Tag Archives: Medicine

Down wiv da kidz

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It is certainly true that if you don’t have a vote, you don’t count in a democratic society.

One of the (many) demonised groups in the UK now seems to be the “youth” – of which the middle aged, middle classes seem to be inordinately frightened. Coincidentally, this is also an age group in which most are unable to vote, and most of those who do, don’t seem to bother. As a result, it seems, they have become fair game for any crackpot ideas. Oddly, they are also a group politicians seem to constantly appeal to (obviously knowing they wont be arsed to vote…). Isn’t the world strange.

Two recent mad ideas spring to mind. First from the Guardian:

Road safety: Impose total alcohol ban for teenage drivers, says chief medical officer
A zero drink-driving limit should be imposed on all drivers under 20, the chief medical officer recommended yesterday, saying that such a ban would save lives.

This hits two of our current “fears.” First it panders to the idea that the UK is in the grip of a “Booze Culture” and secondly it cries that some new restriction will “save lives.” Nicely it wraps all this up by targeting a silent group of society, so the fall out would be minimal (and it was).

For me, despite being neither “yoof” or a novice driver so immune to any resultant laws, this is insane. I completely, 100% fail to see any logic. I am reasonably sure that any young driver mature and grown up enough to go out and stick to the 1 pint limit is also likely to be mature and capable enough to drive sensibly. The problem, and it isn’t just young drivers, is being over the limit.

Some figures are bandied about:

Justifying his call for zero alcohol for 17 to 20-year-olds, Donaldson said they were six times more likely to have a car crash if they had been drinking. A young person who had been drinking was 2.5 times more likely to have a crash than an older person who had been drinking. “I’m aware it is a controversial recommendation, but I believe it would save lives,” he said.

Now, so far I have been unable to clarify this, but I am reasonably certain that the problem is young people are more likely to be over the legal drink driving limit – I seem to recall the alcohol level is not recorded by the police if the person is under the legal limit.

Basically, this is saying young people over the limit have more accidents than old people over the limit, so lets lower the limit for young people.

Madness. But it is the madness that comes from some one with a fantastic knowledge of one subject area (medicine) being given implied authority in another area (crime reduction, driver safety etc).

The next bit really annoyed me. From the Times a few days ago:

Curfew tames feral yobs of Cornwall
An experiment to bring peace to a yob-plagued town by imposing nocturnal curfews on its teenagers had a promising start this weekend when the streets of Redruth in Cornwall were free of the usual intimidating gaggles of youths.
Under the experimental curfew, named Operation Goodnight, parents in the most troubled part of the town have agreed with police that they will keep children under 16 indoors after 9pm, and that under10s will not be allowed out after 8pm.

What a wonderful culture we live in. When you read things like this it really makes you despair for what the adults of 2020 will be like.

I have two big issues with this. First off – why are we sending kids so many mixed signals? We (as a society) say they should be more involved in the community, say they should spend less time on their playstations and more time outdoors, say they should spend more time interacting with others. Simultaneously we say they cant go out, cant hang round together and everything they do means a paedophile will get them.

Secondly, the sheer unadulterated nonsense behind this.

  1. It is a voluntary scheme. So if you are a NAUGHTYKID™©® all you need to do is ignore it. All the good, well behaved kids will stay at home. Hang on, isn’t that the wrong way round?
  2. It is being done with the approval of the parents and targets the children in the most troubled part of the town. What? It actually says “a Sunday Times poll showed that nine out of 10 parents backed restrictions on their own children going out after dark.”

Right, let me get this straight. The parents of these “feral” children want restrictions on when the children go out. They have enough control over the children to stop them going out but wont do this simply because their children are little s***s, they demand that the police tell them to do this.

Nope, still cant get my head around it.

Why in the name of Zeus dont the bloody parents control their children? Why do they have to agree with police to follow this “trial” curfew (which will, no doubt, report a positive outcome and then spread to other areas – just like the criminal nonsense that is congestion charging)?

Our children are fine. They are the same mix of evil little turds and fantastic kind angels they were 30 years ago, 60 years ago, 90 years ago and even 900 years ago.

The bloody feral parents are the problem…. but then, they can vote…

Regressive search algorithm

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I’ve decided to confuse the hell out of the Google search process by posting the top search terms that have been bringing people here recently. This should bring even more people here for no apparent reason.

Schwarzenegger saw some nice houses when he passed  Bodiam Castle on his way to Stonehenge. He was wearing the blacklisted  chip 666, taking medicine and watching Charlie Brooker on the Wire.

See we believe in giving the public what they want.   We aim to please.

(Hint to people that came here before as a result of one of these searches. There are indeed posts with these words in.  Use our own search engine to find them….)

Hollow holistics

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People who feel they need more attention and who express this feeling through medical symptoms will usually feel better after getting some attention.

(This is a theory based on anecdotal evidence but it could easily be tested)

Does this mean that denying the reality and giving them what they want is a good thing? Maybe adding to the world’s sum of myths that people forget are metaphors doesn’t matter. Except for the danger of suckering in the ill?

The mind is involved in many diseases, so you can’t rule out the effectiveness of the placebo effect, whether it’s sparked by consuming a well-marketed drug or by a set of rituals. The more incomprehensible the ritual, the better it seems to work. White coats and a prescription pad reassure some of us. A claim to focus mystical energies work on others. However, just because a fair bit of modern medicine is woo doesn’t make complete tosh is a reasonable alternative.

Here’s one of the most comprehensible bits of a thread from a homeopathy forum:

Scientific Validity of Homeopathy:– Dynamic effects from higher potencies are well observed and experianced by homeopathic community but not by scientific community, consitently in DBPC studies. Furthur science of homeopathic effects and presence of raw remedies substances in higher potencies remained unmeasurable, a truth, miss or weakness as per their current measurable technology of science. As such, homeopathic effects are interpreted as placebo effect by them and its legal and moral validity/existance may be based on “posing no harm”. But still ,some basis of “time lapse” in giving the needed treatments can pop up anytime in view of inconsistency in outcome, non-presence of raw remedy substance, placebo effects, least side effects etc.

Can’t make head nor tail of that? Homeopathy is at the almost-credible end of the alternative therapy chain. Go down the ladder a bit and homeopathy seems almost to make sense, in comparison.

Kinesiology? Sounds impressively scientific. What is it then? Buggared if I know after looking at a few websites. For instance, the Health Kinesiology definitions page says that:

Common forms of treatment include the use of magnets, homeopathic remedies, flower essences, or even a particular thought. ….In a single session, the therapist may identify allergies, rectify nutritional imbalances, deal with phobias and psychological stress, rebalance chakras and start the process of detoxifying the body from heavy metals, vaccinations, drugs etc.

So, it can treat everything by doing whatever the “therapist” feels like, then?

Crystal healing? (Do crystals really get sick?)

.. not part of standard medical theory, but it is included in a broader view of crystal power that says crystals, which are minerals with a periodic atomic structure, possess metaphysical abilities.
Crystal healers say that it works because everything is energy and vibrates at various frequencies and that crystals work via these vibrations. Every living thing has a vibrational energy system, which includes chakras, subtle bodies and meridians. By using the appropriate crystals one can allegedly retune an energy system or rebalance a body’s energies, thus improving well-being.

Reiki? (In the absence of a pseudoscientific name, an implied reference to the inscrutable powers of the east will have to serve the purpose.)

There is no need to remove any clothing as Reiki will pass through anything, even plaster casts. The practitioner gently places their hands non-intrusively in a sequence of positions which cover the whole body. The whole person is treated rather than specific symptoms. …..
It is possible to heal at any level of being: physical, mental, emotional or spiritual. Acute injuries can be helped to heal very quickly but more chronic illness takes longer. In some cases such as terminal illness, there is not enough time for the progress of the disease to be reversed….. The practitioner is a channel which the energy is drawn through by the need or imbalance in the recipient.

Sorry, I know this is getting boring. Treating the whole patient, rebalancing energies .. But, I am going somewhere with this. As it seems, incredibly, that your tax pounds are.

A website called NHS Directory of Complementary and Alternative Practitioners says that it is

compiled and managed only for use by NHS healthcare professionals by the NHS Trusts Association, the leading professional association for primary care in the UK

It purports to be a guide for NHS Trust staff so they can find alternative practitioners when they want to refer patients to them.

There are a few things in its list of therapies that don’t seem exceptionable (like counselling) but most of them are complete and utter nonsense.

Despite my fervent hope that this is just a phishing site, i am afraid that it’s real.

Who funds the NHS?

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Carrying on the thread from the post below about public funding for airport security, there is a related issue to do with the National Health Service. The one thing that most people in the UK are happy to contribute their tax pounds to must be the NHS. But it may not be prepared to come through with the goods when we need it to.

FFS, it’s spending comically inflated sums on a new computer system. Drugs that will give sight to the blind or another 5 years to people dying of kidney cancer are obviously too much of an expensive luxury after that.

Tony Wilson – former Granada TV presenter, creator of the independent Factory Records (Joy Division, et al) , styled “Mr Manchester” by fellow Granada TV presenter Gordon Burns – has kidney cancer. And lo, he finds that the NHS won’t pay for the drugs that would almost certainly give him 5 years more life.

The view expressed by his local health authority and National Institute for Clinical Excellence is that these drugs are too expensive (at over £2k) and aren’t a “cure”. Tony Wilson says that, although not a cure, the main doctors in the field regard them as essential. But obviously, £2k is too much to pay for one individual to live another half decade or more…

Well, Tony Wilson can pay, or his showbiz chums can pay for him. But, he is, unselfishly, campaigning for all the other patients who can’t come up with £2k to save their lives.

Similarly, there is a treatment for macular degeneration (age-related blindness) that is also considered too costly. So, if you suffer from macular degeneration, depending on where you live and whether you are already blind in one eye or not, it’s possible that you might get it. Then again, you may not.

This stuff is not even remotely rational. If the health service budget is stretched to its limits, take more money from us. Or, maybe try some more ruthless cost-cutting.

Like, don’t give Prozac to everyone who seems a little unhappy, for a start. Don’t lash millions of working computers and replace them with a multi-billion computer system designed to leak everyone’s personal information at will, but ready for the one occasion a year when you need to book someone from Dorset into a hospital in Aberdeen.

Some insignificant fragment of it is MY money, right? If I ever get kidney cancer or go blind, I’ll happily let the NHS use my computer, but I want the best treatments.

[tags]blindness, cancer, health, kidney cancer, national health service, nhs, public spending, medicine, tony wilson, Health Service[/tags]

Computers aren’t doctors

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We all know Google has become the new hypochondriac diagnostic tool. All the same, it’s a bit disturbing how far the NHS has started to behave as if computers have some intrinisic sickness-curing value. And I’m not talking here about that inferior version of Google that you can find in the so-called NHS Direct high street shops. (Add a triage nurse, subtract the coffee and the wider web-surfing capability and these are NHS Internet cafes)

The general opinion on the new NHS computer system puts its cost at over £20 billion.

The National Audit Office claims that this cost will not all be borne by the taxpayer – only £12.4 billions, before factoring in the cost of the “savings” that will result from it. The companies involved – the major one of which was almost destroyed in the process – will somehow meet the shortfall. Hmm. I am definitely too sceptical. My limited understanding of the laws of the market make it hard for me to see why any company would bid for a contract that would cost them £8 billion pounds to complete. Their profit margins must be astronomical. In any case, I remember that about four years ago, this was going to be an unprecedented spend of £6 billion. So even on the most optimistic estimate, this project costs double what it was supposed to.

The Health Minister, Lord Warner, claims that the project will pay for itself. This in itself seems well nigh incredible, unless it means that huge numbers of clerical staff are to be made redundant, which begs the question of who is going to operate the new system then? My doctors and any hospitals I’ve ever visited have used computer systems for years. Were there some strange 19th century hospitals and surgeries lying forgotten in the world of the quill pen?

Correct me if Windows Calculator is wrong here but I believe that £20 billion (cost of shiny new national computer system) divided by 60 million (UK population) is £333.33. That seems to be the cost for every man woman and child in the UK

That’s approximately the cost of a cheap low-end PC isnt it? So this new system would buy everyone in the UK a low-end PC, WITHOUT any economies of scale.

How many doctors and nurses and hospital cleaners would it buy? Quite a fair number I would have thought, if we all club together a bit and put our £333.33 towards wages. A hundred of us could have paid for a junior doctor or a very senior nurse or paramedic or even two cleaners or cooks.

(Yes, I know that the blog has an excessively medical flavour this week. No particular reason, except maybe that getting a post picked up by the excellent NHS blog doctor site has skewed our thinking.)

More Bad Science?

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It seems this is the week for nonsense “science” being thrown about by people who really should know better. This latest instalment may not be bad science, there are lots of fallacies which may well apply, but I will leave that up to you to judge.

Here in the sunny green and pleasant land of the UK, the TV and Radio were carrying a news bulletin, which has been picked up in the print press today, which explained that a Charity (Alcohol Concern) was calling for the Government to ban children under the age of 15 drinking alcohol at home. Seriously. Alcohol Concern are concerned [puns always intended] that a Government report shows the number of 11 – 13 year olds who “binge drink” has increased dramatically (I do not know what the figures for this are, sorry).

Depending on which news / radio station you caught this on, the feedback was mixed. In some of the “older listener” channels, there was applause at such good suggestions and heartfelt condemnation of “today’s youth” who are all alcoholic rebels, unlike any other time in the past… On the “younger listener” stations this was met with outrage and shock anyone would be daft enough to suggest it.
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Bad Science, Bad Conclusion or …

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Now I have a bit of a moral quandry here. Normally I would be loathe to pass comment on research findings without having read the research in full but for some reason (well, I can think of lots) I have been unable to read the full JAMA article. Obviously I am not going to let this stop me though…

In the 10 Mar 07 edition of NewScientist the news section reports on a study into diets which is titled (in the magazine) The Atkins diet works – a bit. The news item begins:

Compared head-to-head against three other diet plans, the Atkins diet has come out on top. In one of the largest studies to date, overweight women lost most weight on the popular low-carbohydrate diet.

Now this seems reasonable enough. The item continues about how, during a 12 month study the sample on the Atkins diet lost more weight than those on the Zone, LEARN (low fat diet based on US government guidelines) or Ornish (lower fat) diets. 12 months is a long time for a study like this and it looked at 311 women between the ages of 20 and 50. The data should be great.

I have no intention of getting into an argument about which diet is the best, or even if the current western obsession with diet makes any sense at all (simple answer, I dont think it does). The thing which caught my eye was the science involved.

Without having read the study itself, I can only assume this was a properly constructed study to generate an unbiased result as to which diet was the most effective at weight loss. It strikes me, this is what the study found out as well.

You would think they would be happy about it…

Given the fact that the diet industry generates lots of money, even the most crackpot (“eat three ants a day”) diets will pretty much make their inventors rich (especially if a fat celeb signs up to it, gets surgery then claims it was your diet…) and you can see people will defend the cash cow.

The commentary about the study seems to think it has failed (which leads me to suspect they were trying to prove one of the other three diets was the best – I wonder who funded the study..) and Gardner (the author) is quoted in NS as saying:

“Was the slight benefit on Atkins due to the low carbs, or the high protein, or the eight glasses of water a day that may have replaced sweetened beverages? We don’t know.”

Is he saying his experiment construction is flawed? Were there so many uncontrolled variables that he can not explain the results? Was he expecting the LEAN (or Ornish or Zone) diet to come out best? (The Zone diet pretty much came out the worst, which is a blow for people who advocate the “equal proportions” approach.)

I am not convinced this is “bad science” as such. From what I can read, the study looks sound, but I am amazed at the unwillingness to accept the conclusions. Adding to the bad conclusions, if you are still curious, there is an entire website devoted to quotes about this study: “Best Quotes from Atkins, Ornish, Zone, LEARN Diet Study” and in here you can see some amazingly bad conclusions from people doing their utmost to ignore the results of this study and maintain their cash cow…

“This is the message of this article — focus on lifestyle and environmental factors and don’t worry about the macronutrient composition of the diet, particularly if you can achieve the NHLBI guidelines of a 5 to 10 percent weight loss,” says Dr. George Blackburn, chair in nutrition medicine at Harvard Medical School. “I think that was my message for the past 20 years.”

Call me old fashoned but I have no idea where he drew that conclusion from given the available information.

Still, have a look, see what you think and if anyone can get access to the full article I would love to know how it reads. (JAMA, vol 297, p969)

[tags]Bad Science, Science, Diet, Atkins, Low Fat, Low Carb, Medicine, Experiment, Business, Woo, Crackpot, Society, Culture, Food[/tags]

The Trap- BBC2

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The Trap – on BB2, on Sundays at 9pm for the next few weeks – is well worth watching. It is mainly brilliant. It’s rare to find television that addresses fundamental issues about our current society. If it’s any indication of how good it is, Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn in Saturday’s Guardian – which introduced it as unmissable – was probably the only totally serious piece Brooker has written in that column.

The programme looks at our ideas about freedom, where they originated and how they serve to cage us. Ian Curtis traces our current views of individuals as totally self-serving to inventions that were necessary to make Rand Corporation cold-war game theory work, through anti-psychiatry’s attack on institutions and Thatcher-inspiring economists to a situation where, as Brooker put it

“conventional human traits such as sadness or irritability are reclassified as aberrant medical conditions, Narcissism and selfishness, however, are normal.”

I can’t say I can go along with all the arguments – I can’t believe that R.D. Laing was truly so influential anywhere, nor that anti-psychiatry can be blamed much for the medicalising of normal behaviours. Curtis’s argument here is that Rosenham’s experiments, by showing that psychiatrists misdiagnosed mental illness, shook the medical establishment and led to the application of non-human computerised automatic diagnoses. When applied to large numbers of non-mental patients, the diagnostic questionnaires showed that half of the US population had a recognised mental disorder. The questionnaires provided an “objective” set of standards of normality that became a model for the population as a whole to judge itself against.

I don’t know where the argument is going with this, yet, but it seems a little far-fetched. I don’t think the detail is really important. Tonight’s programme was very impressive and important. It looks very broadly at the action of ideas in our society, from their origin to their implications.. It should really make you think.