I'm sorry to write about the same topic on two consecutive weeks, but this really deserves the attention. Last week I wrote about how we're still not past the peak of this flu season and how the flu shot this year has been less effective, and I linked to a few authoritative web sites that I thought would be useful.
This week, allow me some personal observations.
This year's flu is hellish. I've had young healthy patients who've...
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Still In the Middle of the Flu Season
The recent news about this flu season has all been bad. As reported in this Reuters article, the match between the strains in this year's flu vaccine and the strains that are actually making people sick in North America are not as close as in previous years, meaning the flu vaccine this year is giving patients less protection than it has in the past. There are documented cases of vaccinated patients s...
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How Much Good Do Cholesterol Drugs Do?
Last month BusinessWeek had a fascinating article about cholesterol-lowering medications. The article also teaches us how we should calculate a specific medication's benefit and harm, and how pharmaceutical companies manipulate our opinions by reporting benefits in percentages but side effects in absolute numbers. If you want an interesting lesson in evidence-based medicine, or just in cholester...
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What We Don’t Know About Diabetes
This week we learned something very important about diabetes. We learned that we don't know something we thought we knew. (Regular readers will note that this keeps happening in medicine. For a generation everyone assumes something. Then we check and discover it isn't so.)
We've always assumed that in type 2 diabetes, the closer to normal that blood sugar is lowered the fewer complications of diabetes patients would have. Why? Because diabetes is known to be a major cause of kidney diseas...
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Laparoscopic Gastric Banding Can Cure Diabetes in Obese Patients
The scientific evidence for treatment of obesity is trending in a very interesting direction. For years a safe and effective medication for weight loss has been sought, with only modest results. (I wrote about orlistat, the medication in Xenical and Alli, a year ago.) Surprisingly, for obese patients evidence is increasingly mounting in favor of surgery for weight loss, rather than medications or even diet and exercise.
In 2006 ...
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