Increasing antibiotic resistance is a global health emergency. According to the World Health Organisation, without urgent, coordinated action, the world is heading towards a ‘post-antibiotic era’ when drugs used routinely to treat infection will be useless. There are already antibiotic resistant strains of the sexually transmitted disease Gonorrhoea and syphilis, which are both caused by […]
Resistance to antibiotics Over my surgical career, I have seen a real change in the way we use antibiotics. Initially, we doled them out at every opportunity, not just to treat, but in the hope of preventing infection from surgery. Today, the situation is very different. We are seeing more and more people resistant to […]
Chronic pain is one of the major health concerns in the UK. According to the National Pain Audit, published in 2011, over 7.8 million people in the UK say that they live with significant pain that does not go way, compared to seven million people who suffer from cardiovascular disease and around four million sufferers […]
Bio-identical hormone therapy routinely includes key anti-aging hormones such as oestrogen, progesterone, testosterone and DHEA, which can be taken orally in tablet form, administered as a topical gel or even injected. But it can also include a wide range of others, depending on the patient’s ‘deficiencies’. Cortisol: This is the body’s stress hormone because it […]
Jim O’Neill, chair of the UK Government’s Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, has today called for vaccines and alternative approaches to be used more widely in healthcare and agriculture as an alternative to antibiotics in the fight against drug-resistant “superbugs”. There has been much in the media recently about our currently available antibiotics becoming less effective, […]
Read More… from AMR and the importance of finding new ways to prevent and treat infections
A few years ago, I and some GP colleagues – Tony Avery from Nottingham University, and Rupert Payne from Cambridge University – were asked to do a review of polypharmacy by the King’s Fund. Polypharmacy had always been looked on disparagingly through my training in medicine and my subsequent work as a GP. It was […]
For all sorts of reasons, people who have been taking medication for depression (or related conditions including anxiety and OCD) for many years may find that it seems to have stopped working. This is pretty dreadful for them, and presents a challenge for their clinicians. When I used to man a telephone helpline for an […]
Antibiotic resistance occurs when medicines are no longer effective in treating bacterial infections. This is potentially catastrophic, as much of modern medicine would become impossible without antibiotics. Simple infections would become life-threatening and common surgery would become unsafe. Antibiotics are not effective against viral infections, yet they are often used to treat them. Pharmacists are on […]
Read More… from How can pharmacists fight antibiotic resistance?
Spend a bit of time browsing the internet for information about health conditions and you’ll eventually run across pages claiming that cannabis is the cure for everything from chronic pain to cancer, epilepsy to multiple sclerosis. Although these pages may boast lists of tens or even hundreds of scientific papers claiming to prove that ‘weed […]
Read More… from Medical cannabis: snake oil or health solution?
I want to introduce you to a new drug. You may want to use it, indeed many people across the world do. It is from a natural source that is cheap to make and is easy to use. It is a helpful drug. In that it can help with stress relief, it reduces appetite a little […]