What Doctors Don't Tell YouWhite-coat hypertension, where a patient’s fear of the doctor causes his blood pressure to rise higher than it usually is, seems to occur at home as well as in the doctor’s office,
One of the things conventional medicine prides itself on is its diagnoses. But much of the credit goes not to doctors, but to the technologists who have created increasingly sophisticated ways of peering into the human body.
Up to one third of women given a mammogram could suffer the anguish of a false positive where the test incorrectly detects breast cancer and consequently further unnecessary medical intervention, ...
As breast cancer rates continue to spiral upward (to 185,000 women in the US and 28,000 women in the UK every year), the pressure is on for women, particularly those over 40, to have regular mammograms.
* Lung: PET scans are just as accurate as biopsies, with no significant health risks (Appl Radiol, 2003; 32: 9-17).
* Breast: MRI has variable accuracy (60-100 per cent)
Early in May, in a landmark decision, the British courts struck a blow for patient rights. The Court of Appeal held in favour of Ms S, a woman who had been forcibly given a caesarean section agai ...
Annual chest x-rays to screen for tuberculosis (TB) should be stopped even though the disease is once again on the rise. ...
There are serious differences in performance among three commonly used faecal occult blood tests (FOBTs), often used to detect clinically undetectable upper gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding.
The use of "peak flow monitors", which measure the breathing volumes of asthmatics, does nothing to reduce the likelihood of death or illness from the condition. ...
Not all home pregnancy test kits are as reliable as the manufacturers claim, researchers have discovered. Three makes of kit with a supposed accuracy rate of 97 per cent were only 77 per cent accu ...
