Early oral antibiotics in paediatric pneumonia - GIM Journal Watch

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By Dr Druin Burch

Druin Burch is a consultant physician at Oxford, and has written a number of books on medicine, medical epistemology, and medical history. He has written in the past for the Guardian and the New Statesman, and now writes regularly for The Spectator.

Lancet August 1, 8

417 "Multidomain lifestyle intervention for the prevention of cognitive decline in at-risk older adults in Latin America"

One of those perennial studies from the world of geratology that comes trailing glorious virtue and disappears into the void. A multidomain lifestyle intervention was here shown to be slightly better than a "flexible lifestyle intervention". A total of a thousand patients participated. The results are enough to get their authors into the Lancet, woefully insufficient to persuade any sane healthcare system to widely adopt them. What this paper represents is therefore not medical science, but the industry of pseudo-academia which parasitises it so successfully.