Yesterday the drug company Novartis announced it was taking the NHS to court to protest about off-label prescribing, that’s when a drug is given to patients even though it doesn’t have a license to treat that particular condition. “It’s unacceptable to put the safety of patients at risk,” said a spokesperson for the company “though widespread use […]
Pharmageddon: how distortion and cover up happens
April 25, 2012 by 5 Comments
The most detailed and passionate statement of what has gone wrong with evidence based medicine and how it is damaging patients can be found in a new book called Pharmageddon by psychiatrist and campaigner Professor David Healy (published by the University of California Press, £27.95). I wrote a summary of the book with David Healy, […]
Prescribing off label – common and unscientific
April 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Two recent reports have just peered into a murky corner of evidence based medicine and found illegal doings and a distinct lack of evidence Over 11% of the prescriptions handed out in Canada were done off-label, according to a study published yesterday What this means that there weren’t clinical trials backing up their use for that condition. […]
Rattling with pills as you grow older
April 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment
As you peer into your medical future among the nasties lurking for you will be lots of pills. Fifty percent of people over 65 are on five or more drugs – the medical version of five-a-day – unless of course you have read ‘The 10 Secrets of Healthy Ageing’, my new book written with Patrick […]
Alzheimer’s Funding boost 2
April 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The second alarming event (the first was here) concerns an announcement that never happened. Two years ago a high quality randomised trial showed that taking high doses of B vitamins significantly reduced brain shrinkage in patients who were beginning to have problems with memory and general thinking. Given that Alzheimer’s is such a huge problem and […]
Statins: worth it or not when you are healthy?
April 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment
If any preventative drug use had good evidence supporting it, you’d think cholesterol-lowering statins would. They are given out to around five million healthy people in the UK with the aim of lowering their risk of having a heart attack. For fifteen years or more there have been hundreds of large-scale double-blind, evidence-based-medicine gold-standard trials […]
Alzheimer’s funding boost 1
April 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The announcement last month (March 25th) the Alzheimer’s funding was to be doubled by 2015 is to be welcomed. But what is the money going to be spent on? Two separate developments don’t inspire confidence that it will always be the most safe and effective treatments. The first concerns the latest developments with the drug […]
Book: “The 10 Secrets of Healthy Ageing” by Jerome Burne and Patrick Holford
April 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Book details: Format: Paperback, 432pp Published by: Piatkus Publication Date: 5 April 2012 Language: English ISBN-10: 0749956542 ISBN-13: 978-0749956547 Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.2 x 3.4 cm RRP: £14.99 Buy it here • Extracts • Reviews & Testimonials A mere twenty or thirty years ago we knew what a granny or a pensioner looked like – wrinkly, white […]
Yellow Card: parcelling up risk
March 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment
This was the first posting on on this blog, all the earlier ones are articles. Following up on my feature in the Mail today around Professor Gotzsche’s excellent new book about why it is a really bad idea to have a mammogram I’ve been picking up a lot of material around the issue of evidence […]
Article: Mamograms do more harm than good
March 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment
This articles was published in the Daily Mail 26 March 2012 | [External Link/Permalink] This was based around a remarkable book by a Norwegian researcher and bio-statistician who had been looking at the data for the benefits of mammograms for over a decade. He’d found that their benefits had been massively overplayed and the very real risks of […]
Body of Evidence 
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