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I would suggest waiting for a while to see how things unfold.

I have not received a no. But don't ask further.

I think it is probably fair to say the 2007 review was influenced by the PACE trial. By then PACE was under way and the results had been reliably arranged. The NICE committee was very likely informed that these results were going according to plan, even if recruitment was annoyingly slow. And...

Much the commonest reason for dehydration is water loss through sweating in heat or during exertion. Sweat contains a reasonable amount of sodium. Salty water is disgusting for some reason so I expect salty crisps were thought to be a good alternative - probably fair enough. Where I think the...

Right, but sometimes I worry that irony gets lost when people are asking for genuine advice.

Except that the article points out that this is bonkers. Dehydration is shortage of water so any water will help.

I don't think any sugar is needed for rehydration. The WHO advice is for children with diarrhoea who presumably benefit from sugar because they cannot eat anything solid. Rehydration just needs water. If there has been salt loss from sweating or potassium loss from diarrhoea then there may be...

I strongly suspect the project was a waste of time - asking students questions in a 'qualitative study'. One of the commenters makes the point that ethics committees have to protect people who feel obliged to help - like students and junior staff, from repeated intrusive requests to be part of...

Yes, indeed. It could get to a new place and stay there. Or it could maybe flip flop between states. You see that with paroxysmal atrial tachycardia. But PWME are not in one of two states. They go up and down in various steps and often fairly gradually as I understand it. And there does not seem...

That's interesting. So it is easier to sell foods than drugs (at least in terms of safety testing) but maybe harder to make positive claims about them.

No it was me that was verbose. (post 26 vs 24)

It is easy to see how Freud's ideas of guilt and potty training caught on. I can imagine the psychiatrists having serious repressed feelings of guilt here, which they feel they need to act out by becoming famous psychiatrists in order to please their mothers.

For me it is not so much an issue of people saying things like this. We all have to learn. What is wrong with that meeting is that nobody senior quietly and subtly points out in questions that the speaker has just made an arsehole of themselves by talking through their trousers.

I think it is entirely fair to blame speakers for thinking they have a perspective they do not. One of the biggest problems of modern education policy is to encourage youngsters to give talks as if they were experts. That leads on to talking down to patients as if they were experts. And there...

Fair point. I guess my reasoning was that the only reason to allow juniors to stand up and talk is if they have some new data from their research to present - in which case they should have the chance to communicate it. There is never any reason to ask juniors to get up and give a review of the...

Just to add to the confusion I might mention the use of the term 'illness behaviour' as in currency in accident and emergency departments in the 1970s. I assume this was taken up from Pilowski. However the meaning was quite different. It was entirely defined as a behaviour and as 'behaving ill...

I have not read the full paper but I would be surprised if the evidence for probiotics being useful in IBS was 'excellent'. I am not sure that a company making a probiotic derived from food sources would have any problem with making claims if it had done trials and had evidence because of an...

Interesting that people are still trying to pick up the pieces.

I gather that CMRC has a patient advisory group. I think it would make sense for that group to feed on systematic patient comment on presentations at meetings. When I was involved in medical scientific meetings it never occurred to me that patients should really be there as well, making sure...

My understanding is that the new committee had already been formed. And CMRC cannot be an MRC committee if it is planning grant applications around its committee table. It may turn out to be a productive enterprise but it seems to me to be a way of being rules. Maybe if the rules are bent so...