If you are truly trying to do the best by your feet, surely you would choose the best shoes when you are pounding the ground, or the court, or the treadmill. Wouldn’t you?
But what is ‘the best’?
And then, how much does it cost?
Well most of the opinion suggests you want a shoe that supports, and [...]
As I was cleaning out some of my old medical files I came across a couple of letters from 1998 about the weight loss drug phentermine.
Back in 1998 I was reading the material of a medical organisation called MaLAM, which monitors and lobbies pharmaceutical companies on their advertising.
Always a fascinating read, but this time they [...]
In my original 7 years of training to be a medical doctor there were gaps.
Some of those gaps I have filled. I spent time with Aboriginal people in rural Australia. I assessed elderly and frail people for admission to Aged Care facilities (aka Nursing Homes.) I also spent time working in a hospital Palliative Care [...]
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
No, this is not my line.
“The LAP-BAND Solution: A Partnership in Weight Loss” is the title of a book by Australian surgeon Dr Paul O’Brien which I read with interest when one of my patients found it in a library and showed it to me.
Since the start of 2007 I have been doing public talks [...]
The problem with studying exercise for weight loss is that you can’t really disguise the exercise.
If exercise came in a pill you could do it.
You could get a big group of people and randomly give half the pill with exercise in it, and the other half a dummy, sugar pill that looks, smells, tastes etc [...]
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
There is so much misinformation around about the benefits of exercise, particularly in regard to weight loss.
But let’s use a bit of common sense, shall we?
When we get active ie exercise, we use up energy.
If you don’t eat more calories, then this energy has to come from your body stores ie from fat.
So exercising more [...]
Have you heard the joke?
When is the time to get empathy from a doctor?
Before they’ve gone to medical school.
Boom. Boom.
Well actually it’s not a joke at all. It’s a researched fact, and not a very funny fact either.
Evidence has been building that shows a steady decline in empathy in doctors as they go through their [...]
Fake pills and treatments are such wonderful things.
They work roughly 30% of the time, on almost anything.
With the technical term of ‘placebos’ they are the gold standard treatment against which every other treatment is measured.
And the whole field is shrouded in mystery.
Why do blue placebos make people more sleepy, while red placebos keep people more [...]
The commotion over the study that said anti-depressants are a waste of time for all but the most severely depressed people, has continued to escalate.
It hit the middle editorial pages of my local city’s newspaper, and that means the story is big!
Much of the criticism that I have read of this study has been badly [...]