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OMNS – Plenty of Food but not Plenty of Weight Or, “So that’s why those good-looking French eat the butter and cream dishes!
Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, January 19, 2018 by Tom Taylor “Say it ain’t so Joe!” (1) Really? You mean what you have heard all your life just ain’t so? You have probably believed fat is bad. “It ain’t so.” You have probably believed that starvation is the main way to lose weight. “It ain’t so.” You…
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Dig your well before you’re thirsty
If I had to name the single characteristic shared by all the truly successful people I’ve met over a lifetime, I’d say it is the ability to create and nurture a network of contacts. Although I never met David Rockefeller, he certainly would have fit in this category. When he passed away in March 2017…
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Pro Bono Pharmacy Services Create a Social Dividend
Pharmacists have always embraced a culture where service provision for health problems have been provided free of charge to local communities, while the physical product that resulted as a solution to those health problems attracted a monetary value. In contrast, GP’s charged for their services (consultations) and basically avoided selling products. Given that pharmacists and…
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Are your patients involved in a clinical trial?
A 90-year-old patient of mine has given me two invitations sent to her by her surgery and signed by her GP, to participate in the STAREE trial. She has (one year ago) diagnosed early-onset Alzheimer’s and was unsuccessfully given one of the usual drugs which worsened her mental state. Interestingly, before that prescription was offered,…
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Australia’s Health Care System Funding Needs Fixing
Australia’s health system funding is beginning to exhibit signs of stress. Is this by accident or by deliberate design? Health out of pocket expenses are beginning to climb and many common medical procedures are now funded by drawing down from a patient’s superannuation fund -sufficient monies to cover costs. Health advocates are concerned about the…
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OMNS – Fat is My Friend
(OMNS Jan 17, 2018) Throughout 2017 I kept saying “This looks like the year that the whole fat-cholesterol-heart disease hypothesis falls apart.” Well for once it looks like I was right. Today (I write on Jan 1st 2018) the annual review from Diabetes.co.uk carries 3 game-changing headlines from the past year: “Saturated fat myth challenged” “High carb…
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A New Year Brings Change
A new year often brings new beginnings. I was intrigued to discover how one company used a novel way to motivate employees to think about new ways of doing things. Here is the approach practiced by Chiyoji Misawa, who founded the largest home builder in Japan, Misawa Homes, more than 50 years ago. He “died”…
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Scotland’s Pharmacist Practitioner Champions
Perhaps it is because of my Scottish heritage, but I am continually dawn to the Scottish business model for community pharmacy, funded and developed in a genuine partnership between community pharmacists and government. One of its lesser publicised components is the funding of “Practitioner Champions”. It’s not a lot of money (£300,000 funding for this year),…
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Depressive illness – can we get involved?
The challenge of mental health is something in which we are intimately involved. How many of our patients struggle with SSRI and SNRI medications, only to struggle further with their symptoms and feelings. It is well known that many drugs modify normal and abnormal behaviours by changing the amounts of particular neurotransmitters present within the…
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OMNS – Niacin Treatment of Schizophrenia Recent Research Confirms Abram Hoffer’s Original Work
(OMNS Dec 2, 2017) Schizophrenia is a devastating and complex disease that can include a variety of specific clinical conditions. Drugs to treat schizophrenia have not advanced much beyond the 1960s; in many cases they are not very effective, and they have severe side-effects. The problem is that the cause of schizophrenia is unknown, and…