per year of extreme heat conditions that can be considered deadly. Block quote: In heatwaves we need to change the way we think about our environment. The most vulnerable groups are children, older adults and individuals with type 2 diabetes especially those with associated co-morbidities […]
The UK and the USA have suffered more than their fair share of clinical crises within their health care systems. In the UK, neonates and the elderly are dying in inordinate proportions in hospitals. In the US, deadly infectious diseases are now carried out of the research labs into the wards of the most prestigious hospitals. More doctors […]
Pharmaceutical names are an important part of branding products. They are designed to encode a message about the product. Older names were focussed on the clinical aspects of a drug. Sometimes they alluded to the disease such as Procardia for heart problems and Tamiflu for influenza treatment. Other names related to what the drug does […]
Nearly half of all patients admitted to hospital have more than one health problem. The concept of co morbidity is not new. It has been around since the 1970s. Depression is not the end of a one-way street. It can be the cause of other illnesses. What is new, however, is that where more than […]
Adults who have more than two health problems are likely to receive a prescription for a painkiller at least once every six months. Chronic pain is one of those heart sink problems of medicine. Nothing chronic is ever simple or curable. Originally it was thought that pain became chronic when the circumstances that initiated it […]
The human body is really one large water storage tank with entry and exit valves. Water makes up about 60% of our bodies. Each litre of water weighs 1 kilogram, so in a person who weighs 60 kilograms, 36 kilograms is water. Nearly one third of our daily water supply comes from what we eat. […]
Everybody knows how to get weight off. Most of us have tried at least once and usually we have failed to keep the weight off. Most of the strategies we use to lose weight are not sustainable. Up to 50% of dieters who reduce their weight to a healthy level, put weight back on within […]
The Thinker 