We are two peoples separated by a common language. Recalling on Radio 4 how his band had broken into the British market, an American moozish’n said it wasn’t until they had gartten on Tarp of the Parps that things reely took off. Travelling the other way, and now tarp of the parps in American health news, is our British NHS way of burning babies to heat our hospitals. Based on a horrific appeal to Holcaustian imagery from a Channel 4 documentary on the fate of terminated and miscarried foetuses, the anti-Obamacare American media wants its citizens clear on the dreadful consequences that await those who sup in the corridors of socialised medicine – and that’s without even beginning to mention what the Pro-Life lot had to say.
Month: March 2014
The Invisible Gorilla
Statins continue to generate more heat than light. On the Today programme this morning, the pro-statin academic Sir Rory Collins only just managed to get off at Edge Hill rather than go on to accuse BMJ editor Dr Fee of mass murder for publishing research suggesting statins for people at low risk of heart disease may do more harm than good. The bun-fight is interesting because in the heat we do in fact find some light shone on a blind sector in gold-standard drug research: we tend to see what we are looking for, which means we tend not to see what we are not looking for, an effect known as the Invisible Gorilla effect. A well known example is the sexual side effects of the SSRI anti-depressants. Because initial clinical trials were conducted on healthy volunteers (often stoodents) with male libidos the size of the Eiffel Tower, no one thought to look for sexual side effects. But once SSRIs got out into the wild, it became apparent that what had once been two foot long and hard as steel was now measured in inches and made of jelly. Once unwanted SSRI sexual side-effects are looked for, it turns out SSRIs are to your sex life what a water hose is to your bonfire.
Slit
Slit, the gash in the silk curtain BBC One legal procedural through which we get to see posh knobs with wigs on polishing each other off, is back. So too are the hormonally challenged. Leading QC Martha’s oxytocin levels are so high it can only be a matter of time before she starts lactating for her under-dog clients. Billy still plays the testosterone fuelled clerk ready to roger anything with a hole in it, despite a heartless medic telling him it’s bye bye Morning Glory hello tits for Billy, on account of his treatment for prostate cancer. In the last episode Martha’s oxytocin met Billy’s cancer head on, and the cuddle juice won. Billy coughed, and they cuddled.
Meanwhile, the show continues to tackle The Big Issues Of The Day. Increasingly these are medical. The first episode of the current series hinged on the fate of David, an undiagnosed schizophrenic charged with killing a police officer, while this week’s episode three took on maternal mercy killing. Neither, to this viewer, ended satisfactorily. The series formula – Martha gets you off – was rigorously applied, like a double mustard poultice. The schizophrenic walked free, the case against the self-confessed filicidal mother collapsed.
Staggering Catastrophes
As a doctor who has dabbled in epidemiology, Dr No is not unaware of the siren song of care.data. Greater minds, including epideiology’s Einstein, have frothed at the prospect of the data orgy to be had, only to have it dawn that theirs was a premature cigar. Yet even when left staggering at the catastrophes revealed, a hard core group still want care.data to happen, the idea being that if enough corks are inserted, then nothing will leak.
If only! Dr No remains persuaded that the call of care.data is indeed the song of a siren balanced on dangerous rocks. However alluring the song, the rocks remain; many rocks, but four stand out as especially dangerous.