Top Prize in the recent busting homeopathy stakes undoubtedly goes to Simon Singh for his wonderfully effective puncturing and deflating of the pompous David Tredinnick MP on the Today programme. Tredders was wind-bagging on about how they do homeopathy better in France, but he hadn’t bargained on Singh doing his homework. The best selling homeopathic remedy in France, said Singh, is a ’flu remedy made from the mashed up entrails of a single Muscovy duck that generates a staggering $15 million of revenue. It was, said Singh brilliantly, ‘the ultimate quack remedy’. Tredders had more than his wings clipped: he was permanently grounded; while Humph was reduced to muttering something about getting his hands on ‘that duck’.
Category: Dodgy Practice
Experts Bail Out
Unlike the well-fed DoH poodles at the RCP kennels, the unpaid members of the UK’s Advisory Council of the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) have shown commendable backbone is standing up to the bullying ways of Home Secretary Alan ‘Hadron Collider’ Johnson. Indeed, so many advisors have now bailed out of the Advisory Council that the media, never strong on numbers at the best of times, have lost count of how many have jumped. It could be seven; or it might be eight. The latest expert to don his ’chute and jump is one Eric Carlin, citing undue political and media influence on the Council’s work.
The Royal College of Pharisees
That smuggest of colleges, the Royal College of Physicians of London, already infamous for its part in the MMC/MTAS disaster, has of late been cozying up ever more closely to the Department of Health, and its chief pongo, Sir Liar Liar Pants on Fire Donaldsong. Earlier this week it moved still closer, issuing an right-on report damning callous smokers who kipper their kids.
The report, featuring a cover photo of a prole caught in the hideous act of kippering a bairn, contains shocking figures and urgent recommendations in bountiful supply. Passive smoking, it estimated, caused children over 300,000 UK GP consultations and almost 10,000 hospital admissions every year, at a cost to the NHS of about £23.3 million. An alarming list of childhood illness caused by passive smoking includes old favourites such as asthma and wheeze (22,000 extra cases) and middle ear disease (120,000 extra cases), as well as the reliable media magnets meningitis (200 extra cases) and cot-death (40 extra deaths).
Tick Box Medicine
Dr No’s mother, a fit 80-something year old, recently attended an ophthalmology clinic, on the advice of her optician, and was told – out of the blue, by a nurse – she hadn’t even seen a doctor – that a bed had been arranged for her to come in two days later to have her cataract removed. The nurse was most put out when Dr No’s mother – who knows her mind very well – said she had no intention of coming in for an operation she neither knew about, nor did she need. Yes, she does wear reading glasses – but otherwise her eyesight is fine.
Snake Oil
Yet another study has been published showing that prescription antidepressants are no better than snake oil – that is to say, placebo, or sugar-pill – for treating mild to moderate depression. Yet in 2008 – the latest year that figures are available for – UK doctors doled out a staggering 36 million prescriptions for antidepressants to patients – almost enough for one prescription for every adult.
How can this be? To answer this question, we have to go a bit further than the usual – and highly important – profit motive of Big Pharma. We have to ask the question: why is it so easy for Big Parma to shift 36 million prescriptions a year? The answer lies in the history and nature of General Practice – which is of course where the vast majority of these prescriptions are issued.
Good Nooze
It is a truism of the festive season that, as the party lights come out, so to do the Temperance Brigade. Last week we had two pronouncements: one from Sir Liar, advising no booze for under fifteen year olds, and another from Alcohol Concern, telling us we grossly underestimate our consumption when answering drink surveys. What Alcohol Concern didn’t say – probably because they hadn’t realised it – is that the study data behind their pronouncements show that the current safe drinking limits of 21 units/week for men and 14 for women – already known to be arbitrary – are also misleadingly low.
Totto Blotto
The planet may be heading for Gas Mark 10 – and the country half buried under snow – but that is not the only science anomaly in the news.
Yesterday, we had Pants telling us that not a drop of the demon drink should pass the lips of children. Where once we had Gin Lane, we now have middle class parents weaning tiny tots into blotto tots. Pants even managed to tot up some figures of his own: half a million of England’s 11-15 years olds had been drunk in the last four weeks, he wailed, before switching to Full Temperance Mode: childhood was being robbed of its ‘clear-eyed innocence’, only to be replaced with the ‘befuddled futility’ of ‘dirt cheap alcohol’.
All Gas and Garters
There is, believe it or not, a group of doctors madder than the shrinks, and seedier than the pecker checkers; a bunch of clowns, jokers and no-hopers so weird that no one knows what they do or why they are there. Mostly, they don’t know either. Until, that is, one or more of them develops ideas above their station, and puts their arse over the parapet and launches an air biscuit. I refer, of course to that posse of disconnected and discontented doctors who call themselves public health physicians.
Reading the Tea Leaves
We doctors live in daily fear of being sued. But that is only one side of the story. On the other side is the lot of the sensible patient or relative who genuinely believes that “something went wrong that should not have gone wrong”, but who faces the daunting task and uphill struggle of mounting a claim for negligence. His or her daily fear will not be one of being called to court, but quite the opposite, of ever getting the claim off the ground in the first place.
Snuff Doctors
Ethicists – those academics who are wont to use the incomprehensible in pursuit of the unknowable – have lately been enjoying something of an outing from their armchairs in the matter of Kerrie Wooltorton. Many aspects have been much debated, but one mighty elephant remains in the room: to what extent is a doctor who stands by and watches a suicide complicit in that suicide?