One of the many takeaways from this week’s excellent Preventing Overdiagnosis Conference is that it’s hard for doctors to tell their patients that too much care is bad. For so […]
US healthcare
William Cayley: Measurement—at the expense of success
“Doc, how’s my blood pressure? What about my cholesterol? How about my weight?” “There’s room for improvement,” I say. “How much do you exercise? How many fruits and vegetables do […]
Edward Davies: Overdiagnosis—what are we so afraid of?
Evidence based medicine is first and foremost at the Preventing Overdiagnosis Conference in Dartmouth this week. The importance of data, research, and careful analysis has been repeatedly hammered home, with […]
Tessa Richards: Lifting the lid on information and learning from it
Progress. The march towards giving patients online access to their medical records is accelerating. The Society of Participatory Medicine has put out the bunting in welcome to the announcement by […]
Richard Smith: Is the pharmaceutical industry like the mafia?
The piece that follows is my foreword to a new and fascinating book by Peter Gøtzsche, the head of the Nordic Cochrane Centre, entitled Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How […]
Richard Smith: Time for science to be about truth rather than careers
Most scientific studies are wrong, and they are wrong because scientists are interested in funding and careers rather than truth. That was the chilling message delivered by the smiling, brilliant, […]
Richard Smith: A gamechanger for the polypill?
It is now some 15 years since the emergence of the idea and supporting evidence that combining antihypertensives and a statin into a single polypill and giving it to people […]
Desmond O’Neill: Elysium—an effective Trojan horse for Obamacare and the social gradient
“Just enjoy the film, dad, you don’t always have to write about it!” is a familiar refrain from my family on our sporadic outings to the movies. Yet cinema was […]
Siddhartha Yadav: A foreign medical graduate’s path to US residency
On 15 September 2013, thousands of doctors and doctors-to-be will flock to the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS) website to apply for a residency position in the United States. As […]
Paul J Rosch: Cholesterol, cancer, and statins
Numerous studies of healthy people show that a low cholesterol concentration that has persisted for a decade or more is associated with an increased risk of cancer, and that elevated […]