With winter well and truly here none of us will be getting any vitamin D from the sun for four to five months. Unfortunately. writes Dr Oliver Gillie, we also won’t be getting clear evidence-based advice from the government on safe sun exposure. (Read more…)

Rarely have I been proven wrong quite so fast. After confidently informing the world that the post-statin cholesterol lowering drugs PCSK9 inhibitors would be launched upon an unsuspecting public in the near future, with billion dollar marketing budgets, it seems that I was wrong. Although who knows, I may be wrong about being wrong. (Read more…)

Some years ago I became interested in how the government and the Department of Health deal with preventing illness. My own health had improved after I had lost a lot of weight and I felt so much better that I began researching what else could keep me feeling so well. One bit of advice that kept cropping up was to keep Vitamin D levels topped up. (Read more…)

Evidence for medical treatments, like Campbell’s coup, comes in many different varieties. As Dr Malcolm Kendrick’s latest feature reveals, when evidence is needed to licence the first post-statin drug intended to cut the risk of a heart attack, there is no need to show it actually does cut the risk, only that is lowers cholesterol, which is not necessarily the same thing at all.(Read more…)

An era is coming to an end. Statins, the world’s most widely prescribed and profitable drugs, have, with the exception Crestor (rosuvastatin), all come off patent and their price has plummeted. Good news for NHS accountants not so good for company profits. (Read more…)

This week we bring you a shocking warning about a new danger linked with statins. Did you know that they stimulate the production of something called P9 which can not only damage the liver but also actually makes statins less effective? Nor did we. (Read more…)

Last week the British Medical Journal carried a stinging indictment of decades of dietary advice. ‘Scientific evidence shows that advice to reduce saturated fat intake’ wrote cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra, (Saturated fat is not the major issue) ‘has paradoxically increased our cardiovascular risks.’ The article was picked up by UK newspapers and others around the world even though he wasn’t saying anything new. (Read more…)

The ‘Cochrane Collaboration’ is an international collective of researchers whose self-proclaimed role is to provide accurate and robust appraisals of health interventions. The group specialises in ‘meta-analyses’: the grouping together of several similar studies on interventions including drug therapies…

It’s been a great week […]

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