Current Posts – 21 November 2014

Friday 14 Dec 2014 is diabetes day so a post about a GP who has very successfully adopted the low carb diet and firmly integrated it into his practice seemed appropriate. Remarkably, given the massive interest in this diet among patients and the growing body of evidence supporting its use – see here for a recent summary –  it is still regarded as very controversial and possibly dangerous by the diabetes charities and many GPs. Changing that would be a good goal of Diabetes Friday.

Experts in Alzheimer’s disease agree that lifestyle plays a big part in your chances. Then they ignore the logical conclusion and devote massive research funding to developing a drug. Occasionally a small trial tests one or two lifestyle elements but what if you blitzed patients with an intensive package of all the things that could plausibly make a difference? That’s just what has been done and the results are very impressive. 

How naïve we’ve been. For months we have puzzled by the bizarre responses by senior medic Sir Rory Collins to scientific critics of his claim that statins benefit almost everyone. He never engaged with his critics just attacked. We believed in evidence based medicine but a paper by a government chief scientific advisor, explains why Sir Rory’s response makes sense. It’s not just the evidence, stupid.