Tarek S Arab

As a gynaecologist, I was appalled to read this story about a supposedly 'groundbreaking' treatment to stop premature births in the Mail (I read it on the online Mail site but in fact the culprit is The Mail on Sunday). Let me quote from it before telling you what it gets utterly wrong. Note my emphases in bold: A hormone treatment that can help prevent premature births could be made more widely available to thousands of at-risk mothers-to-be. The groundbreaking treatment, not yet widely available on the NHS, sees women given a daily dose of progesterone. This is dubbed the ‘pregnancy hormone’ by doctors, and levels naturally rise during pregnancy to help prevent the cervix from opening too early.

For over 30 years, dietary fat has been seen as a major cause of heart attacks, strokes and cancer. This has been a health catastrophe. Ancel Keys's 'Seven Countries’ study, first published in 1970, brought about the widespread idea that we should all eat a low-fat, high-carb diet for optimal health. Had Keys used the entire data set covering 20 countries, his landmark paper would never have been published. The data did not support the hypothesis. UCL’s Professor John Yudkin valiantly argued against this demonisation of fat based on bad science, citing his own experiments and data that showed excess consumption of refined carbohydrates to be the true culprit; he regrettably lost the ideological battle.  Later, the late Dr.

Real disability is humbling for those who have to live with it and those who care for the disabled. A true disability — degenerative neurological disease, for instance — involves the equivalent of a daily war to live in the way that most of us take for granted. We shouldn’t mock the truly disabled by misusing the word. Yet the European Court of Justice has classified obesity as a disability, meaning that we are all now expected to view those who, in the majority of cases, attained morbidly-obese status by determined and unrelentless bad-lifestyle choices as deserving of our understanding and admiration as those who battle real disability everyday.

I will start by publicly apologising to Professor Meirion Thomas; in a moment of folly, I erroneously signed a petition decrying his alleged 'disrespect' of colleagues, in the wake of one of his articles in the Daily Mail. In my defence, my newborn was crying at the time and I was sleep deprived. Now, however, I believe that the undignified manner - see the abuse and attacks against him, as detailed in last week’s Spectator - in which members of his own profession reacted to his views speaks ill of the medical profession and says a lot about how public discourse has deteriorated. I have read Professor Thomas’ articles.

After the Bristol Heart Scandal in the 1990’s, the speciality of cardiac surgery rose to the occasion, leading the way in publishing individual surgeon’s mortality figures and self-audit, which made it perhaps the most transparent speciality in the UK, and thus consolidating its long-held position as a world leader in the training of surgeons and patient safety. Professor Bruce Keogh, head of NHS England, recently announced that NHS surgeons will now be asked to submit their mortality data online to public scrutiny, and failure to do so will result in medical purgatory. The cardiac surgery experience suggests that 'league tables' will improve outcomes; I disagree. The public deserves competence from their surgeons, something prevalent in the NHS 99.9% of the time.

The recent case reported in the press of a 17 year old mother who deliberately binge drank alcohol during her pregnancy, resulting in a baby with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) and who now stands accused of administering a 'noxious substance' to the baby and criminal negligence, represents the beginning of what may subsequently morph into the repudiation of some of the rights women have achieved in the last two centuries. FAS occurs in 1 in 3000 births and is characterised by growth deficiency, facial abnormalities and impaired cognition. Adult complications involve psychiatric issues, drug addiction and cognitive deficits. Financial societal costs of FAS are over $300 million dollars in the US alone. It is irreversible and caused by heavy, frequent alcohol consumption in pregnancy.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_15082013.m4a" title="Andrew Haldenby and Sean Worth join Sebastian Payne to discuss NHS reforms."] Listen [/audioplayer] GPs enjoy the salary of bankers, regularly pulling in £100,000 for a five-day week, with no on-call or weekend duties and a lovely taxpayer-funded holiday every year. I know this because it says so in the papers, so it must be true. Stories of GP largesse are far from accurate, and bear testament only to the media’s desire for sensationalism. GPs are the true medical heroes of the NHS, the soldiers in the trenches, too loyal to the metaphorical army to revolt, protest or express opinions, lest such opinions serve as an indirect abrogation of their oath to heal and comfort the sick.

The successful transplantation of a uterus represents the last major surgical goal in the field of reproductive gynaecology. This feat has recently been achieved by a team at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The 36-year-old patient was born with a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) Syndrome. The condition occurs in one out of every 4,000 babies, and presents as the absence of a uterus and sometimes a vagina. The absence of a kidney may also be a feature of this condition. MRKH Syndrome usually manifests in late puberty. Because these women appear outwardly normal, the absence of a vagina or uterus will only be suspected after examination, and subsequently confirmed by an MRI.

According to a new paper published in the journal Cancer Research women taking combined oral contraceptive pills (COCP) have a 50 per cent increased risk of developing breast cancer. Frightening stuff – or is it? Oral contraceptive pills have many benefits; they provide excellent contraception, decrease pain and bleeding during periods, they can help towards restoration of normalisation of hormones in women with polycystic ovary syndrome and they significantly decrease the risk of ovarian cancer, endometrial cancer, colon cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. They do have risks, however, among them an increase in the risk of breast cancer. This risk needs to be put into perspective in order to fully assess whether the benefits of the pill outweigh the risks.

According to the World Health Organisation’s latest report into antibiotic resistance we are facing a ‘problem so serious that it threatens the achievements of modern medicine… A post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries can kill, far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the 21st century.’ Bloody frightening stuff if you ask me. Naturally the prime suspects in this whodunnit are the much-maligned medical profession, guilty of giving out antibiotics like sweeties in a tuck shop while the human race barrels toward a future in which we are going to die of diseases at which–thanks to antibiotics–we barely bat an eyelid today. Are they truly the culprits in this case?