Seeking Health

PEPPERx3

Everything’s relative nowadays and my idea of health is probably quite different to yours or a kitten’s for that matter.

I’ve been doing family this past weekend so that my husband and I’d be at home to pick up our new kitten from the Blue Cross (a pet rehoming charity in the UK). And then stay at home to keep her (and us) entertained. She’s working a treat so far.

I think I need to get back to short posts. The ability to edit myself and turn one post into two or three had left me while dealing with our dying cat but, as you can see I don’t think I’ll be distracted by old age and possible pain of another being for the moment rather, enthusiastic exuberance and the idiocy of youth!

Bring it on.

The first thing that caught my eye on my return was an article about untested Ebola treatments causing a UK team of medics to walk out of their voluntary positions in Ebola treatment centres in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

The team felt it would be unprofessional giving a treatment originally developed for heart conditions to a group of physically weakened and physiologically complicated sufferers (liver and kidney failure are amongst Ebola patients’ complications). The treatment had limited antiviral properties. The WHO had identified over 50 other treatments that had greater anti-viral strengths. The team were exposing themselves to the patients’ contagious blood all for questionable benefit.

This is another article that’s been brought to my attention. Statins are a drug that have been around for a while and have had some very good PR behind them as you’ll see from the post that explains the difficulties that arise when equating the NNT (Number Needed to Treat in order to see a worthwhile treatment outcome) for preventive medicines where you’re not saving lives rather, preventing deaths.

It’s fascinating stuff and really worth reading if only to get a bit of a handle on how we are so easily persuaded of a thing’s worth by sets of numbers which get mistakenly conflated with other meanings of numbers in other scenarios.

I could list the sorts of pharmaceutical therapies involving supplementation that have received similar treatments but this is a short post as it’s Christmas Day, I’ve just been playing with the kitten at the top of the page and now need to get me some xmas w friends.

Happy Christmas folks.

New Year post will be a rundown of the various strategies we can all do to help us feel at our best.

Happy New Year (depending on the depth of my gluten free mince pie haze) there maybe a post before NYE!