Bermondsey Awareness Seminar, Medicine and Health

Harris Academy Bermondsey, 55 Southwark Park Road, London
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Event has ended
This event ended on Sunday 1st of September 2019
Admission
Free
Location

Harris Academy Bermondsey, 55 Southwark Park Road, London

Nearest Tube/Rail Stations
Bermondsey 0.42 miles

Mahatma Gandhi is reported to have replied to a reporter who’d asked what he thought about Western Civilisation, that he thought it was a good idea.

That pretty much sums up my thoughts about Evidence Based Medicine (EBM) – the system that nearly all doctors will tell you they follow when they are treating you.

EBM - a way of testing the effectiveness and safety of treatments - is certainly a good idea. Trouble is that too often it doesn’t live up to its promises. For example, everyone over 60 is advised to take a cholesterol-lowering statin drug to protect their heart. But the big studies that report their benefits were all done by companies that make the drugs and no independent researchers are allowed to see details of what the trials actually found.

How bad is the problem? A couple of years ago research by the University of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, listed some of EBM’s failings, including such facts as: half of all trials are never published, and positive trials are twice as likely to be published as negative ones; between 2009 and 2014 the drug industry was fined a total of £10bn for criminal behaviour’ and for breaking the rules for running trials. Such fiddling makes treatment when you are ill more risky than it should be. It also means the official way of keeping you healthy – prescribing you more and more drugs to deal with the effects of aging – is unlikely to be side-effect free or get to the root of any problem.

Jerome Burne is an award winning medical and health journalist who writes regularly for the Daily Mail Good Health Pages and publishes a blog on evidence and medicine at: http://healthinsightuk.org. His latest book, written with nutritionist Patrick Holford, is ‘The Hybrid Diet, which explains how your body is designed to run on two sorts of fuel – fat and carbohydrates. Cutting back on one or the other doesn’t make sense

Join Jerome Burne for this special seminar evening as he lifts the lid on bad evidence, gives you some tips on how to spot it and explains why nutrition and lifestyle changes can be a safer way to stay healthy.



Titles of recent blogs on Healthinsightuk.org include:

*The claim that the cure for the crippling fatigue of ME/CFS was to change your mind always seemed bizarre. Now it really is on the way out.

*Statin Deniers and Anti-Vaxxers. How political rhetoric is infecting medicine

*The great QOF fiasco. The untold story of the biggest public health experiment ever and how its failure was ignored

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