Whistleblower Dr Carl Elliot 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’s 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/

Professor Sarah Berry discusses her research in personalised nutrition, which is uncovering the hugely varied effects different foods may have on one particular group or individual compared to others. This variability can be due to our genetics, metabolism or a number of other factors.

This may well have important implications for what, when and how we should eat.

For example, research is revealing that as we age, many of us have a worse tolerance for eating carbohydrates in the evening compared to earlier in the day. And while some blood markers have a strong genetic effect, many others can be heavily influenced and changed by lifestyle.

Professor Sarah Berry is a nutrition scientist based at King’s College, London University. She has particular research interests in individualised nutrition, food and fat structure, and the metabolic changes that happen after eating. She is also the chief scientist for the nutrition company Zoe.

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/

Dentist Dr Victoria Sampson argues that while the gut microbiome gets a huge amount of attention, funding and publicity, the oral microbiome gets almost entirely overlooked, yet it is essential to our health.

As she explains in this podcast, it has a close symbiotic relationship with our gut biome, so changing the composition of one affects the other. And perhaps most importantly of all, poor oral biome health is linked to a range of illnesses from heart disease and Alzheimer's to diabetes and arithitis.

Remarkably even our fertility can be affected by the health of our mouth. But the oral biome is usually disregarded as a possible cause or aggravating factor in all of these conditions.

So what can we all do to ensure that we have a healthy oral biome?

Dr Victoria Sampson is a co-founder of the Health Society.

In addition to all the standard dental services, the Health Society also offers oral diagnostic testing. And anyone wantting to join the waiting list for a new oral microbiome test which will shortly be available can do so 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/

This week's guest is Dave Feldman, who unusually for this podcast is not a doctor or a medical researcher, but actually a software engineer.

For a long time, there has been concern that those on a very low carb or ketogenic diet are pushing their cholesterol to very high levels. This is something that Dave experienced personally, when he noticed the amount of his so called bad cholesterol - the low density lipoprotein, known as LDL - shoot up on a keto diet.

And when he found others reporting similar findings, he decided to set up an organisation called the Citizen Science Foundation to fund research to find out exactly what was happening in the particular case of people like him - what he has labelled as lean mass hyper-responders - who are slim, metabolically healthy, but see their cholesterol levels rise substantially once they are on a ketogenic diet.

Perhaps surprisingly, the early results from this work, suggest that this group - contrary to what has been thought in the past - may not be endangering their health.

At the very least what this research clearly demonstrates is the large gaps in our current understanding of the role of cholesterol in metabolic health.

One illustration of this is an experiment carried out by one of Dave's colleagues, Nick Norwitz, who found that eating Oreo cookies while on a keto diet actually lowered his LDL cholesterol more than a statin, which I don’t think I need to add is not a recommended medical intervention!

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/

Oncologist Professor Robert Thomas, argues along with standard conventional cancer treatments - all of which he uses - that exercise and diet can play a pivotal role in improving cancer outcomes.

Robert says for the newer biological therapies which require a patient to have robust immunity, research is revealing that a healthier lifestyle and gut health, can improve the chances of responding well to these biological agents by 30-40%.

He discusses his research using supplements which have shown significant benefit in the treatment of cancer patients.. One of which has also been shown to help those with long covid. Here are the links to the supplements discussed in the podcast:

https://yourgutplus.com/prostate-research/

https://yourphyto.com/scientific-study

The podcast receives no financial benefit or incentive from any of these products or companies.

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/

Author and journalist Tom Mueller, after meeting whistleblowers working in the US dialysis industry seven years ago, decided to investigate further. Tom argues what he found is a cautionary tale not just about dialysis, but about the impact on healthcare of for profit medicine in general.

His book How to Make A Killing: Death, Dollars and the Business of Blood, contains one statistic that I found extraordinary. Although the US has one of the most sophisticated health care systems in the world, around 22% of US dialysis patients die each year, yet in Europe the figure is only 9-12%.

So what could possibly explain this?

How to Make A Killing: Death, Dollars and the Business of Blood by Tom Mueller is published by WW Norton and Company.

Before publiciation, Tom contacted organisations, both private and public, involved in the US dialysis industry about the material contained in his book, most did not respond but DaVita one the two companies responsible for 80% of US dialysis healthcare did.

It said that its company’s principles rendered many of Tom’s assumptions incorrect or downright impossible.

It states that patient welfare is paramount in its facilities: “The first consideration in every decision we make is patient safety….We are committed to providing a comfortable, therapeutic environment for all patients.”

Tom Mueller's work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere. Previous books include Crisis of Conscience, a cultural history of whistleblowing and fraud.

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/