Is putting all our eggs in the drug basket really the best way to beat Alzheimer’s? Just as we can’t rely on drug companies alone to beat antibiotic resistance, so we can’t rely on a pharmaceutical silver bullet for Alzheimer’s. Tackling antibiotic resistance needs heavy investment in drugs that will be used sparingly for a short time. The pharma model prefers drugs for as many people as possible for as long as possible. (Read More…)

Medical and other health professionals dealing with diet and nutrition are keen to stress that their advice is firmly evidence based, backed up by properly conducted research. It’s the thinking behind the proposal to make Weight Watchers available on the NHS.

But an investigation by one of our contributors Zoe Harcombe has discovered that there is no evidence supporting the most fundamental principle behind the advice they have been giving for decades about weight loss… (Read More…)

Last week I was called by a friend who opened the conversation by saying: “So you were wrong about statins.” He was referring to the correction that the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has had to make in two papers that claimed statins have a high level of side effects. But I certainly haven’t recanted and started popping those pills.
Given the huge amount of attention this has attracted, the actual point being “corrected” is remarkably small. It is the kind of thing that would normally be dealt with by publishing a response to the article in the journal. I’ll come to the specifics in a moment but first a bit of context…. (Read more…)

There is a whiff of the Wizard of Oz about the advice on statins that we’ve been getting for years. It comes in the form of ringing pronouncements from behind a curtain that all is well… (Read more…)

Should a professional body, however eminent, be allowed to keep information about the safety of products they are supplying to public hidden so no one else can run tests on them? (Read more…)

Last week an email containing what looked like a great story arrived in my inbox – drug kills 800,000 in Europe in 5 years! A quick check revealed that that this was no wild or dodgy claim. It was based on research by a cardiologist at Imperial College Professor Darryl Francis, just published in the European Heart Journal.(Read more…)

Unfortunately for the rest of us today’s medical research is not driven by an abstract search for objective truth but by the need to produce a product. Unless there is a drug at the end of promising new line of research it’s unlikely to attract funding from the biggest payers – the drug companies. Instead it will be parked with the comment that it needs more research, the funding for which will be virtually impossible to obtain, however effective it is. (Read more…)

How about this for a crazy, irresponsible idea? If you’ve got cancer, cut the amount of carbohydrates you are eating down to no more than 25 grams a day (that’s just under an ounce) as a way shrinking the tumour and boosting your health into the bargain. (read more…)