DR Douglass Report MD
Today, July 06, 2011, 14 hours ago
Breaking up the angio-scam
Today, July 06, 2011, 14 hours ago | Health Sciences Institute
Heart scans pointless in healthy patients
All your doc has to do is utter the magic words “heart risk” and he’s got your attention — along with your compliance.
I get it: You’re scared… maybe terrified — so when he sends you out for a CT angiogram, you don’t ask questions.
But if you haven’t had any actual heart symptoms, don’t just ask questions — ask for a new doc, because there’s ZERO benefit for you in that ultra-radioactive screening.
And now, a new study confirms it… again.
Researchers compared records on 1,000 symptom-free Koreans who had a regular physical exam to 1,000 similar patients who were given CT angiograms along with their physicals.
Better them than you — because 21.5 percent of those given the CTs were told they had heart risk, and these patients were 10 times more likely to be sent out for stress tests, cardiac catheterizations or a nuclear medicine scan than those who didn’t get CT’ed.
Even worse, they were three times more likely to be put on useless cholesterol meds and four times more likely to get a daily dose of stomach-wrecking aspirin.
And none of it made a difference: Over three months, there were no serious heart incidents in either group. And over 18 months, there was just one in each.
That’s it.
Now, you might think this isn’t that big a deal — even those hacks at the American Heart Association say symptom-free patients don’t need routine CT angiograms.
But of the 2.3 million CT angiograms delivered every year in the United States, up to a third are being given to exactly these types of patients — exposing hundreds of thousands of people to a radiation blast equal to 600 X-rays.
We’re being zapped from here to kingdom come — pumped so full of radiation from diagnostic tests that if this was a comic book, we’d have super powers by now.
Out here in the real world, however, all that zapping comes at a price: Cancer risk.
CT scans alone are responsible for 1 percent of all new cancer cases — and with docs ordering more of these tests than ever before, you can bet they’ll claim a bigger piece of the cancer pie soon enough.
All your doc has to do is utter the magic words “heart risk” and he’s got your attention — along with your compliance.
I get it: You’re scared… maybe terrified — so when he sends you out for a CT angiogram, you don’t ask questions.
But if you haven’t had any actual heart symptoms, don’t just ask questions — ask for a new doc, because there’s ZERO benefit for you in that ultra-radioactive screening.
And now, a new study confirms it… again.
Researchers compared records on 1,000 symptom-free Koreans who had a regular physical exam to 1,000 similar patients who were given CT angiograms along with their physicals.
Better them than you — because 21.5 percent of those given the CTs were told they had heart risk, and these patients were 10 times more likely to be sent out for stress tests, cardiac catheterizations or a nuclear medicine scan than those who didn’t get CT’ed.
Even worse, they were three times more likely to be put on useless cholesterol meds and four times more likely to get a daily dose of stomach-wrecking aspirin.
And none of it made a difference: Over three months, there were no serious heart incidents in either group. And over 18 months, there was just one in each.
That’s it.
Now, you might think this isn’t that big a deal — even those hacks at the American Heart Association say symptom-free patients don’t need routine CT angiograms.
But of the 2.3 million CT angiograms delivered every year in the United States, up to a third are being given to exactly these types of patients — exposing hundreds of thousands of people to a radiation blast equal to 600 X-rays.
We’re being zapped from here to kingdom come — pumped so full of radiation from diagnostic tests that if this was a comic book, we’d have super powers by now.
Out here in the real world, however, all that zapping comes at a price: Cancer risk.
CT scans alone are responsible for 1 percent of all new cancer cases — and with docs ordering more of these tests than ever before, you can bet they’ll claim a bigger piece of the cancer pie soon enough.
The non-epidemic of young hypertension patients
Today, July 06, 2011, 14 hours ago | Health Sciences Institute
Hypertension is either nothing to worry about for nearly all young adults or a “sleeping epidemic” threating nearly a fifth of them.
Researchers say one of those two statements is true… and they can’t for the life of them figure out which.
A new survey finds that 19 percent of adults between the ages of 24 and 32 have textbook hypertension — blood pressure levels higher than 140/90.
But wait just a minute — because a recent survey of similar data from the same period finds that only 4 percent of these people suffer from high blood pressure.
What gives? Even the researchers behind the new study have no idea.
“We think the estimates are probably somewhere in between,” lead author Kathleen Mullan Harris told the Los Angeles Times.
Way to stand behind your research, Kathleen.
This isn’t a negotiation — you can’t just split the difference when your numbers come in at nearly 500 percent higher than the rest of the evidence.
But I can’t blame her for being confused, because hypertension has turned into one of most confusing and convoluted mainstream health measurements — and in a land where cholesterol levels are read like tea leaves, that’s saying a lot.
Hypertension levels were set — and revised, repeatedly — to get more people on meds, not to save lives.
But in reality, there’s no one-size-fits-all formula here — and that’s true at any age.
If you’ve always been a little high, that could just be how you’re wired. It’s also natural for BP to rise as you age.
None of that is cause for alarm.
Now, if your blood pressure suddenly shoots up dramatically and stays there, you’ve clearly got something going on — and it needs to be taken care of.
And a BP pill isn’t the answer.
Researchers say one of those two statements is true… and they can’t for the life of them figure out which.
A new survey finds that 19 percent of adults between the ages of 24 and 32 have textbook hypertension — blood pressure levels higher than 140/90.
But wait just a minute — because a recent survey of similar data from the same period finds that only 4 percent of these people suffer from high blood pressure.
What gives? Even the researchers behind the new study have no idea.
“We think the estimates are probably somewhere in between,” lead author Kathleen Mullan Harris told the Los Angeles Times.
Way to stand behind your research, Kathleen.
This isn’t a negotiation — you can’t just split the difference when your numbers come in at nearly 500 percent higher than the rest of the evidence.
But I can’t blame her for being confused, because hypertension has turned into one of most confusing and convoluted mainstream health measurements — and in a land where cholesterol levels are read like tea leaves, that’s saying a lot.
Hypertension levels were set — and revised, repeatedly — to get more people on meds, not to save lives.
But in reality, there’s no one-size-fits-all formula here — and that’s true at any age.
If you’ve always been a little high, that could just be how you’re wired. It’s also natural for BP to rise as you age.
None of that is cause for alarm.
Now, if your blood pressure suddenly shoots up dramatically and stays there, you’ve clearly got something going on — and it needs to be taken care of.
And a BP pill isn’t the answer.
Placebos work for headaches
Monday, July 04, 2011, 2:00:50 AM | Health Sciences Institute
Next time you’ve got a headache, forget the meds — take two nothings and call me in the morning!
We’ve been hearing plenty lately about the effectiveness of the placebo… and now, a new study finds that sugar pills work for headaches nearly 40 percent of the time.
Dutch researchers looked at data from 119 randomized controlled clinical trials on headaches, and found a recovery rate of 38.5 percent for patients who took placebos.
They also found that placebos worked specifically for migraines 41 percent of the time, and 45 percent of the time for all forms of headaches in children — but if you’re giving painkillers to a kid in the first place, shame on you.
The researchers also found that the placebos were up to three times more effective than doing nothing at all, according to the data published in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics.
Granted, this isn’t as good as some of the most commonly used meds — but it’s not a whole lot worse, either. Most trials for aspirin, ibuprofen and acetaminophen — take your pick — show relief rates for slightly more than half of all patients.
In exchange for that little bump in the recovery rate, people who take painkillers risk everything from internal bleeding to hearing loss to sex problems.
But let’s get real here: If you’re experiencing headaches regularly, you need to do something about it — and neither a painkiller nor a placebo is going to be a whole lot of help.
I have everything you need to know about conquering migraines in the May issue of my Douglass Report newsletter, including the remarkable and poorly understood connection between your head and your gut.
Read all about it right here — and finally send the headache pain packing for good.
We’ve been hearing plenty lately about the effectiveness of the placebo… and now, a new study finds that sugar pills work for headaches nearly 40 percent of the time.
Dutch researchers looked at data from 119 randomized controlled clinical trials on headaches, and found a recovery rate of 38.5 percent for patients who took placebos.
They also found that placebos worked specifically for migraines 41 percent of the time, and 45 percent of the time for all forms of headaches in children — but if you’re giving painkillers to a kid in the first place, shame on you.
The researchers also found that the placebos were up to three times more effective than doing nothing at all, according to the data published in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics.
Granted, this isn’t as good as some of the most commonly used meds — but it’s not a whole lot worse, either. Most trials for aspirin, ibuprofen and acetaminophen — take your pick — show relief rates for slightly more than half of all patients.
In exchange for that little bump in the recovery rate, people who take painkillers risk everything from internal bleeding to hearing loss to sex problems.
But let’s get real here: If you’re experiencing headaches regularly, you need to do something about it — and neither a painkiller nor a placebo is going to be a whole lot of help.
I have everything you need to know about conquering migraines in the May issue of my Douglass Report newsletter, including the remarkable and poorly understood connection between your head and your gut.
Read all about it right here — and finally send the headache pain packing for good.
Hide and seek with drug side effects
Monday, July 04, 2011, 2:00:04 AM | Health Sciences Institute
J&J accused of hiding tendon risks
Imagine going into the hospital to be treated for pneumonia — and ending up with ruptured tendon.
That’s what happened to 82-year-old John Schedin in 2001 after he was put on Johnson & Johnson’s antibiotic, Levaquin.
It’s an associated side effect that has since earned the drug the infamous black box warning, but at the time, it was only listed in a two-foot long label with writing so small it looks like it was written by one of those Chinese street vendors who can put your name on a grain of rice.
It’s a game of hide and seek. But for once, this drug company could be losing at its own game.
Schedin took Johnson & Johnson to court and was awarded $1.7 million in damages. And that’s just one of more than 2,500 pending cases.
It’s nonsensical to think you can place any major risk you want in a bunch of unreadable fine print, and it looks like juries tend to agree.
These are just the patients who saw the possible link between the drug and their tendon problems — obvious cases, like tendon ruptures.
I can’t help but wonder how many people who took this med could have ended up with tendonitis — but never made the link between the two.
In many cases, they might not even realize they have tendonitis — because docs don’t even know how to diagnose it. Most of them just assume it’s arthritis, write a painkiller prescription, and send the patient home.
Imagine going into the hospital to be treated for pneumonia — and ending up with ruptured tendon.
That’s what happened to 82-year-old John Schedin in 2001 after he was put on Johnson & Johnson’s antibiotic, Levaquin.
It’s an associated side effect that has since earned the drug the infamous black box warning, but at the time, it was only listed in a two-foot long label with writing so small it looks like it was written by one of those Chinese street vendors who can put your name on a grain of rice.
It’s a game of hide and seek. But for once, this drug company could be losing at its own game.
Schedin took Johnson & Johnson to court and was awarded $1.7 million in damages. And that’s just one of more than 2,500 pending cases.
It’s nonsensical to think you can place any major risk you want in a bunch of unreadable fine print, and it looks like juries tend to agree.
These are just the patients who saw the possible link between the drug and their tendon problems — obvious cases, like tendon ruptures.
I can’t help but wonder how many people who took this med could have ended up with tendonitis — but never made the link between the two.
In many cases, they might not even realize they have tendonitis — because docs don’t even know how to diagnose it. Most of them just assume it’s arthritis, write a painkiller prescription, and send the patient home.
Phony baloney over hot flashes
Sunday, July 03, 2011, 2:00:14 AM | Health Sciences Institute
Whoops! Better hold off on filling your Lexapro prescriptions, ladies — turns out it won’t do much for your hot flashes after all.
Maybe you heard all the hoopla earlier this year when researchers declared that this antidepressant slashed the rate of hot flashes by 47 percent.
Now, researchers behind a new study say not so fast — the med actually doesn’t make any difference at all.
So who do we believe?
I’m going with the new study — because I wasn’t terribly impressed by the first one (and if I had been, I would’ve told you about it).
A 47 percent reduction may sound great, but all it takes is a quick look at the raw numbers to throw some cold water on that study: After eight weeks, the women on Lexapro reported 5.3 hot flashes a day… while those who took the placebo said they had 6.4.
In exchange for 1.1 fewer hot flashes a day, women who took Lexapro got to spin the wheel of side effects. Some of the common ones here include headaches, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, dizziness and the sweats.
The drug also comes with a risk of sex problems — but if you’re busy fighting bowel issues, headaches, dizziness AND 5.3 hot flashes a day, I’m guessing you’re not going to be “in the mood” anyway.
In any case, you can take all those numbers and toss ‘em — because they came from “hot flash diaries” kept by the women.
Who knows how accurate they were.
In the new study, researchers placed a small device on the skin that recorded each hot flash… then gave the women either the drug or a placebo.
When the drug had no effect, they upped the dose — but that didn’t do much good either, according to the study in Menopause.
Ladies, hot flashes are a part of life at some point. If you can’t groan and bear it, boost your intake of vitamins C and E, along with some bioflavonoids (now there’s an excuse to drink some wine if I ever heard one).
And if they’re still too much to bear, talk to your doctor about a bio-identical hormone regimen — not an antidepressant.
Maybe you heard all the hoopla earlier this year when researchers declared that this antidepressant slashed the rate of hot flashes by 47 percent.
Now, researchers behind a new study say not so fast — the med actually doesn’t make any difference at all.
So who do we believe?
I’m going with the new study — because I wasn’t terribly impressed by the first one (and if I had been, I would’ve told you about it).
A 47 percent reduction may sound great, but all it takes is a quick look at the raw numbers to throw some cold water on that study: After eight weeks, the women on Lexapro reported 5.3 hot flashes a day… while those who took the placebo said they had 6.4.
In exchange for 1.1 fewer hot flashes a day, women who took Lexapro got to spin the wheel of side effects. Some of the common ones here include headaches, nausea, constipation, diarrhea, dizziness and the sweats.
The drug also comes with a risk of sex problems — but if you’re busy fighting bowel issues, headaches, dizziness AND 5.3 hot flashes a day, I’m guessing you’re not going to be “in the mood” anyway.
In any case, you can take all those numbers and toss ‘em — because they came from “hot flash diaries” kept by the women.
Who knows how accurate they were.
In the new study, researchers placed a small device on the skin that recorded each hot flash… then gave the women either the drug or a placebo.
When the drug had no effect, they upped the dose — but that didn’t do much good either, according to the study in Menopause.
Ladies, hot flashes are a part of life at some point. If you can’t groan and bear it, boost your intake of vitamins C and E, along with some bioflavonoids (now there’s an excuse to drink some wine if I ever heard one).
And if they’re still too much to bear, talk to your doctor about a bio-identical hormone regimen — not an antidepressant.
WHO’s confused now?
Sunday, July 03, 2011, 2:00:12 AM | Health Sciences Institute
Cellphones cause cancer — kinda, maybe, sorta
It’s like a loaded gun pointed right at your head… and your own finger is on the trigger.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist anymore to believe that cellphones come with cancer risk — and now, even the World Health Organization is calling in a warning.
Sort of.
The organization’s cancer arm has reclassified cellphones as “possibly carcinogenic,” a move that places them with… well… coffee, among other things.
I’d take my chances with a cuppa jo over a cellphone any day!
You know what else is on this list of “possible” carcinogens? Asian pickled vegetables and talcum powder.
Give me a break already!
I’m trying real hard to give these guys a little credit here — but they just have a way of turning everything they touch into some kind of joke.
Just take a look at the five classifications they have for cancer risk: carcinogenic to humans, probably carcinogenic to humans, possibly carcinogenic to humans, not classifiable as to carcinogenicity in humans, and probably not carcinogenic to humans.
All that’s missing is “maybe kinda linked to cancer sometimes” and “definitely probably not usually cancerous.”
So you’ll have to excuse me for not being impressed to find cellphones added to the list in the middle of the pack — the vague coffee-and-pickles category of “possibly carcinogenic.”
Really, why even bother?
Here’s the reality: The WHO’s own researchers have found a link between brain tumors and cellphone use.
In one study, people who used these things the most for a decade or more had double the risk of cancerous brain tumors. And in another, researchers found a 40 percent increase in risk for people who use them for 30 minutes a day over a decade.
I could go on — but you’ve heard it all before.
My biggest fear is that all this back-and-forth about cellphone cancer risk will seem tragically naïve in a couple of generations — because these tumors take decades to form.
And any move the WHO makes tomorrow will be far too late for kids who are raised with a cellphone pressed to their ear today.
It’s like a loaded gun pointed right at your head… and your own finger is on the trigger.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist anymore to believe that cellphones come with cancer risk — and now, even the World Health Organization is calling in a warning.
Sort of.
The organization’s cancer arm has reclassified cellphones as “possibly carcinogenic,” a move that places them with… well… coffee, among other things.
I’d take my chances with a cuppa jo over a cellphone any day!
You know what else is on this list of “possible” carcinogens? Asian pickled vegetables and talcum powder.
Give me a break already!
I’m trying real hard to give these guys a little credit here — but they just have a way of turning everything they touch into some kind of joke.
Just take a look at the five classifications they have for cancer risk: carcinogenic to humans, probably carcinogenic to humans, possibly carcinogenic to humans, not classifiable as to carcinogenicity in humans, and probably not carcinogenic to humans.
All that’s missing is “maybe kinda linked to cancer sometimes” and “definitely probably not usually cancerous.”
So you’ll have to excuse me for not being impressed to find cellphones added to the list in the middle of the pack — the vague coffee-and-pickles category of “possibly carcinogenic.”
Really, why even bother?
Here’s the reality: The WHO’s own researchers have found a link between brain tumors and cellphone use.
In one study, people who used these things the most for a decade or more had double the risk of cancerous brain tumors. And in another, researchers found a 40 percent increase in risk for people who use them for 30 minutes a day over a decade.
I could go on — but you’ve heard it all before.
My biggest fear is that all this back-and-forth about cellphone cancer risk will seem tragically naïve in a couple of generations — because these tumors take decades to form.
And any move the WHO makes tomorrow will be far too late for kids who are raised with a cellphone pressed to their ear today.
Forget taking statins… eat a tomato instead
Friday, July 01, 2011, 2:00:53 AM | Health Sciences Institute
I’ve told you time and again that you don’t need to worry about your cholesterol levels——and I’ve given you study after study showing that “high cholesterol” is nothing more than an arbitrary number drummed up by Big Pharma to scare you into taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs.
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