Hello, I'm Greg Jenna and good news, Your Dead to Me is back for a new series. Here we go. Yes, we'll explore Emperor Nero's notorious reign with Professor Marybeard and Patton Oswald. I would not want my daughter having the remote control, not alone an empire. We'll dissect the decadent life of Philippe Duke-Dor-Leon with Tom Allen. I've often tried to pretend I'm an aristocrat and being very quickly knocked down. And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Mosniak and Rihalina. I'm excited. You're dead to me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Dr Mark Porter and thank you for downloading this edition of Inside Health.

I hope you enjoy it.

Coming up today, blood clots, we have an exclusive interview with a leading expert concerned that tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people in NHS hospitals

are being given blood-thining drugs they don't need.

Might you be one of them?

Kidney stones.

I talked to one of the specialists involved

in a trial into a new tablet-based approach to relieving what's widely regarded as the most

painful condition in medicine. And drug driving. As of March next year, driving under the

influence of drugs, including some commonly prescribed medicines, will be treated by the courts

in the same way as alcohol. I'll be finding out what that's actually going to mean for drivers.

But first, new research suggesting that doctors have been getting it wrong when it comes to

treating bad backs. The largest trial to date of paracetamol for back pain has caused quite a stir after suggesting

that Britain's most popular painkiller doesn't help. Esther Williamson is a research fellow at the University

of Oxford. This research was looking at the use of paracetamol for patients who presented to their

GP or I think also physios and chiropractors with an acute episode of low back pain.

And they essentially evaluated the use of paracetamol in this patient group because paracetamol is

the first drug of choice in all the international guidelines for the management of acute or a

recent onset of low back pain. And they found that whether you took paracetamol regularly

or as you needed it, it was no better than just taking a placebo or a dummy pill. And that it didn't help people to recover better and it didn't impact their pain or their disability levels. Basically, it didn't work. Exactly. So how did it get into the guidelines in the first place? What one would like to think that they were evidence-based? Is this the first time someone's actually looked at this? No, it's not the first time it's been looked at, but certainly the studies to date have been a lot smaller than this. So that's really one of the strengths of this research is that it's a really large study with 1,600 patients so that we can be confident in the findings. And I think the sort of total some of participants who'd been in previous research was only about half that number.

So actually the previous studies weren't as good quality.

But, you know, when guidelines are made, people need to make decisions on the best available evidence.

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