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General Health
Last month, the inventor of statins died. His name was Akira Endo, a Japanese biochemist. He moved to New York from Tokyo in 1966 to work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Arriving in the USA, he remarked upon the large number of overweight people, and elderly people with coronary heart disease. When he went back to Japan, he started looking into the link between cholesterol levels and heart problems. Thus began his quest for a drug that blocked…
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Here’s the weird thing about science. The more we discover, the more we realise what we DON’T know. The strange effects of quantum mechanics where particles act like waves when they’re not being observed… The bizarre invisible dark matter and energy that seems to be gluing the cosmos together. The mysteries of black holes, which are not even holes, but concentrations of matter packed into a tiny space. It’s the same for questions of health and illness. For instance, despite…
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I often rail about the unnecessary prescriptions GPs give out. Drugs with side effects are dished out to masses of patients, when a lot of these people could have found other more natural preventatives and remedies. And I’ve long promoted the idea that by making some lifestyle changes, especially dietary ones, we can reduce or avoid a lot of serious health problems. So I was not at all surprised by the results of an ‘innovative’ pilot scheme in Tower Hamlets…
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I have a serious question for you about your relationship. Not your romantic one… I mean the one with your phone! Or, more specifically, your relationship with the internet (and all its many platforms, tools and alerts) as it exists in a little black box you carry around with you. How much time do you spend on it? How distracted does it make you? How anxious, angry, irritated or inadequate does it make you feel? And how uncomfortable do you…
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I remember when I was at university, smoking was cool. Binge drinking too. Hanging out at the student union all day drinking cheap beer, then going to smoke-filled flats and shared houses to listen to punk records. Even the ‘healthier’ sporty groups (rugby players like me) would hit it hard in the bar afterwards. It was part of the culture – and those who didn’t want to do that stuff formed a smaller group, comparatively. Today it is a little…
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In the health-writing game you come across a lot of studies. Research is carried out by university scientists into all kinds of topics…. from the effects of different diets to the healing power of certain foods. Some of them are animal studies – so they only suggest a potentiality for the same thing to be true in humans. Some of them are human studies – but they can number as few as 5-15 participants. Some are only carried out over…
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