Dr Briffa's Blog - A Good Look at Good Health
A health-focused blog that makes sense of science, and offers accurate, trustworthy and practical advice about all aspects of healthy living.
About a year ago, I wrote a blog post about ‘earthing’ or ‘grounding’. The idea here is that by connecting ourselves with soil or wet sand or sea, say, we can ‘suck up’ electrons that effectively act as ‘antioxidants’ that can quell inflammation and enhance health. The blog post links to a review article of [...]
The General Medical Council (GMC) is the governing body for doctors in the UK (like me). The GMC publishes rules and regulations on how we doctors go about our business. Of course, the real aim of having such guidance is to ensure that individuals get a certain standard of medical care. Perhaps with a patient [...]
Although medical practice has a sheen of being ‘evidence-based’, you don’t have to look to far to find a lot of what we do as doctors to be either untested or proven ineffective. I wrote about this recently here where I highlight an initiative by the British Medical Journal entitled ‘Too Much Medicine’ which seeks [...]
I was having a conversation with someone this week which centred around this photo which has done the rounds in the blogosphere. Essentially, this has been used by proponent of low-carb/primal/paleo eating and lifestyle who, as a rule, reject the notion that a healthy diet is one that is largely or completely devoid of animal [...]
Niacin is a form of vitamin B3 that has been long-known to reduce levels of ‘unhealthy’ LDL-cholesterol, while raising levels of ‘healthy’ HDL-cholesterol. It’s generally believed that these effects would translate into better outcomes in terms of cardiovascular issues such as heart attacks and strokes. As a result, niacin has a history of use for [...]
We’re entering the ‘flu season here in the UK. Last year, my local surgery put a banner outside urging us to ‘roll up’ for the ‘flu vaccine. I wrote a blog post which explained why this practice is not nearly as effective or ‘evidence-based’ as one might think. In a previous blog post here I [...]
Some nice person sent me a link to this article earlier this week which appears in the UK’s broadsheet newspaper The Telegraph. I mention the fact that this publication is a ‘broadsheet’ because these larger format newspapers generally have a reputation of higher quality reporting compared to the ‘tabloids’. Whether that true or not, I [...]
One of my last posts pointed to the hazards associated with the use of sunscreens, including some propensity to increased skin cancer risk. Some people have commented that chemicals found in sunscreens might have a direct toxic and cancer-inducing effect in the body. I don’t disagree with this idea at all – it’s certainly plausible. [...]
