Dementia and the drive to increase diagnosis rates: the debate goes on

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As part of its excellent ‘Too Much Medicine’ series, the British Medical Journal last week published an important analysis of the current direction of travel in the field of dementia care. The article is hard to ignore, written as it is by highly authoritative academics from the UK and Australia, including Professor Carol Brayne, an [read the full story…]

Hypochondria: a word desperately in need of a makeover

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Hypochondria is an ancient word. It stems from the Greek meaning for the upper abdomen; hypo- is the prefix for below, and -chondro refers to the ribs, so that the Greeks referred imaginatively to the upper abdomen as ‘the bit below the ribs.’ For the Greeks, the abdomen was felt to be the seat of [read the full story…]

Books for the blues

GPs are to be encouraged to issue a ‘Reading Prescription’ to patients

The Arts Council-funded project to promote self-help books for mental health conditions was widely reported in the media last week. In true Daily Mail style, their coverage was accompanied by an image of a bikini-clad woman, apparently reading one of the ‘books on prescription’ whilst sitting on an idyllic beach with her toes resting in the gently lapping water [read the full story…]

Guest blog: Screening for dementia – beware the zeal of an evangelist

If you missed Martin Brunet's blog on dementia screening back in December, read it now.

This article originally appeared on the Binscombe Doctor blog on 14 Dec 2012 and is reproduced with kind permission from Dr Martin Brunet. There’s an old joke about a Pastor and an Evangelist going on a bear hunt. Once they have arrived at their log cabin hunting lodge the Pastor starts to unpack their supplies [read the full story…]

Guest blog: Antidepressants and the Long Shadow of Stigma

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Following the media coverage of the NHS statistics published last week that reported a large rise in antidepressant prescribing, Martin Brunet (a GP from Surrey and author of the excellent Binscombe Doctor Blog) has written an opinion piece that explores the positive and negative aspects of this complex story: “Are GPs prescribing antidepressants too readily?” [read the full story…]