A forum on healthcare policy and professional issues, by Glasgow-based GP and FT Weekend columnist Margaret McCartney
From the category archives:
Great to see some straight talking common sense from the US. Just because you can have your genome dissected, doesn’t mean you should pay a few hundred pounds for your ‘genetic risk assessment’ as several UK and US websites currently offer. These tests may need FDA approval, says this piece from the New England Journal of [...]
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New research is a ‘wake up call’ for GPs- at least, according to Professor Steven Field, who is quoted today in the Telegraph as saying that doctors are needing more training in recognising dementia symptoms. The paper is in the BMJ, here, and I am rather amazed at the conclusions that both Field and the [...]
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The NEJM carries a concerning article: a woman having a CT of head was exposed, accidentally, to a radiation overdose. She became unwell afterwards, and she’s suing. However the article also points out that new imaging techniques, getting more information about brain structures and blood flow mean that radiation doses from scans can now be [...]
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..in Clinical Evidence. And I’m so chuffed to be name checked…
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False positives are one of the many banes of screening programmes. In the US, advertising for people to come to private clinics for expensive CT scans, to screen people for lung cancer is common and, of course, legal. Here in the UK, several private companies advertise their services despite COMARE saying that “we have strongly [...]
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Over the past few weeks, I have been offered massages, gym visits, vitamin supplements, make-up tips and consultations with cosmetic surgeons. All these generous invitations came from PR companies keen to create a media glow for their clients’ products. Since an awful lot of column inches seem to be devoted to genome testing at the [...]
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There has been much press coverage of The Lancet Oncology’s paper this week on screening for ovarian cancer. Screening – looking for disease before a person has symptoms that suggest the disease – is often harder than it seems, thanks to the myriad problems it can create. That’s not to say that screening shouldn’t be [...]
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