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An Evening With Manuel Cardoso – The Man Who Helped Reform Portugal’s Drug Policy
There was a big turn-out on rainy Sydney evening for drug law reform meeting. Tuesday 5th June 2018. St Stephen’s Church, Macquarie Street, Sydney, for “An evening with Manuel Cardoso – the man who helped reform Portugal’s drug policy”. The take-home message to get through to our politicians: decriminalisation is now proven to save lives, money…
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A Sensible Community Pharmacy & GP Collaboration
In a win for commonsense, a professional collaboration between community pharmacists and local GP’s coupled with a simultaneous a solution for a major public health problem, a mutually respectful system has been piloted in the County of Staffordshire in the UK. And patients involved in the pilot study have documented high levels of satisfaction, simply because…
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The Medical Profession Leadership – Is Their Pharmacy Rant a cry for a Direction?
The medical profession has always promoted itself as being the leading health modality with all other health formats and modalities being inferior. It has reinforced that vision through the lens of adopting power politics as its primary marketing strategy. This meant that instead of being respectful and gaining the collaborative support of all other health…
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OMNS – Infantile Colic
An infant with colic not only is suffering from pain, but is causing great concern in parents attempting to render loving care. We can’t ask the infant to rate the pain on a scale from 1 to 10, but we know that only pain could produce such an agonizing cry that borders on screaming. We…
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No Evidence? ….Who’s kidding whom?
I had the privilege last week of speaking on both days at the 4th Annual National Institute of Integrative Medicine Symposium in Melbourne. Twenty-five International and Australian speakers presented the latest evidence-based research, therapies, treatments and innovative technologies. The topic list contained many of the issues our patients are confronting each day: Cancer: Integrative Oncology,…
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Opioids & Non-opioids
I’m a turmeric, magnesium powder, lipoic acid, vitamin B12, vitamin D, arnica and omega-3 krill oil type of person when it comes to pain. I see great results when anybody in pain is empowered to make some decisions based on their expectations, rather than be told what they need, without adequate explanations of the range…
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Statin Therapy – A new Low?
I have a 90 year-old female patient who is physically OK but starting to face the reality of dementia. She showed me the “lovely” invitation from her GP to enroll in the StaREE trial. StaREE is the acronym (don’t you love them!) for “Statins in Reducing Events in the Elderly”. A quaint idea, brilliantly conceived…
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Statins are for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease….really?
Well, well, well…….even pharmacy publications are now casting doubts over the effectiveness of statin therapy in primary prevention of cardiovascular disease. What does this mean to the pharmacist when a patient asks “do I really need to take this medicine for my cholesterol?” and goes on to describe a fuzzy memory, aching muscles and generally…
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OMNS News Service – Vitamin C and Sepsis
Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, May 24, 2017 Vitamin C and Sepsis: The genie is now out of the bottle The enormous effectiveness of vitamin C in helping to resolve any of a wide variety of infections comes as no surprise to anyone who has made at least a minimal effort to study the large body of…
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MEDICAL CURIOSITY: Where Has It Gone?
What happened to curiosity as it pertains to searching for causes of poor health? Maybe it’s payback. Lack of curiosity leads to the next step: complacency. Some doctors and patients have retained their curiosity, but many more have not. Over the last several decades, there has been a cultural shift in attitudes about healthful living…