What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You

What You Need to Check Before Taking Any Prescription Drug

Former Canadian politician Terence Young became a safety advocate, starting the non-profit group Drug Safety Canada, following the tragic death of his 15 year old daughter Vanessa after taking the drug Propulsid. The drug was withdrawn from the North American market the day before Vanessa's funeral.
Terence argues in a new book that it’s essential that we all educate ourselves about drug safety. We can’t just leave it to doctors.  He says most of us have absolutely no idea about the true risks and benefits of the prescription drugs we take. And the only way we can find out this information is by asking the right questions.
So in this interview Terence explains the ten key points or rules we all need to know. For example, were you aware that a patient’s individual response to a drug can vary by 400 to 4,000 %? And why - unless there is a very good reason - you should try to avoid taking a drug less than seven years old?
Forbidden Knowledge: A Self-Advocate’s Guide to Managing Your Prescription by Terence Young is published by Dundurn Press
The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director.  You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com
If you would like to support this podcast you can do so at patreon.com/whatyourgpdoesnttellyou or via PayPal at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou
What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

Sugar, Refined Carbs and Polyunsaturated Fats: The Perfect Storm?

Orthopaedic Surgeon Dr Gary Fettke frustrated by the increasing number of diabetic patients' limbs  he was having to amputate, started prescibing low sugar diets to these patients. But then found himself sanctioned by the Australian medical board for giving nutritional advice.
Fettke was told: "there's nothing associated with your medical training that makes you an expert, or authority on the field of nutrition, diabetes or cancer, you're not allowed to make any recommendations to your patients on nutrition". It would take nearly five years for the decision to be reversed.
Fettke's belief in the importance of preventative medicine began his lifelong research into the science of nutrition, dietary guidelines and exactly what makes a healthy diet.
And he has become convinced that for all of us - not just those with diabetes -  sugar, refined carbs and polyunsaturated fats come together to create a perfect storm in our bodie. That is why he believes we are seeing a higher level of metabolic illnesses such as diabetes type 2, heart disease and cancer,  than ever before.
 
Dr Gary Fettke, is an orthopaedic surgeon, based in Tasmania, Australia.  He has a particularly interest in  preventative medicine. Although his speciality is surgery, Gary believes it is much better to help patients avoid surgery if at all possible, by making dietary changes.
 
The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director.  You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com
If you would like to support this podcast you can do so at patreon.com/whatyourgpdoesnttellyou or via PayPal at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou
What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

Could Stem Cell Transplants Play a Critical Role in MS and Other Auto-Immune Diseases?

Dr Richard K. Burt,  a world leading pioneer who performed America’s first hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) to treat multiple sclerosis, discusses how he developed this innovative procedure and its future in the treatment of MS.
While the treatment is only suitable for certain MS patients it can be life changing. The US’s National MS Society says there is growing evidence that HSCT may be highly effective for people with relapsing remitting MS who meet very specific characteristics. The society adds it can greatly reduce and potentially even end MS disease activity in some.
But the treatment is not without its risks and patients have died.
However, as Richard argues in this podcast and his recently published book: Everyday Miracles Curing Multiple Sclerosis, Scleroderma, and Autoimmune Diseases by Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant not all types of stem cell transplantation are the same and that it’s vital that both doctors and patients understand the different approaches. That's because the type of stem cell technique used can affect the risks and effectiveness of the treatment for both MS and other forms of auto-immune disease.
And an effective treatment for MS is desperately needed. Currently researchers are also looking at the use of high level vitamin D in the treatment of the disease. While current drugs known as disease modifying therapies may slow the progress of the disease, they cannot stop it.
Dr Richard K. Burt is a Fulbright Scholar, Professor of Medicine at Scripps, a tenured retired Professor at North Western and CEO of Genani Biotechnology. In addition to performing America’s first hematopoietic stem cell transplant  for MS, he also carried out the first procedures in the US for a number of other auto-immune disease too. He was recognised by Scientific American as one of the Top 50 individuals for improving humanity and outstanding leadership.
His book: Everyday Miracles Curing  Multiple Sclerosis, Scleroderma, and Autoimmune Diseases by Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant is published by Forefront Books.
The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director.  You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com
If you would like to support this podcast you can do so at patreon.com/whatyourgpdoesnttellyou or via PayPal at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou
What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

Could Inflammation, Diet and Disease Be Linked?

Dr Shilpa Ravella, a transplant gastroenterologist, argues that inflammation may be a common factor in many of the diseases we face today from heart disease to cancer.
While our bodies' inflammatory response is essential in fighting off infections and viruses,  in her recently published book A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet and Disease,  Shilpa claims many of us are suffering from hidden low inflammation which may be at the root of many illnesses and reveals simple lifestyle changes we can make to reverse this.
And one of the many surprising facts she reveals is that most so-called anti-inflammatory pain killers such as ibuprofen although they may suppress inflammation initially, actually delay the resolution of inflammation in our bodies. It turns out that one of the oldest pain killers of all - aspirin -  is one of the very few painkillers which does help resolve inflammation.
 
Dr Shilpa Ravella is a transplant gastroenterologist with a particular expertise in nutrition and an assistant professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center.
Her Book: A Silent Fire: The Story of Inflammation, Diet and Disease is published by Bodley House, an imprint of Vintage.
The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director.  You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com
If you would like to support this podcast you can do so at patreon.com/whatyourgpdoesnttellyou or via PayPal at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou
What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

Dr David Healy Discusses SSRI Drugs, Suicide and Sexual Dysfunction

Dr David Healy was one of the first psychiatrists to suggest that while in some cases the antidepressant drugs, the SSRIs may help prevent suicide, in other very rare cases, they might actually increase the suicide risk. So how does a doctor balance that risk?
David also discusses the evidence from healthy volunteer trials, these are small trials that take place before the major trials and regulators can be unaware of these trials' results yet they often contain important information about a drug's potential side effects.
And he also discusses the problems of sexual dysfunction that some people suffer after taking SSRI drugs. David says he has had personal experience of several patients who have committed suicide as a result of this ongoign sexual dysfunction and even been asked by people suffering from this to write referral letters to the right to die group Dignitas.
 
Psychiatrist David Healy is a professor in the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University in Canada.  He is also founder and CEO of Data Based Medicine Limited, which through its website RxISK.org, aims to make medicines safer through online direct patient reporting of drug side effects.  David has been involved as an expert witness in homicide and suicide trials involving psychotropic drugs, and in raising issues with these drugs with the American and European regulators.
https://rxisk.org/blog/
https://davidhealy.org/blog/
You can sign up to the mailing list to the podcast and be first to know when a new episode is published at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com and also find out more about the pod there.
The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director.  You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com
If you would like to support this podcast you can do so at patreon.com/whatyourgpdoesnttellyou or via PayPal at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou
What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

How to Keep Your Gut Healthy - Season Two

Professor Tim Spector reveals how developing research about our gut biome – the microbes in our gut – is revolutionising our understanding of  diet and disease. And he argues this may also help explain why we got so many things wrong about food. For example, it turns out that not all calories are equal, because different microbes will deal with identical calorie foods in very different ways.
 
70% of our immune cells are actually in our gut, so how our microbes interact with these immune cells has a major impact on how effective our bodies are at fighting infections and illnesses.
 
In his recently published book: Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well, Tim reveals what we should eat to optimise our gut biome and health.
 
Tim Spector is a professor in genetic epidemiology at King’s College, London and one of the founders of the personalised nutrition company Zoe.
You can sign up to the mailing list to the podcast and be first to know when a new episode is published at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com and also find out more about the pod there.
The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director.  You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com
If you would like to support this podcast you can do so at patreon.com/whatyourgpdoesnttellyou or via PayPal at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou
What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

Should You Take A Vitamin D Supplement? - Season Two

Dr Michael Holick is a pioneer in vitamin D science and has spent a lifetime researching and exploring what he believes are its potentially life-changing benefits.
He argues that across the world guidelines for the amount of vitamin D we need are simply too low. And that many of us, even those  living in a hot climate, will not be able to get enough vitamin D from sunlight alone.
Dr Horlick contends that not only do we need vitamin D for bone health, we also need it for many other critical functions too. Without a sufficient amount, he says our immune system can’t operate effectively, and that a deficiency of the vitamin is linked to a wide range of other health conditions from heart disease and depression, to auto-immune illnesses and cancer.
In this interview, Michael discusses why he believes vitamin D is so essential and reveals the levels he thinks we all need take for optimal health.
 
Dr Michael F. Holick is a Professor of Medicine, Physiology and Biophysics. He is Director of the General Clinical Research Unit;  Director of the Bone Health Care Clinic and the Director of the Heliotherapy, Light, and Skin Research Center at Boston University Medical Center.
You can sign up to the mailing list to the podcast and be first to know when a new episode is published at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com and also find out more about the pod there.
The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director.  You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com
If you would like to support this podcast you can do so at patreon.com/whatyourgpdoesnttellyou or via PayPal at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou
What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/
 

Could Low-Carb Diets Help Treat Mental Illness? - Season Two

Harvard trained psychiatrist Dr Georgia Ede is pioneering the use of low carb -  otherwise known as ketogenic - diets to help treat a range of mental illness from major depression to schizophrenia. An approach she believes could revolutionise psychiatric care in the future.
She spent a decade treating patients with the standard approaches of medication and psychotherapy but became increasingly frustrated that she was not seeing the results she had hoped. So began to explore nutritional options and has now treated hundreds of patients using this approach.
A recently published paper on which Georgia was an author, reported that 28 patients who had either major depression, schizophrenia or biopolar disorder were put on this diet. These patients had tried multiple medications previously with very little improvement. But following this diet, 43% went into total remission and 64% were discharged on less medication.  This was a small study without a control group, but having said that it's almost unheard of to see results like these in a psychiatric trial, so if these results are replicated, this approach could have a major impact for patients in the future.
 
In the podcast, Georgia recommends a number of websites to go to for further information, here they are:
https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/
https://baszuckigroup.com/
https://med.stanford.edu/psychiatry/patient_care/metabolic.html
https://www.dietdoctor.com/home
 
Georgia also talks about insulin resistance and suggests the various tests to take to see if you are insulin resistant or not:
https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/files/content/pdfs/Insulin-Resistance-Tests-rev01-20.pdf
 
Dr Georgia Ede, trained at Harvard Medical School, before first working for the Harvard University Health Services and then moving to Smith College. In 2018, she set up her own psychiatric nutritional practice, helping patients reduce or eliminate the use of medications by changing what they eat.
 
You can sign up to the mailing list to the podcast and be first to know when a new episode is published at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com and also find out more about the pod there.
The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director.  You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com
If you would like to support this podcast you can do so at patreon.com/whatyourgpdoesnttellyou or via PayPal at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou
What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/
 
 

Sugar - A Chronic Toxin? - Season Two

Dr Robert Lustig  argues sugar is fuelling an epidemic of chronic and metabolic disease, from diabetes and strokes, to cancer and heart disease costing hundreds of thousands of lives. He says in a view that some have seen as controversial that we need to see sugar not just as empty calories,  but as a chronic, addictive toxin. In this podcast, Rob reveals just what sugar does to our bodies.
And he claims that while modern medicine has been highly effective in treating acute illness, it has failed in its treatment of chronic conditions, only able to treat the symptoms rather than curing the diseases.
In his words:
“You can’t fix healthcare until you fix health. You can’t fix health until you fix diet. And, you can’t fix diet until you know what the hell is wrong”.
Rob explains what he thinks it is essential to eat to stay healthy  and contends that  prevention is not just better than cure it is the cure.
 
Dr Robert Lustig is a Professor emeritus of Pediatrics, at the Division of Endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. He has written a number of best selling books about the dangers of sugar, refined carbohydrates  and metabolic illness. And his research and clinical practice have focussed on childhood obesity and diabetes.
 
You can sign up to the mailing list to the podcast and be first to know when a new episode is published at whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com and also find out more about the pod there.
The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director.  You can follow Liz on Twitter at @lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at liztucker.substack.com
If you would like to support this podcast you can do so at patreon.com/whatyourgpdoesnttellyou or via PayPal at patreon.com/whatyourGPdoesnttellyou
What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/
 
 
 

The Whistleblower Who Inspired A John Le Carré Novel - Season Two

Welcome to Season Two of What Your GP Doesn't Tell You
This week’s story is so extraordinary that the best selling spy writer John Le Carré used it as the inspiration for one of his novels. And indeed if it was a work of fiction it would be dismissed as too fantastical or improbable. To tell this remarkable tale, I am talking to whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri, who became concerned during a  trial about the effectiveness of a drug that she was using to treat thalassemia – an inherited form of anaemia.
Nancy was threatened with legal action by the drug company Apotex - who were part funding the trial -and told it would be a breach of contract if she mentioned her concerns to  patients. This would spark decades of legal action, vitriol and intrigue during which time many careers including Nancy’s would be destroyed, investigations would be launched, private detectives  be hired and an academic found guilty of sending anonymous letters finally  tracked down by his DNA.
 
Dr Nancy  F.  Olivieri is a professor of pediatrics, medicine and public health services at the University of Toronto, a senior scientist at Toronto General Hospital and the executive director of Hemoglobal®
 
You can sign up to the mailing list to the podcast and be first to know when a new episode is published at whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com and also find out more about the pod there.
The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director.  You can follow Liz on Twitter at @lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at liztucker.substack.com
If you would like to support this podcast you can do so at patreon.com/whatyourgpdoesnttellyou or via PayPal at patreon.com/whatyourGPdoesnttellyou
What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/