I am preparing to present at a medical conference. My topic has to do with our information age and how doctors can more effectively deal with the “expert patient” – the one who knows as much or more about their condition and treatment than the doctor does? Can that happen? Yes, of course. Many doctors [...]

How many times have you looked back and thought, “If only I knew at 20 what I know now, I would be in a completely different place financially and in other ways”?
Well at 60 we are only half way through our adult lives. The trouble is both our conscious and unconscious minds are governed by [...]

 The following was written for a newsletter and I publish this as I wrote it.
“And I would like to see you lose 10 kilos,” the GP said as she started to usher Grace out of the door. “Your BMI (body mass index) is far too high at 33. That puts you in the obese range.” [...]

I’ve just been looking at another paper looking at dietary fat intake in relation to heart disease in women. This was a paper published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine on information from the Nurses Health Study published in 1997. They followed up over 80,000 women for 14 years. I am looking at this [...]

This week I came across a new idea in the medical literature, well new to me anyway. This was the name of a type of blood cell that I hadn’t heard of before.
In the blood there are killer T-cells which are both efficient and effective at killing infective agents such as viruses, bacteria and parasites [...]

I am particularly interested in what ordinary people can do about their health. To those who are into self development and who automatically assume responsibility for their personal sense of well being (well more or less, anyway) it might seem rather odd not to have a social network. Social connections that are positive improve your quality [...]

We are usually told to keep our consumption of fat down below 30% of our daily calories. This is supposed to be because fat leads to heart disease. For example the American Heart Association on its website says that fat eaten as food gets converted into cholesterol which gets laid down in the blood vessels [...]

There is an overwhelming belief in the community in the theory that being overweight is because people eat too much in comparison to the amount of energy they expend. So it is therefore simple. Fat people should eat less and exercise more.
There is, like many beliefs, an aspect of truth to it. If you eat [...]

A lovely study was done from US data looking at whether being overweight or obese when over the age of 70 increased the chance of an earlier death.
 The short answer was that thin people tended to die earlier than normal people who died earlier than those who were overweight. This is not what they expected. [...]

I was facilitating a group yesterday and we were creating picture boards of our goals and hopes for the future. Many, if not most, of the self help gurus recommend that we each create a picture board so we can visually keep our goals in front of ourselves and stay focussed on the outcomes we [...]