Current Posts – 18 July 2014

Too long a big loser in the disease funding stakes, Alzheimer’s has recently been emerging from the shadows with a personal commitment from David Cameron for more money and two major conferences in London during the last six months. But a silver bullet is unlikely any time soon. Patient numbers will only start dropping when funding bodies learn the lessons from the latest thinking about how best to tackle antibiotic resistance – don’t just rely on a drug solution.

Want to lose weight with a calorie controlled diet? Don’t. That’s the strong advice of nutritionist and author Zoe Harcombe. To her the most basic dieting equation, eating fewer calories than you burn equals weight loss, made no sense. It sounds like common sense but top nutritional bodies couldn’t show her any evidence for it. Despite this failure, they still continue to recommend it to patients. Eminence based medicine strikes again.

No apologies for writing about statins – again. These are the biggest selling drugs of all time and we still don’t know for certain if, for healthy people, they are worth taking. Now a group of independent statin experts and senior doctors have published an open letter stating there should be no increase in prescribing because commercial interests have rendered existing data unreliable. The statin saga represents a serious failure of evidence based medicine as it is currently organised.