I n this era of personalized medicine there is nothing general anymore. So why do we persist with terms so wholly inappropriate to the kind of care delivered in the community by doctors? “Family medicine” as a term has the scope to address the newer genetic aspects of our work but still misses out on […]
Health & Medicine
A neoteric’s view
Page 9 of 11
Being an olympian is a dangerous occupation. In the sixteen days of competition one in ten athletes will sustain an injury during the games. Of these injuries one in three will prevent the athlete from competing or continuing to compete. During the games we only hear of the spectacular injuries and so far in Rio, […]
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 […]
It’s hard for leaders to breathe life into health care these days because the atmosphere is so polluted by frequent restructuring. Clinical leaders and their teams lose the commitment that made them choose to work in health care in the first place. Teams are worn down by continual change without seeing any positive benefit. Leaders […]
Depending on where you live, you look at your mobile phone on average between 40 (UK) and 120 (US) times a day. The likelihood of one of those interactions involving a health site is very low, despite the large number of applications available. In 2012 there were over 40 000 mobile device applications for health […]
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 […]
The Olympics are never without a health issue. In the pastit has been doping. But doping is never going to be eradicated, despite the number of exposes of athletes, withdrawn medals and public outrage. Now there is a new target – the Zika virus. The Olympics are a global health risk, rather than a celebration […]
Successful weight loss programs all agree that participants lose at least 5-10% of their weight in the early phases of the program and up to 90% of participants maintain a healthy weight for between six and 12 months afterwards. So losing weight is not a problem and yet weight loss is big business because so […]
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 […]
Even today with broad access to good online information and a wealth of evidence about the myriad ways that disruptive technologies provide access to services, most of us still leave healthcare choices to trusted advisors – usually our doctors. What we don’t realize is that this behaviour is exactly what governments and private health insurers […]
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 […]
Well, not exactly but disease should be dead and treatment should be reigning. In the 21st century, as we delve into the minutiae the body, the smaller we can see, the more we describe and define. But by using old methods of disease description we continue to differentiate rather than unify concepts and this results […]
More than 30% of all medicines in many African and Asian countries are falsified, rising to 50% for antibiotics making the fake drug market more lucrative than fake handbags and fake watches. Here in the Western world Interpol and other agencies are struggling to keep online drug sales below 1%. But they’re growing, even Tory […]
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 […]
Medical knowledge has exploded and future doctors need more training to be competent, or so the argument goes. But has our obsession with length of courses blown undergraduate medical education and postgraduate medical training courses out of proportion? Today, if you want to be a general practitioner you’ll spend your first five years at medical […]
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 […]
The Thinker 