Dr James Le Fanu: 11 January
Nowadays it is commonplace that doctors should do more than just (hopefully) make the ill better – they should also be encouraging everyone to lead a ‘healthier’ life. But not all take kindly to being on the receiving end of these good intentions, as a novelist describes when struck down by a sore throat. There are, to be sure, more serious ailments, but being feverish, he thought a course of antibiotics might knock it on the head.
He was rather taken aback at being cross-questioned by the doctor about matters that had nothing to do with his complaint. How many glasses of wine did he drink in the evening? How many times a week did he take regular exercise? Did he eat the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day? After a few minutes of this, he walked out: ‘I’d rather keep my sore throat than waste more time being subjected to this dreary inquisition,’ he told me.
The first interesting aspect to this encounter is the assumption that people are too stupid to know what is good for them. The second – if my acquaintance had stuck around long enough – is that the medical advice he would, no doubt, have received about a healthy diet has never been scientifically proven to promote a long and healthy life.
As many will recall from their childhood in the decades following the Second World War, they were encouraged to drink a lot of milk and eat more meat and dairy products. Then, suddenly, in the early 1970s, this advice was turned on its head and the same foods – being full of the allegedly wicked saturated fats – were incriminated in a whole host of serious conditions.
But is it true? Professor Shah Ebrahim of the Royal Free Hospital in London, analysed all the studies in which thousands of middle-aged men and women adopted a ‘low-fat’ diet. He found the beneficial effects on their risk of stroke and heart disease to be ‘insignificant’. Nothing since then has emerged to challenge that conclusion.
THIS WEEK’S MEDICAL QUERY comes courtesy of a lady from Coventry writing on behalf of her husband, who takes the bloodthinning drug warfarin. He has been advised to avoid cranberries as they can potentiate the effect of the drug. But cranberries seem to be in everything, from muesli to mincemeat. What should he do?
There are indeed several cases reported over the past 30 years of an interaction between cranberry juice and warfarin – though only rarely sufficient to cause a serious complication. A possible reason for this is the presence in cranberry juice of a small amount of an aspirin-like compound. This is really only a hazard for those consuming large quantities (to minimise, for example, the symptoms of cystitis). For everyone else, a small amount of cranberries is not expected to cause such problems. drjames@lady.co.uk
He was rather taken aback at being cross-questioned by the doctor about matters that had nothing to do with his complaint. How many glasses of wine did he drink in the evening? How many times a week did he take regular exercise? Did he eat the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day? After a few minutes of this, he walked out: ‘I’d rather keep my sore throat than waste more time being subjected to this dreary inquisition,’ he told me.
The first interesting aspect to this encounter is the assumption that people are too stupid to know what is good for them. The second – if my acquaintance had stuck around long enough – is that the medical advice he would, no doubt, have received about a healthy diet has never been scientifically proven to promote a long and healthy life.
As many will recall from their childhood in the decades following the Second World War, they were encouraged to drink a lot of milk and eat more meat and dairy products. Then, suddenly, in the early 1970s, this advice was turned on its head and the same foods – being full of the allegedly wicked saturated fats – were incriminated in a whole host of serious conditions.
But is it true? Professor Shah Ebrahim of the Royal Free Hospital in London, analysed all the studies in which thousands of middle-aged men and women adopted a ‘low-fat’ diet. He found the beneficial effects on their risk of stroke and heart disease to be ‘insignificant’. Nothing since then has emerged to challenge that conclusion.
THIS WEEK’S MEDICAL QUERY comes courtesy of a lady from Coventry writing on behalf of her husband, who takes the bloodthinning drug warfarin. He has been advised to avoid cranberries as they can potentiate the effect of the drug. But cranberries seem to be in everything, from muesli to mincemeat. What should he do?
There are indeed several cases reported over the past 30 years of an interaction between cranberry juice and warfarin – though only rarely sufficient to cause a serious complication. A possible reason for this is the presence in cranberry juice of a small amount of an aspirin-like compound. This is really only a hazard for those consuming large quantities (to minimise, for example, the symptoms of cystitis). For everyone else, a small amount of cranberries is not expected to cause such problems. drjames@lady.co.uk