This grew out of my YouTube work where I produce videos usually based around medicine and health related issues. As you will know if you have watched any of my videos, the motto of the channel is to follow the evidence, wherever it leads. This is the essential underpinning of evidence-based medicine. If you are going to accept a treatment, or implement a lifestyle modification, you want to know it’s going to work, to be effective. Treatments can be unpleasant, often with associated adverse effects. Lifestyle modifications can be shear hard work. You know this only too well, if like me, you find difficulties in reducing your alcohol and carbohydrate intake. However, as we know these changes can have positive outcomes, they are worth the effort because we know they are good for us.
Sometimes, working out the evidence for a potential life improving or indeed life saving intervention is reasonably straightforward. If we have a good scientific paper, in a reputable journal, it’s just a matter of decoding the medical-speak and working out the take away messages. Or at least this used to be the situation. Now, unfortunately, or even tragically, things are not so easy.
There are several problems. One is the research that is carried out, and therefore published, is the research that someone has paid for. Other research, with the potential to benefit millions of people is not carried out because no one is prepared to pay for the work to be done. Unfortunately, particularly in health-related research, various financial vested interests commission research, based not necessarily on what is good for you and your family, but on what they can make money from.
How many lifesaving and life improving strategies have simply never been investigated as they are not predisposed to commercial exploitation? This is an open question, but I suspect the answer is more than a few.
This means that individual researchers or whole research departments, can be diverted away from desired research into work which is lucrative for a sponsor. Vested interests can pay for brilliant writers to draft scientific papers in a way that is amenable to journal acceptance. By manipulating the way papers are written, by presenting the results in an over positive light, while minimising or ignoring the negatives, a false impression can be constructed by the unscrupulous.
These papers can often look like brilliant research reports, but it can sometimes be style over substance. Also, we cannot ignore the fact that there can be deliberate fraud and deception as well.
Publications can therefore be influenced by external financial interests. Corporate interests, rich individuals, even government interests all have the power to divert away from beneficial interventions towards profitable ones. Sometimes the motivation behind research can be the accumulation of power and influence, as well as financial.
Some might think these factors amount to national and international corruption.
So, what to do? In my videos and writings, I aim to provide an objective evaluation of an item of medicine or science as best as I can. I do not pretend to be brilliant, I’m not the world’s best statistician, physiologist, pathologist, pharmacologist or life style guru. However, after a lifetime of work as a nurse, and as nurse lecturer for 27 years, I commit to give you my best honest appraisal of a topic. As someone who has studied science alongside clinical work all my life, I am able to bring some scientific scrutiny and objectivity to a discussion. As a researcher, I will try to communicate my understanding of ways of thinking on how new discoveries are made. I also can often talk to top people who I consider to be world leaders in their fields, and I bring them directly to you via interviews and discussions. As a long-term teacher, I will seek to communicate, often complex ideas in ways which are intelligible to the interested reader or viewer.
Basically, at the end of the day I do my best. I will always give the most honest appraisal I am able to. I am not paid by any external interests.
