Acupuncture could help period pain, researchers say reads the BBC.

Acupuncture may be an effective way of easing severe period pain, a South Korean review of 27 studies suggests.

Researchers said there was “promising evidence” for acupuncture in treating cramps, but that more work was needed.

In the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, they noted two studies found little difference between real and sham acupuncture in treating pain.

Acupuncture is a less contentious form of complementary medicine than some, but its value is still disputed.

Period pain can be severe in some women and may be accompanied by nausea, diarrhoea, migraine and backache. Common treatments include pain killers, applying heat and exercise – although a recent study questioned the efficacy of the latter.

This latest review involved 27 studies – which included nearly 3,000 women. They addressed a variety of forms of acupuncture – from classical to acupoint injection. BBC.

You now I’m fed up with such stupid headlines – as always to actually read the research you’d need to subscribe to the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at a cost of £149 for the year – what next 27 studies and 3,000 participants claiming acupuncture makes you live longer – won’t half drum up some business for acupuncturists.

The worst thing is that thousands of young women are going to have to suffer being pierced with needles for absolutely no benefit – and still suffering – lets carry out some effective clinical trials of these lunatic alternative treatments – if they pass I’ll happily eat my words.

Toyota was under pressure today over the accelerator fault that is forcing it to recall 2m cars across Europe as the RAC described the problem as “incredibly dangerous” and urged concerned owners to have their vehicles checked immediately.

Amid calls for the Japanese company to explain why it had waited for a year before issuing the recall, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents called on the manufacturer to launch an immediate inquiry into why the potentially serious fault was not detected before millions of vehicles were released on to the market. Robert Booth and David Teather, The Guardian.

As an owner of a Toyota Aygo which is less than a year old I have a special interest in this story – I yet to hear a thing from Toyota: is my car affected or not? According to the Toyota’s website Aygo’s from February 2005 to August 2009 – so yes it is. So much for Japanese reliability – how many deaths have they waited for before issuing a recall another case of profits before customer. The whole thing is troubling enough but if a reputable company like Toyota is willing to sacrifice customer’s lives for profits what on earth or less scrupulous companies up to? Capitalism it’s just amoral.

Still what to do if your pedal sticks – the best advice I can find is to put the car in neutral and brake hard – don’t switch the ignition off as you’ll lose power steering and braking. I’d also suggest being very careful where you overtake as there’s no way you want to be in the outside lane of a motorway when the pedal sticks – always making sure you can get to the hard shoulder easily.

A 10-year-old girl accidentally hanged herself with a dressing gown cord as she danced around her bedroom, a coroner has ruled at her inquest.

Megan Williams was taken to hospital after being found by her brother at their home in Harpurhey, north Manchester, in May 2009.

She died despite resuscitation efforts by her mother and paramedics.

Coroner Nigel Meadows said he hoped the case would highlight the dangers of playing with ropes and cords.

He recorded a verdict of accidental death at Manchester Coroner’s Court on Tuesday.

“It is an illustration of the significant dangers of playing around with things you put around your neck,” he said.

“I am entirely satisfied that Megan had been messing about. She had been dancing, listening to music, and she put her head through the loop.

“She was playing about without knowledge of the risks.” Source: BBC.

What a horrifying accident sends shivers through my body. As a father of an 8-year-old daughter I’m resisting the temptation to rush upstairs and remove all ropes, strings, scarves and the like from her room – it’s tempting – but that would be treating her like a prisoner in the police cells – what I will be doing is ensuring my daughters aware of the risks.

There is a worrying lack of safety data on electronic cigarettes, despite their growing popularity with the public, two leading Greek researchers have warned.

In the British Medical Journal, they say that without more evidence it is impossible to know if such products actually do more harm than good. Source: The BBC.

Unusually I side with anti-smoking campaigners.

Deborah Arnott, of the charity Action on Smoking and Health, said: “We do need better data on safety and appropriate regulation for e-cigarettes, although these products are certain to be significantly less hazardous than cigarettes, which lead to premature death in half all long-term users.”

She said there was demand for the products from smokers – UK estimates suggest around one in ten has already tried them. Source: The BBC.

So let’s get these tested and approved – no they aren’t going to be safe – just better than smoking the real thing.

Parents who allow their children alcohol at home may be increasing the chances of future drinking problems, says England’s chief medical officer.

Sir Liam Donaldson accused some parents of a “laissez-faire” approach and said “. Letting children taste alcohol to ready them for adulthood was “misguided

Evidence showed that this could lead to binge drinking in later life, he said. BBC.

Evidence – I’ve not the time needed too completely refute the evidence – personally I don’t accept Donaldson’s accusation, a brief look at the details as provided back up my instincts.

Firstly looking at the Chief Medical Officers Guidance and looking for any references I found this.

The work to support the Department of Health in producing this report has been carried out by Professor Mark Bellis and his team at the Centre for Public Health, Liverpool John Moores University. Department of Health.

So off to the John Moores University website where there are 60 reports on alcohol abuse alone – I looked through a few but couldn’t identify which reports might have been used.

So back to the Guidance where I downloaded the Guidance on the consumption of alcohol by children and young people and looked at section 6 references the first reference to Professor Bellis is.

Bellis MA, Hughes K, Morleo M, et al (2007) Predictors of risky alcohol consumption in schoolchildren and their implications for preventing alcohol-related harm. Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy 2:15.

The first thing that strikes me is the report was published two years ago, no wonder I didn’t locate it on the University website. Now looking at the Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, And Policy website we find the report Predictors of risky alcohol consumption in schoolchildren and their implications for preventing alcohol-related harm, which concludes.

Although previous studies have examined predictors of risky drinking, our analyses of access to alcohol and youth income have highlighted eradicating underage alcohol sales and increased understanding of children’s spending as key considerations in reducing risky alcohol use. Parental provision of alcohol to children in a family environment may also be important in establishing child-parent dialogues on alcohol and moderating youth consumption. However, this will require supporting parents to ensure they develop only moderate drinking behaviours in their children and only when appropriate. Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy.

Now how does that back up Donaldson’s claims – still I’ve a full time job to do and have only been able to carry out the most cursory investigation – but it didn’t take much using Donaldson’s own references to reach a different conclusion – Donaldson appears to be manipulating evidence to meet his own political agenda.

A drug that can prolong the lives of patients with advanced liver cancer has been rejected for use in the NHS in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) said the cost of Nexavar – about £3,000 a month – was “simply too high”. BBC.

I’d not like to have to make these sorts of decisions – at the end of the day the Health Service resources aren’t limitless and £3,000 a month is a lot it – although it wouldn’t seem quite so much if your life depended on it.

What no-one seems to be asking is how Bayer justify such an exorbitant price – what was their development costs, what’s the production costs and what’s the payback period – questions that we’ll never get straight answers to – all you can say is Bayer made €1,719 million last year – plenty of profit margin.

The whole sorry tale confirms what we all know – health care is for the rich.

Patients who do not get the treatment that they need from the NHS within 18 weeks are to be given the legal right to free private care.

The Cabinet agreed this week that the legislation, placing maximum waiting times on the statute book for the first time, should be rushed through Parliament before the next election.

Cancer patients, in particular, will receive funding for private treatment if they have not seen an NHS specialist within two weeks of GP referral.

Downing Street says that the two legal rights, which will be unveiled in next month’s Queen’s Speech, are designed to entrench the dramatic reduction of NHS waiting lists over recent years. Tom Baldwin and Sam Lister, The Times.

What a brilliant idea – let’s take money from the NHS and give it to private health care companies – that’s really going to improve the service. Still the Tories are even more clueless apart from phasing out NHS targets – which seems daft considering they’ve produced results – they’ve said little.

Or come to that cat

The regulation of hypnotherapists in the UK is so lax that even a cat can become accredited, the BBC has found.

Chris Jackson, presenter of Inside Out in the North East and Cumbria, registered pet George with three industry bodies.

Each one accepted a certificate from the non-existent Society of Certified Advanced Mind Therapists as proof of George’s credentials.

It follows a similar investigation by an American clinical psychologist.

Dr Steve Eichel suspected industry bodies in the US were not running checks on their members.

He said: “I felt I’d test my hypothesis and I did that by getting my cat certified by a number of the most prominent lay hypnosis organisations in the United States. It was a frighteningly simple process.”

In the UK, George was registered with the British Board of Neuro Linguistic Programming (BBNLP), the United Fellowship of Hypnotherapists (UFH) and the Professional Hypnotherapy Practitioner Association (PHPA). BBC.

So the next time you fancy hypnosis to help you give up smoking I suggest you don’t waste your money.

I’ve never really had a high opinion of businessmen – not least it is still mostly men. In the world of medicine the practise of burying dug trials is rife:

We have known for decades that academic publishing faces two serious problems. One is that trials often go missing in action: a drug company might do eight trials of a drug, say, but only two have a positive result. So those two positive trials will appear in an academic journal, while the six remaining with negative results quietly disappear. Bizarrely, regulatory bodies like the FDA get to see this negative data, but often enough doctors do not.

This is a familiar problem, and a murderous one, because overall the results of all 8 trials combined might show that the treatment is ineffective: in the absence of this full information, people are subjected unnecessarily to side effects, and deprived of other more effective treatments. Ben Goldacre, Bad Science.

Still burying a bad trial isn’t the only thing that goes on – don’t get the answers you want from your trial, then change the goal

You might do a trial on a blood pressure pill, for example, stating that you will look to see if it can reduce heart attacks, but find at the end that it doesn’t. Then you might retrospectively change the whole purpose of your study, ignore the heart attacks, pretend it was only ever about blood pressure, and glowingly report a reduction in blood pressure as if this was the primary outcome you were always interested in. Or you might measure so many different things that some of them will show up as positive changes simply by chance. Ben Goldacre, Bad Science.

All this is supposed to have stopped with the clinical trials register, but without any enforcement of the rules no one’s taking any notice – which leaves the drug companies free to kill us for profit.