During the Covid-19 pandemic, public health and infectious disease authorities struggled to grasp, communicate and act on current evidence about how the SARS-COV-2 virus spreads. These shortcomings resulted in misguided policies and insufficient protection measures, contributing to 15 million potentially preventable deaths worldwide. With ongoing threats like tuberculosis (TB) – South Africa’s leading cause of …
Introduction Despite being underfunded for over a decade, and now in “critical condition”, the UK’s National Health System (NHS) has significantly invested in personalised medicine. These initiatives include the pioneering 100,000 Genomes Project, genetically based cancer screening, and personalised prevention. Proponents argue these programmes will improve outcomes and reduce pressure on the healthcare system. Critics …
Personalised Prevention: Fattening the Cow or Just Weighing It? Read More »
Clinicians thrive on solving their patients’ health problems The responsibilities of medical practice can be heavy, but despite the challenges and complexities, or perhaps because of them, clinicians generally find clinical work rewarding. High levels of workplace frustration and burnout currently reported in multiple countries and settings are not intrinsic to the clinical aspects of …
Operational Failures in Primary Care: AI Solutions? Read More »
Our online health professionals discussion group includes clinicians who use dietary interventions to change the course of type 2 diabetes. One of them described two patients newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and his approach to their treatment, raising a couple of interesting questions: – Can a low-carb diet help with type 1 diabetes? – …
Type 1 Diabetes: Can a low carb diet cure it? Does immunisation cause it? Read More »
In the journal NEJM AI, Peter Szolovits, a computer scientist and medical decision-making expert, describes generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models as having “miraculous abilities” but points out that “science abhors miracles” and concludes that these models aren’t ready for clinical use. [Miracle: “an extraordinary and welcome event not explicable by natural or scientific laws and …
AI and Large Language Models – Divine or Platonic? Read More »
In 1954, Henry Beecher, the pioneering American anaesthesiologist, described death from anaesthesia as a “public health problem“. Seventy years later, thanks to concerted effort and innovation, anaesthesia is about 100 times safer, occurring in about 1 in 100,000 cases. This makes surgery safer and contributes to its popularity and effectiveness: globally, over 313 million surgical …
If you’ve never heard of NAFLD (Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease), or MASLD (Metabolic dysfunction-Associated Steatotic Liver disease (MASLD), its equally non-catchy new name[1], you’re not alone. Yet this condition affects 30% of the global population. Image: DALL-e As an anesthesiologist working in the operating rooms of a large university medical center in Cleveland, Ohio …
Fatty Liver Has a New Name, and a New Drug. Why Should We Care? Read More »
Despite the huge excitement that greeted the sequencing of the first human genome at the turn of the century, genetic testing isn’t routine. When will this change? Historically, genetic testing was reserved for patients with known or suspected genetic disorders. Tests could identify single gene (“monogenic”) changes linked to conditions like sickle cell disease, haemophilia …
Discovery Health reviewed 8 years of data from private hospital “patient satisfaction surveys”. They say patients with low scores are more likely to have an unplanned hospital readmission in the 30 days after hospital discharge and that their study identifies responsible gaps in hospital care. Are they right? I want to discuss these conclusions …
Does “Patient Satisfaction” Predict Hospital Readmission? Read More »
This week I attended a webinar series hosted by the Cardiac Arrhythmia Society of Southern Africa (CASSA), taught by cardiologists from the University of Cape Town, focused on Essential ECGs. These are the ones you can’t miss – if you do, your patient might die! I surprised myself by getting the quizzes mostly right. Surprised …
Eagles, beagles and a moose – change comes to cardiology Read More »
