A few years ago at the age of 67, Sarah (not her real name) was planning suicide because she was starting to have the same problems her mother suffered from as she developed Alzheimer’s. She couldn’t remember phone numbers or what she had just read and even finding her way around the familiar roads near her […]
Time to get serious about prevention. Remove a pump handle.
December 10, 2013 by 10 Comments
Like transparency, equality and democracy in politics, prevention of disease is a motherhood and apple pie issue in medicine– everyone is in favour of it, so long as it doesn’t involve actually doing anything as committed as mounting a serious public health programme or spending millions on research. This truism takes on a new urgency […]
Benzos: Beware the baddest drugs in a doctor’s armoury.
August 28, 2013 by 2 Comments
Benzodiazepines are the serial offenders of the drugs’ cabinet with a cluster of pharmaceuticals ASBOs to their name. They’ve been around since the 1960s and are generally given if you are complaining of the likes of insomnia or anxiety – family names include temazepam (for sleep) and the tranquillizer valium. They have a charge sheet that […]
We know how to cut diabetes deaths. So why aren’t we doing it?
April 10, 2013 by 6 Comments
Who’s responsible for our diabetes/obesity epidemic? Is it those fat lazy bastards who eat crap food and sit on the couch all day or is it the drug companies that spend billions researching and marketing drugs of limited effectiveness or dubious safety or is the government that allows commercial interest to create a food supply […]
Treating disease with diet – new possibilities
March 19, 2013 by 3 Comments
There were several reasons I got interested in the low-calorie liquid diet I’ve written about in today’s Daily Mail – mainly the fact that evidence is mounting that it can reverse diabetes and other conditions such as arthritic knees. But also because together with the alternate day diet I think it holds out possibility of […]
Ten top tips to boost your disease free survival
March 7, 2013 by 5 Comments
In quieter moments, pondering the end of your life, how many years to you think you might be effectively house-bound with a number of chronic diseases before you pop off? The jargon for describing this unappealing state is YLD (Years of Living with Disability) and according to a big report in the Lancet earlier this […]
Ben Goldacre’s new book. Too late, too little
September 23, 2012 by 17 Comments
Drug companies exaggerate their successes, hide their failures and generally fail to abide by the rules of evidence based medicine. This ongoing fraud is the subject of the latest book from Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre, better known as merciless scourge of “woo” merchants cynically flogging worthless complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatments. An extract from […]
Can fasting for two days each week stop dementia?
August 10, 2012 by 1 Comment
This is an article I wrote about fasting in the Daily Mail back in February. It features top American fasting researcher Dr Mark Mattson who was just about to publish a review of the evidence that, in animals at least, cutting right back on calories a couple of days a week can protect brain cells. […]
Easier ways to stay slim and healthy
August 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment
The Horizon program I blogged about yesterday explored some cutting edge ideas about what really makes us fat – the big surprise was that a major player is one of the genes that controls insulin. It also tested a radical new idea that fasting could be an effective way of turning off that gene. Both […]
How to get slim and healthy and stay that way
August 8, 2012 by Leave a Comment
OK the title is a bit of a come-on but this week’s BBC2 investigation into the benefits of fasting by the Horizon team, actually entitled “Eat, fast and live longer “, did become very enthusiastic towards the end. Understandably. It wouldn’t be over-egging it too much to say that if you were looking for a single thing that […]
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