The purpose of palliative chemotherapy is to provide the longest period of good quality life to a patient who is likely to die from the disease – in this case colorectal cancer. Is this best done by hammering the cancer as hard as possible with combination chemotherapy from the start, or by using the chemo […]
The richest woman in Elizabethan England, Bess of Hardwick, conceived the idea that unless she kept building houses, she would die. Hence the two Hardwick Halls on a hilltop in Derbyshire, one left uncompleted while she ordered work to begin on the other. […]
As we English GPs drive down dreary town streets on warm afternoons, our hearts are suddenly lifted by the sight of tall waving mallow flowers in a wonderful variety of soft and dark colours: hollyhocks. […]
July in England is not usually a good time for fungus-hunting, though the season gets under way around now in Poland, with special steam-hauled mushroom-picking trains taking the populace to the woods. What heaven. […]
The current fashion in Britain is to put every patient who is thought to need a statin on 40mg of simvastatin. Atorvastatin is a more powerful drug, weight for weight, with a wide dose range. This study compared a dose of 10mg with a dose of 80mg in patients aged 65 or over with stable […]
This week’s Lancet is devoted to HIV-1 and in particular to the effect of new anti-retroviral drugs in treatment-experienced patients. […]
Cervical cytology is a topic I find almost unendurably boring, and how some people can spend their lives looking at cervical smears passes all understanding. […]
The success rate of in-vitro fertilisation in women over the age of 35 is about 35% in this Dutch series, provided there is no tinkering with the embryo to remove a cell for preimplantation genetic screening. If this is done, the live birth rate drops to 24%. […]
As a substance both pleasurable and mildly addictive, chocolate is a natural cause of anxiety to health puritans. The fault lies with the British chocolate manufacturers (themselves of Puritan, or at least Quaker, descent) who market their cocoa solids mixed with sugar and milk fat. […]
I grew up a weedy kid, but at least that was better than being a fat kid. There were not many of those in the northern England of my early youth, and they suffered all the more for it. […]