Asthma, Visual snow, Confounding factors
Inside Health
BBC
4.4 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 15 March 2016
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why asthma is both over diagnosed and undertreated. Professor Mike Thomas and GP Dr Margaret McCartney discuss this apparent contradiction and look behind recent headlines that half a million children in the UK could be taking asthma medicines they don't need. A new study finds that putting doctors under pressure or being a difficult patient may backfire, inducing them to make diagnostic errors. With scarlet fever and measles in the news, Margaret McCartney gives a quick guide on the key symptoms as both diseases have a characteristic rash. A listener has emailed to ask about visual snow, a condition where your vision is like an untuned TV set. World expert, Professor Peter Goadsby explains the latest understanding of visual snow, and says that even 15 years ago it hadn't been universally accepted as a condition. Plus the first in the latest Inside Language series with Margaret and Dr Carl Heneghan of Oxford University. This week, they discuss confounding factors and why they matter to your health.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, you're about to listen to a BBC podcast, and I'm Ed Gamble, host of another BBC podcast, |
| 0:05.4 | The Traitors Uncloaked. But my show is available only on BBC Sounds, just like Ellis and John's |
| 0:10.6 | Saturday bonus episodes, the Pop Top Ten podcast with Scott Mills and Ryland, and comedy specials |
| 0:16.2 | from the likes of Harriet Kemsley, Susie Ruffel and Rommas Shranger Nathan. However, and maybe I'm biased, it's really all about the traitors uncloked. |
| 0:24.3 | So for a whole bunch of exclusive scoops and podcasts, listen only on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:29.5 | Welcome to this Inside Health podcast, which was first broadcast on 15th of March 2016. |
| 0:35.5 | Margaret McCartney, you're going to be talking about a number of things, |
| 0:38.5 | including measles and scarlet fever. I am. What all these rashes we're hearing about in the |
| 0:43.0 | news just now, how to tell them apart. I actually think it's quite difficult, and I'm going |
| 0:47.5 | to admit the use of textbooks features predominantly my day-to-day practice. Mark, you're sounding |
| 0:52.7 | a bit hoarse yourself. Yeah, well, I'm at the moment living proof that doctors get viruses too, but less about me. |
| 0:59.1 | Let's get to the podcast. Coming up today, pushy patients, why putting your doctor under pressure |
| 1:05.1 | may be bad for both of you. Visual snow. Imagine if your world look like the screen of an old out-of-tune TV. |
| 1:13.8 | We're looking at the picture that a young girl, 12-year-old, drew for us. She came in to see us |
| 1:18.4 | with their visual snow problem, and we're interested in her showing us what happened. So she's |
| 1:23.2 | drawn a house that's got nice windows in it with a brown tree with some greenery on it, |
| 1:28.0 | and she's drawn a whole lot of squiggles in black all over the sky and all over her visual |
| 1:35.1 | field. And you can see them almost moving about. And what she's showing us is that her vision, |
| 1:40.6 | while she can see things, is constantly disturbed. And our inside language series returns |
| 1:46.9 | to demystify the terms used by those publishing and reporting clinical trials. This week, |
| 1:52.5 | it's all about confounding factors. But first, asthma and recent headlines claiming that |
| 1:58.3 | half of all children diagnosed with a condition might not actually have it. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.