Are Doctors Confused? Demoralised? The constant stream of 'little corrections to guidance' ? Does anyone know what doctors should be doing?

There are many questions that need to be asked of Pharmaceutical Medicine, and in particular what our doctors should, or should not be doing when treating their patients.

• Why does Pharmaceutical Medicine continually make little changes to their guidance to doctors?
• Is the new guidance better than the old guidance?
• How long will the new guidance last?
• Are these just slight adjustments, to get everything right?
• Or does no-one really know what they are doing?

Just in the last few days the following 'little changes' have been announced by the medical magazine, MIMS. What I would like you to do, when reading each headline, is to remember this - the previous guidance given to doctors was wrong? And I would like you to question, after reading each one, is - what harm has the previous guidance caused to patients?

Macrolide prescribing in pregnancy linked to risk of birth defects. Researchers have called for caution when prescribing macrolides in pregnancy, after finding a small increased risk of birth defects in children whose mothers received the antibiotics during the first trimester of pregnancy.

Macrolide antibiotics that have been used for many years, and they are known to have many serious side effects. Read about the side effects of one of them here. You will not find anything about birth defects though. This new guidance means that doctors have been prescribing these drugs without any knowledge that they cause birth defects.

Early emollient use does not prevent eczema in children, studies show. Daily application of emollients in infancy is not effective in preventing the development of eczema, two new studies have shown.

Parents have been use emollient moisturisers for children who suffer from eczema for decades, and now doctors have been told that they are ineffective, useless.

NICE overturns advice to increase steroid dose in children with asthma. NICE has withdrawn its recommendation to quadruple the dose of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) in children when their asthma control deteriorates.

This new advice shows just how confused the conventional medical system is about the safety and/or the value of its treatment. This is the second change in advice over a short period of time. The first change, in 2017, told doctors to increase the dose. Now that has been overturned; they should not increase the dose! So where to next? Does anyone know?

These are just three recent changes in what is an an ongoing, continual and constant stream of changes in the conventional medical advice given to our doctors. 

Is it any wonder that doctors are confused? This is clearly not a medical system that knows what it is doing.