Articles

Depression is one of the least well understood and least well tolerated (by others) emotional states in our culture. Broadly speaking, there are two types: unipolar, characterised by low moods only; and bipolar, characterised by extreme highs and lows, sometimes called manic-depression. Within these two broad categories are varying levels of severity and regularity. For […]

Half of all heart attack victims die after their first attack. The other half, more often than not, wander the earth in an imitation of life, popping pills and practising self denial. Heart attacks are scary, and the average victim doesn’t want a repeat. On this basis, many feel grateful for the bewildering array of […]

If you are suffering from what medicine calls ‘arthritis’, you could have any one of a hundred different kinds of illness, including everything from the most common – osteoarthritis and the crippling rheumatoid arthritis – to gout and fibromyalgia. While organisations such as the Arthritis Foundation pooh-pooh all but the most widely used conventional treatments, […]

This is a transcript of a talk given at the Royal Society of Medicine, Spring 1997 When I was first asked to speak tonight I was deeply flattered. I was also intrigued and challenged. I went first to my own library of books and research papers.  But couldn’t find what I was looking for.  I pillaged the files […]

Antibiotics were the drugs -that were going to take the human race into the next millennium. Now, more than 60 years after the discovery of penicillin, we find ourselves back to the future. It may as well be 1930 again, because many of the strains of bacteria we sought to eliminate, and indeed for a […]

We have all become the unknowing guinea pigs of an uncontrolled experiment with the food we eat. Today, through biotechnology, scientists are mixing and matching bits of DNA cutting a gene from one kind of organism and splicing it into another species hoping to make an improved plant or animal; corn genes in rice, chicken […]

Multiple sclerosis (MS) often follows a highly individual and unpredictable course, sometimes leading to chronic and occasionally devastating disability. MS is one of the most common diseases of the central nervous system and it can affect any part o MS occurs because of damage to the myelin sheath the thin protective layer of fatty membrane […]

Forty years ago, if you were diagnosed as having lupus, otherwise known as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), the prognosis would not have been good. Odds were that you would have a 50/50 chance of dying within five years. Today doctors are most likely to tell you that, thanks to modern medicine, to greater awareness among […]

Every year in Britain 20,000 people are on the receiving end of 100,000 treatments. In the US 100,000 patients get more than half a million treatments a year. It’s not a new drug or revolutionary type of surgery but, amazingly, electroconvulsive therapy or ECT. In these days of holistic medicine, and particularly when the efficacy […]

Few disorders are as devastating and frightening for an individual as stroke. Often without warning, life can be torn apart by the sudden loss of basic physical or mental skills. Equally, no disorder is more confounding to medical science since stroke cannot be pinned down to one single, treatable cause. Instead, it is influenced by […]