These figures are not precise, because different colds are caused be different viruses, and some may hang around longer than others. Could you let me know for how long I should stay away?
Dr Fred Kavalier answers your health question:
Colds are viral infections, and you are contagious as long as the viruses are present in your nasal secretions. The best estimate is that you can begin passing on a cold about 24 hours before you get symptoms yourself. Up until now I have been very lucky, having had no colds for the past three years But I have one now – a rather severe one.
I very much enjoy spending one day a week with them, but the last thing I want is to give them my cold. For how long does a cold remain infectious? I am a grandmother with grandchildren aged three and two. In the end, does everyone really want to become their own cardiac surgeon, their own consultant, their own GP? There comes a point where you have to put some confidence in the experts.”Professor Vivienne Nathanson, the head of science and ethics at the British Medical Association, also believes that McTaggart is unnecessarily harsh on doctors. Up to 13 per cent of smear tests are “false positives”, meaning that women are told there’s something wrong when there isn’t, and 20 per cent are “false negatives”, where a patient is wrongly given the all-clear. Patients are all different, and some do want to be able to say, ‘What would you recommend, doctor?’.”Professor Nathanson concludes: “It would be a tragedy if people dismissed screening or other conventional medicine on the basis of this book.”‘What Doctors Don’t Tell You: The Truth About the Dangers of Modern Medicine’, by Lynne McTaggart, is published by Thorsons (£14.99)McTAGGART’S DIAGNOSISHere is a summarised selection of the opinions held by Lynne McTaggart: SCREENING* Cervical cancer screening has not led to any reduction in deaths from the disease, but has resulted in unnecessary treatment and surgery because of faulty results. “I think that the vast majority of doctors would accept that medicine does not have the answer to everything, and that, certainly in the past, we have been poor communicators,” she says.
“But we have done a lot of training around communication and information in recent years.”Doctors do not lie to their patients and we do not withhold information, but we cannot just present them with a load of raw data and expect them to make choices. I don’t think this book is going to help anyone, and frankly, it could be dangerous if people refuse treatments on the basis of the information. And much of the research that she says is hidden from patients has also been widely communicated by doctors in the past five years.Unsurprisingly, the medical establishment is not too keen on McTaggart’s opinions, nor the possible impact of her book on the public’s trust in doctors. They accuse her of twisting statistics to support her own theories, and of failing to recognise the benefits to millions of some of the tests and treatments she so derides.Dr Jim Kennedy, who chairs the prescribing committee of the Royal College of GPs, says: “We strongly support patients taking an interest in their health and the decisions being made about their care: we want them to be informed consumers about their healthcare.” But he adds: “Doctors are not the fount of all knowledge, and we do make mistakes, but there are a lot of checks and balances to minimise the risks of us cocking up.”It is interesting that the very things [McTaggart] accuses us of are the things that she does herself – being overconfident, being dogmatic, giving everything a biased interpretation. But, for someone who has an advisory board of 25 “top doctors” to assess the research and evidence she uses, some of McTaggart’s opinions are extreme.
She questions the link between HIV and Aids, citing long-discredited research, and casts doubt on the anti-retroviral drugs used.In a diatribe against the contraceptive pill, she cites a study that found that 97 per cent of women aged 36 who contracted breast cancer had taken the pill at some point. Given the huge use of the pill among women of that age, this is perhaps unsurprising, and does not reflect the most recent research that, while it does carry a slightly increased risk of breast cancer, it can protect against other forms of cancer. “Medicine’s own scientific literature offers overwhelming evidence that some of it not only doesn’t work, but is highly dangerous. This is a belief system so fixed, so inherent, that any truth to the contrary is dismissed as virtual blasphemy. Medicine is currently practised as a private conversation by doctors, for doctors.”She is careful not to advocate wholesale rejection of all conventional medicine (she can be equally scathing about the lack of effective control of alternative therapies), but she suggests that many tests and vaccines recommended by doctors are unnecessary, and patients should question all the treatments and drugs they are prescribed before consenting to them.She has won the enthusiastic endorsements of alternative therapists and nutritionists such as Dr Gillian McKeith, of the TV show You Are What You Eat, who describes her as a “pioneer and innovator in the field of health”.
She also casts doubt on the usefulness and efficacy of screening programmes for breast and cervical cancer, pointing out the high rate of faulty results involved.And, if the theories behind prevention and diagnosis are, in her view, on dodgy scientific ground, then treatment is even more so. According to WDDTY figures, one in six people in hospital is there because of a medical treatment that has gone wrong. Each morning, I wade through piles of letters containing heart-rending stories of personal catastrophe – children who have been killed, or husbands and wives mutilated or incapacitated through medicine.”When we study their cases, we usually discover that the dangers of the treatments given to them were well known, their doctors just hadn’t bothered to communicate this vital information to them.”Her starting point is that modern medicine is too quick to intervene and invade, in everything from pregnancy to depression. Once in hospital, you have an 8 per cent chance of being injured or dying as a result of mistakes on the part of the staff. In all, McTaggart claims, 1.17 million Britons end up in hospital because of doctor’s error or a bad reaction to a drug.Drugs companies are too quick to get their drugs on the market, and doctors are too busy to read all the literature relating to risks and benefits, she says, hence patients becoming guinea pigs for medicines and treatments.