 Allergies [35]
Allergy is a disorder of the immune system often also referred to as atopy.
Antidepressants [36]
An antidepressant is a psychiatric medication used to alleviate mood disorders, such as major depression and dysthymia.
Arthritis [7]
Arthritis is a group of conditions involving damage to the joints of the body.
Cancer [36]
Cancer is a class of diseases in which a group of cells display uncontrolled growth
Cardio & Blood [20]
Risk factors for heart disease: infections
Cholesterol [1]
A fat-like substance called a lipid. It is used to build cell membranes, hormones and bile acids
Diabetes [15]
The inability of the body to produce, or the inability to metabolize, the human hormone insulin; Diabetes insipidus, usually a disorder of the ...
Epilepsy [2]
Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by recurrent unprovoked seizures
Gastrointestinal [1]
The digestive tract is the system of organs within multicellular animals that takes in food...
General Health [144]
The infant, child or young person?s current health condition
Herbal [36]
Herbal tea, herbal medicine
Hormonal [20]
Hormones - Proteins produced by organs of the body that trigger activity in other locations.
Men's Health [1]
For men on fitness, health, sex, caree
Pain relief [36]
Pain management is the medical discipline concerned with the relief of pain.
Skin care [36]
The skin is the outer covering of the body
Weight Loss [36]
Loss of body weight by dieting or due to various easting disorders or medical conditions.
Women's Health [36]
Find information on women's health issues, and lifestyle at the Women's Health
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Allergy/the scientific evidence: safety in numbers ALLERGY/THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE: SAFETY IN NUMBERS
Medical science is never exact, for a variety of reasons. For a start everyone is different, both in the genes that make them what they are, and in the environmental conditions that shape them from birth. Those environmental conditions include childhood and adult illnesses, standard of nutrition, type of work, nature of relationships with other people, past medical treatments and present living conditions. A collection of patients also differ in their age and sex, two very important factors in health and illness. Their response to treatment is bound to differ for these reasons alone.
A second major factor is the imprecise nature of diagnosis. Names may be given to diseases - 'rheumatoid arthritis', for example, or 'migraine' - but this does not mean that they are single, .clearly defined conditions, in the way that infectious diseases such as measles or cholera are. Doctors suspect that, although the symptoms look similar, there are a multitude of different disorders sheltering under such umbrella terms. One of the ways in which medicine advances is by-recognizing different subgroups within such diseases, and giving new names to the symptoms shown by those subgroups - 'classical migraine' and 'common migraine', for example. But in many diseases, there are no obvious subgroups, even though it is clear that the patients are not all the same. This is particularly true in food intolerance.
To overcome these problems in medical trials, it is important to study as large a group of patients as possible. Because the patients suffering from a disease can be so diverse, a new treatment may only be effective for, say, 10 percent of them. A study that only includes 20 patients should, in a perfect world, include two patients who will respond. But when numbers are this small, die laws of chance dictate that there could easily be no patients of this type in the group. So a group of 100 patients may be needed to give a convincing result -but such large-scale trials are costly and difficult to organize.
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Allergies
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