Terry Maguire – Slugger O'Toole

Keir Starmer’s health plans will need to address my sweet tooth…

Terry Maguire on May 27, 2023, 7:00 am | Readers 702

burger beside fried potatoes with drinking glass

Keir Starmer, preparing for office, is setting out his stall on policy and last week addressed Labour’s plans for the Health Service which essentially means England as Health is devolved. But any policies by a UK government at Westminster will affect us here if only in future Health Service investments and policy direction. The current health service, which for us includes social care, seems insatiable when it comes to funding so throwing money at this problem alone is not going to …

Fat Profits or a Fat Lip for Novo Nordisk?

Terry Maguire on February 6, 2023, 11:01 am | Readers 599

white round medication pill on yellow surface

Annual continuing professional development (CPD) is a requirement for most professions including pharmacy. Keeping up-to-date with our art and craft is essential to keeping our customers and patients safe. There is considerable freedom for individual pharmacists to choose what subjects they wish to complete in the required 30 hours of CPD in a given year and drug manufacturers have always been a useful and convenient source of lectures and seminars. The Sunday Times (Feb 5th 2023 p11) reports that a …

Whether Jesus or The Expectation Effect, miracles do happen…

Terry Maguire on January 26, 2023, 10:51 am | Readers 2014

crepuscular rays beyond trees under blue sky

A friend of many years sought my help in 2019 for what seemed, judging by the symptoms, to be uncomplicated heartburn. He worked in hospitality and he worked hard with plenty of stress as he was self-employed and an employer. Initially over-the-counter omeprazole and Gaviscon managed the symptoms but they returned aggressively at which point I insisted he visit his GP as weight-loss was also becoming apparent. The GP immediately referred him to hospital where a progressed lesion in his …

Media’s responsibility in reporting health stories: avoiding public panic…

Terry Maguire on December 10, 2022, 2:00 pm | Readers 964

person using both laptop and smartphone

The death of a child from an infectious disease is shocking and heartbreaking in equal measure. It’s thankfully so rare nowadays that when it occurs, and the event is local, it understandably causes panic. Over the past week, with the reported tragic death of Stella-Lily McCorkindale following a spike in Strep A infections locally and other child deaths across the UK (there have been an estimated 16 deaths to date), we went straight to panic mode. The pressure on out-of-hours …

Return of the Psychedelics…

Terry Maguire on December 3, 2022, 9:16 am | Readers 1442

entrance signage

When I met Albert Hoffman in Basle in the late 1970s I had no idea who he was. At a pharmacy student conference, he was the main speaker and I was immediately enthralled and captivated as he outlined his work on the discovery of LSD and his interest in the origins of man’s association with psychopharmacology. I have remained enthralled ever since. I read all I could find on the topic in the years following his lecture. Foolishly I wrote …

Vaping: We’re being fooled again….

Terry Maguire on November 26, 2022, 8:07 am | Readers 3809

grayscale photography of smoking man

Normally coal-mine owners don’t advise on climate change and Mcdonald’s or Mars don’t advise on healthy eating so why all of a sudden is Big Tobacco advising on health? Big Tobacco, which produces a product that has killed countless millions over the last 100 years and will kill countless millions in the coming years, is now positioning itself as a business committed to our health and well-being. You really need to applaud the nerve. There are now more than three …

Good Science, Bad Science. The ups and downs of ivermectin…

Terry Maguire on November 3, 2022, 2:36 pm | Readers 2183

multicolored stairs handrail

I first came face-to-face with Bill Campbell where he stood outside the old stone fish house at the top of the Mall in Ramelton. As he was a newcomer to the Lennon river bank I stopped to ask who Bill was and why he was there. To my shame, I had never heard of him. Since his 2015 Nobel Prize for medicine this 92-year-old son of Co. Donegal has become an international celebrity; the man who discovered ivermectin the drug …

What is behind the spike in excess deaths?

Terry Maguire on October 24, 2022, 10:39 am | Readers 3097

colored pencil lined up on top of white surface

Vaccine season again. Flu is likely to be a problem this winter and it is essential that all those eligible get their flu jab as soon as possible. Vaccination generally is an incredibly effective public health intervention. We were all convinced with the miracle that was the Covid19 vaccine programme but, as we jab patients for the 5th time with a vaccine that has had little modification since introduced in December 2020, perhaps we need a proper critical assessment of …

Heroin Assisted Treatment is coming but will it reduce drug harms?

Terry Maguire on September 5, 2022, 7:47 am | Readers 628

A person using spoon and syringe in consuming illegal substance

Increasingly it seems, politicians, media columnists and other opinion leaders support further liberalisation of recreational drug use. The Utopia they seek is to rid society of the drug pushers and the cartels. The mess drug use creates in any society is unpleasant to say the least and when things are at their worst it is then, in moral panic, we move; creatively, innovatively with much less resistance towards other ways to address the problem. The War on Drugs was lost …

Rishi Sunak and the Science and politics of Covid19…

Terry Maguire on August 30, 2022, 11:59 am | Readers 1932

text

The Spectator got great publicity for its interview last week with Rishi Sunak. The Spectator’s lockdown-sceptical editor Fraser Nelson sees his interview with Rishi as a coup being the first, in advance of a public inquiry into Covid19, to suggest that democracy wasn’t working well during Covid19 and that too few unelected scientists were alone in deciding and making policy. Superficially it all sounds as if Rishi was against lockdowns just unable to influence things even though he was the …

The depressing facts about depression treatment…

Terry Maguire on August 25, 2022, 11:59 am | Readers 1146

Shot made while filming for yesHEis project

Clinical depression is a very serious mental condition bringing untold misery to millions and, being strongly linked to suicide, depression, if not properly managed can be fatal and too often is. Yet we are not good it seems at managing clinical depression and it’s not really anyone’s fault rather it’s a failure in a systems approach that has attempted to standardise treatment, something generally good in itself, but in depression, sadly, maybe making things worse. The paradigm of current management …

With an update vaccine just licensed where are we now with Covid19?

Terry Maguire on August 17, 2022, 12:35 pm | Readers 1217

What now? | Follow on Instagram: @timmossholder

Back in February when England dared to introduce its “living with Covid19” policy – the first of the UK regions to do so – they were accused of risking the lives of thousands, perhaps millions. At that time, supposedly more sensible, less reckless, leaders in the other UK regions, including N. Ireland, said they would not play “covid-roulette” with the lives and wellbeing of their citizens. Most sensible people back then were livid with the English policy and rightly so …

When the NHS is found lacking, think “Vive La France!”

Terry Maguire on August 11, 2022, 11:59 am | Readers 2553

eiffel tower, love, hands

A constant burning pain in my chest woke me from a deep sleep around 5 a.m. I got up and walked to the bathroom, tripping over my suitcase and wakening my sleeping wife. Standing in the bathroom I hoped the pain might lessen but it stubbornly remained. I had had some chest pain and was breathless walking back from the restaurant the evening before. Biarritz has a steep incline up from its roaring surf beaches but the pain had eased …

We need a more holistic and societal view of healthcare and wellbeing…

Terry Maguire on August 8, 2022, 11:59 am | Readers 1226

white house under blue sky

Terry MaguireI am a pharmacist in Belfast.

Turkey Teeth and Harem Hair, Is medical tourism lengthening our waiting lists?

Terry Maguire on June 21, 2022, 12:00 pm | Readers 2529

Galata view from the Golden Horn

I had a short trip back to Istanbul this June. When I last visited in 2016 I had cause for concern. My concern was, it seems, ill-founded and poorly judged and my hopes that things would improve were granted. In 2016 there had been an attempted military coup and since then things generally have gotten worse; an economic crisis in Turkey created by the financial ignorance of its for-life president Tayyip Erdogan, the proximity to a tragic war in Ukraine …

Is addiction a disease?

Terry Maguire on June 5, 2022, 8:02 pm | Readers 1834

Alter ego

I have been, for many years and mostly from an academic point of view, fascinated by addiction. Perhaps my fascination was sharpened also by a subconscious worry that a genetic curse afflicting both my maternal and paternal families, going back many generations, might too be visited on me. A great grandfather on my mother’s side was banished to America in 1907 before he “drank the farm”. Both my father’s grandparents were drunks causing their children, including my grandfather, to be …

General Practice is making pharmacists’ lives very difficult and is potentially risking patient safety…

Terry Maguire on September 1, 2021, 7:22 am | Readers 14447

medicine, pills, blood pressure

GPs locked the surgery doors on 16th March 2020 and have, it seem, only resumed a basic service. Officially no one is saying so; it’s an uncomfortable truth and GPs are everywhere making the case they work harder than ever. Perhaps they do. When GP spokespersons appear outside practices to tell us how exhausted and burned out they are we might be hearing the truth or we could be witnessing spin at its apogee. Patient access remains constrained to the …

Partition had very negative side effects for this pharmacist…

Terry Maguire on August 15, 2021, 8:22 am | Readers 1599

pharmacy, antique, old

It was the best of times it was the worst of times……. Because of my obsession with great stories and always keen for a better one, I was enthralled by a BBC podcast “The Pharmacist” which charted the rise and fall of a respected Belfast pharmacist Matthew McDonald MPSI who practiced in Belfast in the first quarter of the 20th Century. From what history his great-great grandson, Australian Ian McBurney, could find it seems the political environment he lived and …

Christians should support the right to life by get vaccinated…

Terry Maguire on July 30, 2021, 7:22 am | Readers 1957

vaccine, coronavirus, medical

Perhaps it’s me, but I just couldn’t see where Jim Wells was coming from in a recent Belfast Telegraph article on his views of Covid vaccines. Here’s Jim as reported in the Tele which might give some sense of why I was confused. “It is not an anti-vaccine issue it is an ethical issue. I have had a large number of Christians who have said to me: ‘Look we are not opposed to vaccines and are not into these conspiracy …

American Big Pharma and the US opioid epidemic…

Terry Maguire on July 22, 2021, 1:09 pm | Readers 967

With such focus on Covid19, the US opioid pandemic has largely been ignored in the UK yet continues to destroy lives, devastate families and fracture communities and it worsened rather than lessened as Covid19 ravaged the US. The US Centre for Disease Control published provisional data recently showing that 2020 was a record year for drug overdose deaths with 93,331, up 29% from a year earlier. 500,000 deaths between 1999 and 2019 need to be explained so cities, states, counties …