Dr John Briffa's blog, A Good Look at Good Health — writing on food, cholesterol, weight, energy and the science behind everyday health, from the drbriffa.com archive. Filter by topic, browse by category, or search the library.
Cholesterol and Statins
My blog on Monday focused on a piece published in the American Journal of Public Health which detailed some of the tactics drug companies use to persuade doctors to prescribe their wares. The conclusion? The more aggressively a drug is marketed to doctors, the more suspicious of it we should be, basically. I ended the […]
Food and Medical Politics
When a pharmaceutical company develops a new drug, they naturally want doctors to know about it. Drug companies spend a lot of money marketing drugs to doctors, with the hope that these doctors will ultimately prescribe them to their patients. Naturally, drug companies like to present their wares in as positive a light as possible. […]
Food and Medical Politics
I came across this story this morning. It tells us that less than half America women attend their scheduled, recommended mammogram examinations. The article cites possible reasons for this short-fall in take-up, specifically “discomfort from the test, lack of available screening centers, general non-compliance or denial.” All of these have some validity, I suppose, but […]
Food and Medical Politics
My blog on Christmas eve (My nutritional Christmas wish list) detailed 14 things I feel should be more widely known including the facts that saturated fat is not linked in any meaningful way with heart disease and there’s no good evidence that margarine is healthier than butter. Another was that there’s no good evidence that […]
Food and Medical Politics
Placebos are essentially inactive agents that are typically usually used in trials used to determine if a drug has genuine benefits or not. In most so-called ‘randomised, controlled trials’ individuals are assigned to take the medication or treatment being tested, while the rest get a placebo. If it turns out that the group receiving the […]
Children's Health
No sooner had I written about the fact that the science shows flu vaccination to be a largely pointless exercise, that I came across this on-line piece in the Los Angeles Times telling readers that flu vaccination “help[s] prevent babies from getting sick.” The article goes on to state that the flu vaccination “was effective […]
Food and Medical Politics
A couple of weeks ago I had my lovely elderly parents around for lunch. The subject of flu vaccination came up. My father is dead against this practice, and views flu as a largely self-limiting illness that rarely leads to significant complication (he’s right). My mother, on the other hand, has dutifully attended her doctor’s […]
Food and Medical Politics
Who decides what we should eat? Usually Government departments advised by scientists and researchers. Here in the UK, that job was entrusted to the Food Standards Agency until recently. And what a mess this body made of giving us science-based information and advice. See here, here, here and here for some examples of the sort […]
Food and Medical Politics
Mammography involves taking X-rays of the breast, in an effort to detect breast cancer earlier, with the hope that treatment will be more effective. It’s an approach that appears to make eminent sense. Yet, objective study of mammography shows that it doesn’t work so well. For a start, many, many women have to undergo screening […]
Cholesterol and Statins
Big cholesterol news emerged last week on the publication (much publicised) of a massive meta-analysis of statin treatment in those at relatively high risk of cardiovascular disease. The idea of this meta-analysis was to assess whether aggressive lowering of cholesterol (specifically LDL-cholesterol) brings additional benefits in terms of cardiovascular disease protection. The meta-analysis included results […]