...We had a tasting menu that would have graced any Michelin starred restaurant in London or Milan. We started with a dish of mutton seekh kebab, murgh Peshwari Tikka and char grilled Malai prawns. The mutton was skewered, minted, spice crusted and cooked in a tandoori oven. The chicken tikka was minted, marinated in spices and curds, and finished in a tandoori oven. The prawns were indescribably delicious and crusted with yoghurt, saffron and remarkably... cheddar cheese, and then char grilled.
View PDF...New drugs have to go through incredibly complex approval processes. A new drug is generally approved if the cost of a "quality-added year of life" is around £30,000. So imagine the ripples of shock caused by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) approving a drug costing the equivalent of two spanking new Ferraris a year for a condition (atypical haemolytic uraemic syndrome) affecting just 30 or 40 people a year in the UK...
Read more at timesonline.co.uk (you'll need to be a member)Yesterday's news story about prostate cancer is based on a study released in September by a team of researchers in Canada who reported that they had found an association between numbers of sexual partners and prostate cancer risk... the sort of information that causes panic throughout the land and might make a chap tie a knot in his pyjama bottoms.
The research involved lifestyle interviews with 1,590 men who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and a comparison of these patients' ways of life with matched controls who did not have prostate cancer. Heterosexual men who have had more than 20 partners were found to be at reduced risk, gay men who have had more than 20 partners had a two-fold increased risk and men who had never had sex were more likely to develop prostate cancer.
Read more at timesonline.co.uk (you'll need to be a member)Big Pharma is often seen as driven by a mad desire for money, but money has been very good for cancer patients. Two new high-tech drugs, abiraterone and enzalutamide, have become available for patients living with prostate cancer and they extend life without major side-effects. But Nice, the NHS treatments adviser, has ruled that in England they can only be prescribed under entirely draconian circumstances. In contrast, there is unrestricted use in Scotland and in the private sector.
Read more at timesonline.co.uk (you'll need to be a member)Sir, I commend George Clooney on his excellent decision to marry a member of the Bar who is a former student of St Hugh’s College, Oxford...
Read more at timesonline.co.uk (you'll need to be a member)...Professor Jonathan Waxman, a leading prostate cancer specialist, said Nice was an organisation ‘not fit for purpose’ that persists in using a faulty system for rationing drugs that disadvantages patients in England...
Read more at dailymail.co.ukIt seems that cancer is everywhere, in every conversation, in the papers and on TV. "So you're a doctor?" starts the dinner party conversation. "What do I do to avoid the dreaded Big C?"
View PDFJonathan appears on Sky News' flagship daily news discussion show, discussing cancer diagnoses.
Video up soon...For most people, reading his work is enough to get them to create something spectacular. For Jonathan Waxman, it was meeting the man himself that reignited his love of literature. Waxman was Ballard's oncologist, treating the prostate cancer that would eventually end his life...
Read more at hamhigh.co.ukCancer sufferers live nearly six times longer than 40 years ago, a new report says. Jonathan Waxman describes the difficulty of telling patients they have the disease
View PDFCancer survival rates in the NHS are excellent. Without costly meddling they could be even better
View PDFWoman's Hour looks at how some doctors could improve the way they give a serious and sometimes terminal diagnosis, discussing the issue with leading oncologist Dr Jonathan Waxman who's written a book called The Elephant in the Room, a collection of real life short stories about cancer patients and their doctors.
Listen again at bbc.co.ukHe is the world-leading cancer expert who cared for JG Ballard. His first novel was so full of sex that he had to use a pen name. Now Jonathan Waxman has published a book about doctor-patient relations that he and Ballard had hoped to co-write.
View PDF...What do we say to them, Dr Carter? Do we say: "Tough, it's a cruel world. Let the fittest survive"? Jonathan Waxman is the Flow Foundation Professor of Oncology at Imperial College London...
Read more at timesonline.co.uk (you'll need to be a member)At least 10% of suicides in England are by someone with a chronic or terminal illness, found researchers who tried to obtain information on the subject from local health authorities...
Read more at news-medical.netAt least 10% of suicides in Britain are linked to terminal or chronic illness and account for over 400 deaths every year, according to a Demos report. Louise Bazalgette, who works for the Commission on Assisted Dying and is a researcher at Demos, and Professor Jonathan Waxman of Imperial College London debate why there appears to be a "frenzy of interest" about suicide...
Read more at bbc.co.uk...technological curiosity and that immunisation and molecular medicine will do for cancer what antibiotics did for TB. Jonathan Waxman is Professor of Oncology at Imperial College London. His book about cancer, The Elephant in the Room, is to be...
Read more at timesonline.co.uk (you'll need to be a member)It wasn't such a long time ago that we died from what are now considered to be trivial illnesses. Simple infections carried enormous numbers of people to ghastly deaths; cancer wasn't treatable, and many suffered terribly from chronic diseases...
Read more at timesonline.co.ukWe learnt today that Asda plans to sell cancer drugs at heavy discounts. Introducing competition in the private sector for cancer drugs shows inspirational management style and is exactly the sort of change that a cancer doctor would welcome in the NHS "market". The health service desperately needs Asda-style management to modernise it, not apparatchiks to defend the status quo....
Read more at timesonline.co.ukIt's election time, apparently, and our glorious political classes are marching forward on the massed ranks of the electorate with banners that claim that their party, only their party, will save the NHS. Politicians clamour to praise its world-class status and laud the dedication of nurses and the skill of its doctors. And all parties are united in the view that, despite the need for austerity measures, frontline staff and services will not be cut. So where are the savings planned? Watch the hand and not the mouth...
Read more at timesonline.co.ukIt's recession time and budgets must be cut. And so with a vicious chop of his bloody PBR axe, the Iron Chancellor slashes at the budgets of squealing Whitehall departments. His armour-clad feet stomp on the mouths of protesting ministers...
Read more at timesonline.co.ukIf it makes the doctor weep what does it do to the patient? Last Wednesday I sat talking to a patient with cancer and his pregnant wife. He is in his thirties and a teacher in a pretty tough area of London. He is really nice, a good man who has calmly dealt with his fate...
Read more at timesonline.co.ukIt was my amazing privilege to care for J.G. Ballard. I was his doctor. But Jimmy first came into my life when I was a medical student after I read his science fiction stories. They were important for me, providing such a different view on what the future could be...
Read more at timesonline.co.ukEvery person reading this article has a one in three chance of getting cancer. In the most recent year for which there are statistics, 367,000 men and women in England had cancer diagnosed...
Read more at timesonline.co.ukThe past 50 years have produced an amazing blossoming of the biological sciences. But there is a little problem. How is a country with a healthcare system principled to provide care for all, able to afford the drugs that will cure all?...
Read more at timesonline.co.ukOur Government has been a fabulous custodian of healthcare. Public memory is short and many of us have forgotten how difficult things were for patients before 1997. During the past decade we have seen a doubling in NHS spending. As a result, patients don't have to wait for scans, are seen in hospitals within a reasonable time, and surgical waiting lists are relatively short. But there are areas of healthcare where things have gone badly wrong, where wrong meets bad, becomes worse, and then spirals to appalling, and these areas are approached through the bloodstained portals of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)...
Read more at timesonline.co.ukMacLeod's Introduction to Medicine was published by Springer on 30.09.13 and is available from all good bookshops, including:
Blackwell WHSmith Waterstone's AmazonThe Elephant in the Room was published by Springer on 31.10.11 and is available from all good bookshops, including:
Blackwell WHSmith Waterstone's Amazon