Another five or six million people will be offered a prescription for statins after NICE confirmed its decision last week to halve the risk of heart disease that makes you eligible for these cholesterol lowering drugs. This is a bad decision if you think that the only consideration was the welfare of patients. If you […]
Antipsychotics: firmly on the wall of shame for quackery and woo.
September 24, 2013 by 6 Comments
Quackery and woo are among the favourite insults directed at anyone who practices most forms of CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) – and especially those who use of homeopathy, herbs or vitamins – by staunch and vocal supporters of evidence based medicine. However a feature in the Daily Mail today describes a class of drugs […]
Hidden dangers of diabetic drugs exposed – yet again
June 10, 2013 by 3 Comments
Incretins are the newest and most expensive class of blockbuster diabetes drug but according to a remarkably through investigation just published by the BMJ (British Medical Journal) the risk that they could cause pancreatic cancer is much greater than patients and doctors have been told. The biggest sellers in the UK are Byetta (exenatide), Victoza […]
Silver Bullet Award for dangerous drug promotion
January 17, 2013 by 21 Comments
When I saw recently that Simon Singh, energetic “quack buster “ and scourge of homoeopaths, chiropractors and their ilk, had established an award called the Golden Duck to be presented to the person who had “supported or practised pseudoscience in the most dangerous or irresponsible manner” , my first thought was: How unfair! What […]
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 […]
Drugs: just say no. The hidden dangers
September 4, 2012 by 2 Comments
Blowing you own trumpet is briefly satisfying, like another solitary activity, but not very cool. However I’ve decided to succumb to the urge as its now six months since “10 Secrets of Health Ageing” was published and in a couple of weeks (Sunday 16th of November I’m going to be talking about it at the […]
Acid suppressing PPI drugs: not so safe (updated)
July 25, 2012 by 7 Comments
If you take these drugs which cut your stomach acid by around 90%, you might want to look at the piece wrote earlier in the week for the Daily Mail about the serious side effects they can cause. In the short-term they do of course bring almost instant and blessed relief from the really nasty pain of […]
You can’t even trust Lucozade and that matters
July 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment
Did you register the huge 3 billion dollar fine recently slapped on GlaxoSmithKline, Britain’s biggest drug company and manufacturer of Lucozade ? And if so, did you briefly wonder whether it was enough? After all, hiding data that your product can kill people and making unsupported claims about safety would normally be enough to put […]
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. […]
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 […]
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