Millions of patients with back pain are being given pointless drugs, surgery and injections, with a third prescribed dangerous opioids, experts say. Doctors prefer to offer useless and often harmful treatments rather than tell patients there is nothing to be done except stay active, an [...]
Lower back pain is the leading cause of disability globally but too often patients are let down by the treatment they are offered, say experts. They have written a series of papers in The Lancet asking the worldwide medical profession to stop offering ineffective and potentially harmful [...]
Hundreds of thousands of Australian back pain sufferers are being given harmful or useless treatments, leading researchers say, prompting them to make an extraordinary plea to protect the public. Thirty-one of the world’s leading back pain researchers have published a call to action in medical [...]
Hundreds of millions of back pain patients worldwide are being aggressively treated with strong opioid painkillers, surgery and scans of “dubious benefit”, doctors have warned. Lower back pain (LBP) has been identified as the leading cause of disability globally. It affects 540 million people and is made worse [...]
A team of international health experts has accused the medical fraternity of "mismanaging" back pain and providing "ineffective and harmful" treatments. In three papers published in the esteemed Lancet medical journal, the Australian and international authors assert that low back pain has increased dramatically in [...]
I have no doubt Samantha Armytage was hoping to save lives when she had a screening mammogram on Channel Seven’s Sunrise to look for breast cancer. Before undressing for the X-ray of her breasts last week, Armytage, 41, told millions of Australian viewers that one in eight [...]
Last week, many Australians woke up to David Koch having prostate cancer screening tests on Channel Seven's Sunrise program. "Just try and relax there a bit," a urologist said to the 61-year-old while he was lying on his side, trousers around his knees, having a digital rectal [...]
Advice is mounting to warn Australians against arthroscopic knee surgery, especially for patients with osteoarthritis who are aged over 50. President of the Australian Rheumatology Association Professor Rachelle Buchbinder said it could be doing more harm than good...
Anne Ashford flinches when she begins to recall the painful "grinding and grating" in her swollen knees when her osteoarthritis was at its worst about seven years ago. Her first surgeon booked her in for arthroscopic knee surgery, but it had to be postponed because [...]
One of the biggest challenges in medicine is how to offer hope without hype. Designing personalised treatments based on the science of the human genome will doubtless bring benefits, particularly for those with rare genetic conditions. But overpromoting the promise risks a tsunami of unwarranted [...]