Current Posts – 5 March 2015

Welcome to a new episode in the statin saga. Even though virtually everyone over 60 is eligible for a statin prescription to prevent heart disease, argument still rages about just how safe and effective they are. Latest twist is that the analysis needed to decide the risk of side effects are has never been done. What’s more the way benefits are calculated could be very misleading.

Developing a safe and effective drug to melt away excess pounds is the dream of every drug company executive. It’s also fantastically hard trick to pull off because the control of energy intake and expenditure is fearsomely complicated. So drugs inevitably come with nasty side-effects. The latest offering comes trailing the usual wide-eyes PR optimism. Zoe Harcombe peers under the hood and doesn’t buy it.

Like the proverbial bus service, there are no really radical theories about cancer for 40 years then two come along at once. Remarkably, despite being the brain children of top scientists in quite different disciplines, they are very similar. Last week’s post was about a biologist who thinks we should pay less attention to cancer genes and more to the local conditions that encourage them. This week a top physicist Paul Davies explains why he thinks the same.