Since diabetes was the disease that started me on this journey, I’ll get into it now. I’ll break this huge issue into smaller posts. Since I went into great detail about the methods of the literature with the hypertension post, I’ll keep these shorter. Screening for and preventing diabetes does not...
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Recent news stories touted a 22% drop in cancer death rates that has “spared the lives” of over 1.5 million people over the past two decades. The American Cancer Society (ACS) was attributed as explaining this drop as caused by U.S. smoking habits, extra attention to cancer prevention, improvements in various...
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The New York Times published a great story about the tremendous growth of thyroid cancer diagnoses in South Korea. It’s based on a study authored by H. Gilbert Welch, MD, a professor at Dartmouth Medical School, who has been a voice of restraint in the growth of aggressive American medicine for...
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The American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology just published new guidelines for screening and treating cholesterol. In some ways these guidelines are more like the British guidelines. Instead of setting up doctors and patients to fail by calling for certain cholesterol number targets as in the old U.S. guidelines (LDL level...
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Thanks to everyone who wrote me back on some of the “simple” screening tests that “just take a few minutes” that well-meaning special interest groups want family physicians to give away their time to administer. And remember, the family physicians’ nurses are busy also, so if a special interest expects only...
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