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 about that stress and the processes that we put in place to manage it.

It is now implicated in almost every disease you can think of and intriguing new research suggests that using meditation as a calming technique, doesn't just affect the mind, but can create genuine biological change, switching our genes on and off.

The host of this award nominated podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou or via PayPal at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com/support/

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 attention, she found herself in a political maelstrom facing vitriolic personal and professional criticism.

Because if the serotonin hypothesis was false, what could be the possible grounds for prescribing the popular antidepressants - the selective serotonin uptake inhibitors - better known as the SSRIs? It’s been claimed in the past they can alter brain chemistry and correct imbalances, but how can they work if Joanna is right and no imbalance exists?

What followed illustrates the fierce political divide in psychiatry between those who remain sceptical of her claims and believe that the current medication for depression is a vital tool and those such as Joanna who are unconvinced by its value.

And we also discuss why much to her surprise, Joanna – although she has always been a socialist - found far more sympathy for her research from right wing media sources rather than the left.

Chemical Imbalance: The Making and the Unmaking of the Serontonin Myth by Joanna Moncrieff is published by Flint Books.

The host of this award nominated podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou or via PayPal at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com/support/

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 symptoms. That can mean they end up on antidepressants, sleeping pills and potentially a cascade of other drugs, some of which may be very difficult to stop once they start, and don’t actually treat the underlying issues caused by the menopause.

Shockingly, Louise has even met women who have been given electro-convulsive therapy for their menopausal symptoms.

Recently, there has also been controversy about dosage levels of HRT and why doctors like Louise sometimes prescribe higher doses of the hormone estradiol. But she argues this is because these women are poor absorbers of HRT. They need higher levels of the hormone to achieve an effective level of estradiol in their bloodstream.

In a recent paper, she and colleagues explored the variation in estradiol levels in women using transdermal patches.

Louise Newson's book: The Definitive Guide to the Perimenopause and Menopause is published by Yellow Kite.

The host of this award nominated podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou or via PayPal at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com/support/

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 drug is first approved, it is released with its own brand name, but once the drug’s patent expires, then other manufacturers are allowed to make cheaper generic versions of the same medication.

Now most patients and indeed many doctors think these generic drugs are the same as the brand name ones - but they are not. Current regulations only require the medications to be "bioequivalent" and they also allowed to have very different absorption rates, so may work very differently to the brand name pharmaceuticals, which has huge implications for patients.

But although that is worrying enough, many of the world’s generic drugs are made in India and China - where as Katherine explains - there is little regulation and they can be made very cheaply. In what was India’s largest pharmaceutical company – Ranbaxy - 200 of its generic drugs were revealed to have been filed with the US drug regulator, the FDA, with inadequate, falsified or completely missing data. And furthermore in other companies, an FDA investigator found in over 80 plants in India and China he visited, 80% had falsified data.

These generic drugs are sold into every country, so may well end up on the shelves of your local pharmacy, so what can we do as patients and doctors to protect ourselves?

On her website, Katherine gives some tips for consumers in A Guide To Investigating Your Own Drugs.

Bottle of Lies: Ranbaxy and the Dark Side of Indian Pharma by Katherine Eban is published by Juggernaut.

The host of this award nominated podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou or via PayPal at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com/support/

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 stress and overall health - and that is our heart rate variability or HRV for short.

Torkil explains what it is and simple steps we can all take to improve our heart rate variability. Remarkably, it turns out that drops in our HRV may predict future illness and a higher heart rate variability has even been correlated with a better performing immune system.

The Pulse Cure - The Revolutionary Way to Balance Stress, Optimise Health and Live Longer by Torkil Færø is published by Quercus.

The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou or via PayPal at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com/support/

What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

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 changed.

His disillusioning experience as a whistleblower has driven him to meet others who have had similar experiences. And it seems few escape with their careers and personal lives intact. In a new book: The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the The Price of Saying No, published by WW. Norton and Company, Carl reveals his own personal painful story and that of other medical whistleblowers too.

The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou or via PayPal at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com/support/

What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

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 illness with a sole cause and instead we need to see it as multi-system disease, which requires a coordinated approach to work out what is injuring the brain and then provide effective treatment.

Toups calls her approach the three Rs: remove, replace and regenerate. So that means taking away anything causing problems; providing the nutrients and hormones to help the brain function optimally; and then using a number of neuroplasticity techniques to enable the brain to form new connections and regenerate.

Patients in her latest study who have undergone her protocol have seen a remarkable improvement. Their brain scans are now showing less signs of aging than those who don’t have dementia. All of her subjects have now raised their cognitive scores into the normal range. In one case a fine artist who had had to stop painting has been able to start painting again and has even opened a new exhibition, and another patient has just started a new business.

For the full details of the protocol, please click here.

The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou or via PayPal at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com/support/

What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/

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 Scott argues the picture is actually far more complicated than looking at just one factor and we need to be examining all the different elements that make up our cholesterol and fats. That means looking at our figures for total cholesterol, high density lipoproteins (HDL), LDL and triglycerides, not solely focussing on LDL to get an accurate picture of what is really going on in our bodies.

And there is one other factor that is often overlooked, but that Scott believes is an even bigger risk for heart disease and that is a high blood sugar level.

But as Scott reveals, the good news is that there is preventive action you can take.

The host of the podcast, Liz Tucker is an award winning medical journalist and former BBC producer and director. You can follow Liz on Twitter at https://twitter.com/lizctucker and read her Substack newsletter about the podcast at https://liztucker.substack.com

If you would like to support this podcast you can do so via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/WhatYourGPDoesntTellYou or via PayPal at https://www.whatyourgpdoesnttellyou.com/support/

What Your GP Doesn’t Tell You has been selected by Feedspot as one of the top 20 UK Medical Podcasts https://blog.feedspot.com/uk_medical_podcasts/