I am sure you have all read or heard a version of Goldilock’s and the three bears. Goldilocks finds one of the bears’ beds too hard, one too soft and the final bed is just right, which allows her to lie down and fall asleep. At the moment the United States is having an existential crisis about the cost and value of its healthcare system. A series of articles in the New England Journal of Medicine...
I have been asked many times about how COVID-19 is affecting our MS research programme. The short answer is massively and its true impact is yet to be realised because we are a far way off from anything that feels and looks like normal. We are still paralysed by the threat of a second wave of COVID-19; the social distancing requirements within the NHS means everything is going to be at half-mast...
I attended an online meeting yesterday and gave my usual talk on why the MS community needs to change its worldview from MS being a “clinico-radiological” entity to being a “biological disease”. There are many reasons for doing this but an alternative MS worldview will allow us to (1) diagnose MS earlier, (2) start treatment earlier, (3) define prevention strategies targeting very early MS or the...
It was a privilege to be asked to write the foreword to a new policy document, “The Forgotten Many: A 2020 Vision for Secondary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis” dealing with more advanced MS. If you get a chance please read the document. The ‘forgotten many’ is how people with secondary progressive or advanced multiple sclerosis (SPMS) describe themselves. SPMS has a significant impact...
As America burns and the #BlackLivesMatter campaign goes global and spreads to the UK people of colour have been asking white people to say something. The quote Megan Markle “….. the only wrong thing to say is to say nothing”. At the same time, my eldest daughter is adamant that keyboard activism is wrong; “it easy to type and post something to social media”, she says “but it much is...
It is one thing calling for scientists to turbocharge the development of a coronavirus vaccine but quite another to get the population to have the vaccine. The anti-vaxxers are organising rapidly and have started circulating content with false information to achieve their aims. The movie plandemic is one example and is covered in a very good article in the New York Times today. The primary...
Are we in danger of dropping the ball? I am enjoying doing general medicine again but the majority of the patients under my care on an acute medical ward have social problems. Social problems that either got them into the hospital in the first place and/or social problems that are now preventing them from being discharged. My brief sojourn into general medicine highlights why the social...
Johns Hopkins (see below) have helpfully provided a world map of Coronavirus COVID-19 cases real-time () – join the dots… Despite the UN refusing to call it a PANDEMIC (defined as an epidemic occurring worldwide), scientists and health professionals agree it is just this. This concept of pandemic pandemonium caused by viruses is not new; in fact the record for the most number of...
Each generation is built on trends. Different in it’s uniqueness, like a manifesto set apart from the one before. Popular trends only need to be mentioned once or twice before the herd mentality takes over. Like fashion, cars and the financial world, the scientific world is also susceptible to the whims of trends. So here is a piece of research announcing how trends have influenced FDA (US...
Barts-MS rose-tinted-odometer N/A Yesterday’s PMSA meeting was very interesting. It is clear the field of MS is at a cross-roads and that Pharma needs the wider MS community to help them change the game. If we don’t I suspect we won’t see the next generation of treatments being developed to target the ‘real MS’ or ‘smouldering disease’. It was clear...