Current Posts – 01 December 2014

If you rely on headline news for your latest update on statins and other cholesterol lowering drugs it was good news all the way about the new improved son of statin drugs at the American Heart Association annual conference last month. But if you like your updates unvarnished read Dr Malcolm Kendrick’s telling of the real story behind the hype and the PR. Things nearly went badly wrong for the new arrivals.

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Ignorance and suspicion surround the use of vitamins so even when the need is clear the NHS is often damagingly slow to respond. A Vitamin D deficiency in the elderly in care homes – and the associated health problems – has long been suspected. Now it’s been confirmed in an as yet unpublished report on just one home. It’s unlikely to be unusual. The cocktail of drugs these patients get makes the situation worse.

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

Peter Lurie

Peter Lurie

Peter Lurie

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