Medical Evidence Matters with Liz Tucker

This is the second of two repeated podcasts that were aired a while ago, which are being re-released. This one with Dr Robert Lustig  was particularly popular with listeners. Dr Robert Lustig  argues sugar is fuelling an epidemic of chronic and metabolic disease, from diabetes and strokes, to cancer and heart disease costing hundreds of thousands of lives. He says in a view that some have seen as...

Over the holiday season, I'm releasing a couple of previous podcasts that were particularly popular with listeners. This first one is an interview I did with GP Dr David Unwin. David  has been a pioneer in the UK developing and promoting a low-carb approach for treating type 2 diabetes. In 2016, he won the NHS innovator of the year award for his work. His treatment approach has been so successful...

Professor Tony Avery,  National Clinical Director for Prescribing for NHS England, discusses safer prescribing of medicines. He highlights the changes he would like to see to enable patients to make genuinely informed decisions, which may also sometimes mean that they decide not to go ahead with a treatment. Tony describes how he believes doctors and patients can work together on initial prescribi...

Neuropsychiatrist Dr Alastair Santhouse discusses his concerns  that the huge increase we are seeing in mental health diagnoses across the western world, is now medicalizing emotions and feelings that have previously been seen as part of the normal human experience. He argues in a new book No More Normal – Mental Health in an Age of Over-diagnosis, published by Granta  - this is leading to an incr...

Dr Kevin J. Tracey reveals the extraordinary impact the vagus nerve, which connects every organ in the body to the brain, has on our health. Kevin has been a pioneer in the use of bioelectronic devices to stimulate this nerve  to treat a range of auto-immune illnesses and he is the author of a new book The Great Nerve, The New Science of the Vagus Nerve and How to Harness its healing reflexes, pub...

Dr Nina Fuller-Shavel discusses the use of injectable mistletoe as a cancer treatment in conjunction with the standard treatments such as chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy. Nina was working as a doctor in the UK’s NHS when she discovered in her early thirties that she had breast cancer. That was a decade ago, but that experience helped focus her mind on the reality of being a cancer pat...

Dr Guido Frank discusses his research in the use of ketogenic diets to treat anorexia nervosa. Although, his research is at an early stage his results appear do appear promising. Anorexia is a disease which is one of the hardest psychiatric conditions of all to treat with a depressingly high mortality rate, so this work is of huge potential interest. Up to now, there has been no effective treatmen...

Laura Delano, was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder when she was a teenager and would go on to spent 13 years receiving psychiatric care, both as inpatient and outpatient. In the process,  she accumulated more and diagnoses, and was given more and more drugs. But - as she explains in her new book: Unshrunk – How the mental health industry took over my life and my fight to get it back, published...

Investigative journalist Charles Piller explains the remarkable story of fraud he has uncovered in Alzheimer’s Disease research, which he discusses in a new book: Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s. Charles argues the result of this is that Alzheimer’s research and treatment has been set by years - if not decades. He goes on to discusse the trial data on which...

Kerry Bone,  a herbalist who has spent 40 years working in the field, joins the podcast to discuss just what the evidence is that certain herbs and spices might benefit our health. Today we are bombarded with so much confusing information telling us what to eat, when to eat, and often how particular medicinal plants are particularly beneficial to our health. So, today I hope our conversation gives...

Obstetrician and gynaecologist, Dr Adam Urato, explains why he is concerned about the huge increase in medications now taken by pregnant women. A figure that has surged in the last few decades. Across the world, women are taking more drugs than ever before while pregnant. In the US, around 90% of women expecting a baby will now take some kind of medication during pregnancy Adam argues the notion a...

NHS consultant neurologist Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan argues that a range of medical conditions from autism to ADHD are now overdiagnosed, which is completely redefining how we think about sickness and disease. In a new book The Age of Diagnosis; Sickness, Health and Why Medicine Has Gone Too Far, she explains why she believes that creating large numbers of new diagnoses, carries risks for both our men...

Dr Bill Harris discusses the critical impact the Omega 3 fatty acids have - not just on our heart health - but on a myriad of other medical conditions. Bill was one of the earliest researchers in this field. Ever since he gave a fascinating presentation at the Integrative and Personalised Medical Congress in London last year, I’ve been really keen to get him on the podcast. In our conversation, Bi...

In the very first episode of the new season of Medical Evidence Matters with Liz Tucker formerly known as What Your GP Doesn't Tell you, Liz Tucker talks to medical doctor and researcher, Dr William Li who has treated some of the toughest cancer cases imaginable. He argues for the 21st century treatment of cancer, the solution lies not in a single silver bullet but in an integrative approach. In a...

GP Dr Safia Debar discusses how we can leverage emerging knowledge of neuroscience to help us more effectively manage our stress. This is something, she has personal knowledge of after finding herself burnt out as a GP, when she turned to her first degree in neuroscience to see how it could help her rethink her approach. Safia argues it is not so much the stress that we face, but how we think abou...

Psychiatrist Professor Joanna Moncrieff discusses her new book Chemical Imbalance: The Making and the Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth. I first spoke to Joanna two years ago, just after she had published a review paper suggesting that there was no link between depression and an imbalance of serotonin in the brain. And her book picks up what happened next. As her article gained more and more attentio...

Dr Louise Newson, who runs a menopause clinic, discusses many of the myths about Hormone Replacement Therapy for women - or HRT for short. What are the risks? Who should take it and for how long? It's a subject which has been much misunderstood. Too frequently, women in either the years leading up to the menopause or during the menopause itself, get misdiagnosed when they go to see their GP about...

Journalist Katherine Eban's investigation over more than ten years has uncovered one of the most shocking medical scandals imaginable, which affects millions of patients across the world. In this podcast, she discusses the shocking reality of what happens or perhaps more accurately what doesn’t happen, when generic drugs that we import, are manufactured in countries with poor regulations. When a d...

Norwegian GP Dr Torkil Færø argues wearable devices that measure our heart rate and other health metrics, if used in the right way can be transformative in keeping us healthy and helping prevent disease in the future. In his book, The Pulse Cure, he explains why he thinks far more attention should be paid to a key metric which turns out to give a surprisingly accurate snapshot of our level of stre...

Whistleblower Dr Carl Elliott's life changed for ever, when he tried to alert his university about the running of a drug trial which had resulted in the suicide of a patient. A patient whose mother felt should never have been enrolled in a trial in the first place. Carl’s battle came at a huge personal and emotional cost and at the end of years of campaigning and lobbying, little had really change...

The idea of developing dementia is probably one of our greatest health fears. We tend to think of it as an irreversible disease that gradually robs us of our faculties. But podcast guest, psychiatrist Dr Kat Toups is one of a group of doctors and researchers who argues that certainly in its early stages, the disease is actually reversible. The mistake - she says  - is to think of dementia as an il...

Cardiologist Dr Scott Murray discusses what we can all do to reduce our risk of heart disease. I think many of us are familiar with the idea that elevated levels of the so-called bad cholesterol - low density lipoprotein or LDL for short - have been linked to cardiovascular illness. (Although, in fact there is a group of scientists who argue that LDL levels are unconnected with heart disease.) But...

Professor Sarah Berry discusses her research in personalised nutrition, which is uncovering the hugely varied effects different foods may have on one particular group or individual compared to others. This variability can be due to our genetics, metabolism or a number of other factors. This may well have important implications for what, when and how we  should eat. For example, research is reveali...

Dentist Dr Victoria Sampson argues that while the gut microbiome gets a huge amount of attention, funding and publicity, the oral microbiome gets almost entirely overlooked, yet it is essential to our health. As she explains in this podcast, it has  a close symbiotic relationship with our gut biome, so changing the composition of one affects the other. And perhaps most importantly of all, poor ora...

This week's guest is Dave Feldman, who unusually for this podcast is not a doctor or a medical researcher, but actually a software engineer. For a long time, there has been concern that those on a very low carb or ketogenic diet are pushing their cholesterol to very high levels. This is something that Dave experienced personally, when he noticed the amount of his so called bad cholesterol -  the l...