Drug companies to fund screening

Do you think this is a good idea? AstraZeneca is to fund a project in Lanarkshire to screen people at risk of heart disease. They are funding to a total of £100,000 which is a pretty cheap to find patients who will then have to take AstraZeneca products for the rest of their lives. The price range for AstraZeneca's lipid-lowering drug is from £18 - £29 per month. Once on this treatment there is no recommended finishing point - you keep taking it till you die. Let's imagine one person gets prescribed their top dose for 30 years, that's £10,440 worth of sales. Find 10 people like this and the project makes sense. Bet they find more than 10 people who need their drugs!

Patient-centredness and holism

The Royal College of General Practitioners has just published a new national curriculum for GPs in training in the UK. There are SIX key domains of competence -

• Primary care management
• Person centred care
• Specific problem solving skills
• Comprehensive approach
• Community orientation
• Holistic approach

It is very encouraging to see the skills and competences built on the two core values of Person centred care and a holistic approach.
The document refers to McWhinney IR. A Textbook of Family Medicine. OUP and Stewart M (ed) Patient-Centered Medicine: Transforming the Clinical Method. Sage and states that patient-centredness involves seeing each patient as a unique person in a unique context, taking into consideration the patients values and expectation at every step in the care. It also emphasises the importance of continuity of care - personal (seeing the same doctor), episodic (ensuring that information is always available when taking over or referring) and the continuity of the discipline.
It takes the definition of holism from Kemper "caring for the whole person in the context of the person's values, their family beliefs, their family system, and their culture in the larger community, and considering a range of therapies based on the evidence of their benefits and cost" Kemper KJ Holistic Pediatrics = Good Medicine. Pediatrics 2000; 105
Underpinning all of this is the use of the "bio-psycho-social models, taking into account cultural and existential dimensions".
This is great stuff! Surely this should be the core of ALL doctors' training, not just GPs.
It was exactly this value-base which led me into fulltime practice as a homeopathic doctor at Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital.
If you'd like to learn more about how to explore this approach from a homeopathic perspective have a look here.

Why get so upset about homeopathy?

Some of the criticisms of homeopathy are really quite vitriolic. The language gets very personal and insulting and the amount of effort which the critics put into making their attacks has often quite astonished me. I mean, what's the problem? The attack is on a form of therapy which has a track record of killing exactly zero patients in over two hundred years of use and any surveys of users of homeopathy consistently report personal stories of benefit and relief from suffering. I know that a lot of the attack comes from "scientists" who can't accept homeopathy because of the issue of dilutions but you know other "scientists" claim to show that high dilutions DO have biological effects so any debate in this area should be about whether or not such effects can be demonstrated then setting out to try and explain how that might happen.
But a scientific debate about how something might or not might not work should not get vitriolic, should it?
There must be some other motive. Well, take a look at this article in the British Medical Journal. This doctor describes the incredible over-sensitivity of Big Pharma to criticism. Drug companies just don't want you to know that there are other treatments available which they don't sell. In the UK, there's a "charity" called "Sense about Science" - have a look at who funds it.

Happiness -- Delamothe 331 (7531): 1489 -- BMJ

Happiness -- Delamothe 331 (7531): 1489 -- BMJ

Happiness, according to the British Medical Journal can seriously improve your health! The opening statement in this paper is astonishing! It points out that whether you've won the lottery or suffered a disabling accident, one year later your happiness level will have returned to what it was prior to the event! I am sure we would all rather have the lottery win but if money is not the way to happiness what is?
Engagement - social engagement - Here's what the authors say - "In fact, the breadth and depth of individuals' social connections are the best predictors of their happiness"
In fact, there are apparently three sorts of happy lives -

• The pleasant life—where you experience a succession of pleasures that lose their effect with repetition
  
• The good life—where you play to your strengths and are "engaged"
  
• The meaningful life—where you put your strengths at the service of something higher than yourself

according to Martin Seligman.

A Few Squares Of Dark Chocolate A Day May Stave Off Artery Hardening In Smokers

A Few Squares Of Dark Chocolate A Day May Stave Off Artery Hardening In Smokers

This is the kind of health story I like! Not one based on why don't you give up this or that, or why don't you stop doing whatever it is you are enjoying doing!
Apparently about 10 - 40 grams a day of dark chocolate can contribute to health in relation to heart disease. For a Scot, that's a great piece of information. Luckily, it being just after Christmas, and me just having been in Carcassonne, I happen to have a bar of Poulain's 1848 86% cocoa Chocolat Noir here in my bag.....mmmm....well, less of it now than there was a moment ago!

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2005

What do you believe to be true but cannot prove? is the question asked by THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2005 of several well-known thinkers and scientists. The answers are fascinating. Look at Terrence Sejnowski the neuroscientist talking about memory. He can't figure how we store long term memory when all the cells change and thinks we are looking in the wrong place. We should look in the extracellular matrix not inside the neurones. This is very congruent with the work of people like Mae Han Ho what she terms "the living matrix". It's time we re-thought the connective tissue!

Who needs health care--the well or the sick? -- Heath 330 (7497): 954 -- BMJ

In an article by Iona Heath in the BMJ this week where she calls in to question the value of preventitive medicine, Who needs health care--the well or the sick? -- Heath 330 (7497): 954 -- BMJ, she makes the astonishing statement that 70% of the UK population is taking medication for preventitive or lifestyle purposes. What kind of society have we created which is so disease-centric and drug-centric? Is health about taking medication?

Message from Water Botschaft des Wassers messaggio dell'acqua

Message from Water Botschaft des Wassers messaggio dell'acqua
A Japanese scientist called Emoto has published a number of collections of photographs of ice crystals in waters from different sources and even waters treated by playing different pieces of music next to the bottles. Have a look on this site for some of the amazing photos

Stressful deadlines boost heart attack risk - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News

Stressful deadlines boost heart attack risk - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News
It's been known for some time that "stressful" lives lead to increased risks of heart attacks but it tends to be a factor doctors pretty much ignore preferring to deal only with "hard data" such as blood pressure and cholesterol levels.
Here is another study showing us that the specific stress of a deadline can increase the risk of a heart attack the following day by SIX times! Also it shows that a very competitive environment at work can double the ongoing risk of a heart attack.
It is sad that our dominant view of health reduces people to machines which can be tweaked with the right medicines. Remember the "polypill"? The suggestion there was that a pill with BP lowering and lipid lowering and anti-clotting effects would significantly reduce heart attacks. Well, what about dealing with the kinds of lives we expect people to lead?