Statins and Nocebo, Vit D & Covid, new therapies for Covid
Inside Health
BBC
4.4 • 575 Ratings
🗓️ 12 January 2021
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Should you take vitamin D pills to ward off coronavirus? Our own Dr Margaret McCartney has been sifting through the evidence in search of answers. Also clinical trials expert Dr David Collier of Queen Mary University London tells us about new treatments for Covid-19 that are in the pipeline. And is the mysterious “nocebo effect” causing most of the side-effects from statins? Janice Richardson from Hebden Bridge shares her experience on the pills and we chat to researcher and Dr James Howard of Imperial College and cardiologist Dr Rohin Francis.
Presenter: James Gallagher Producer: Geraldine Fitzgerald
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | 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 |
| 0:21.7 | quickly knocked down. And there'll be so much more with comedians like Olga Koch, Mike Mosniak and Rihalina. |
| 0:27.0 | I'm excited. You're dead to me. The comedy podcast that takes history seriously. Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.5 | BBC Sounds Music, radio podcasts. Hello and welcome to the Inside Health podcast. I'm James Galaher. |
| 0:42.9 | And I've got something weird and quite frankly mysterious to talk about this week. |
| 0:49.2 | It's the idea that one of the most widely used drugs in the country may be causing such severe |
| 0:55.5 | side effects, not because of the drug itself, but just because we expect it to, we believe |
| 1:00.6 | it's going to cause really bad symptoms. It's quite frankly mind-blowing. But first of all, |
| 1:07.1 | I did make a promise last week that we were going to tackle some of the confusion |
| 1:11.0 | around COVID, and we're going to start with vitamin D because it's the thing we've been |
| 1:15.4 | talking about all week in the office. It's been touted as a cure-all, pretty much pick any |
| 1:20.9 | disease, someone will mention vitamin D, and the same has been true for COVID, but is there |
| 1:25.5 | anything in there at all, anything we should take home? |
| 1:28.3 | Well, we set our resident GP Margaret McCartney loose on the evidence to see what she could find and report back. |
| 1:35.8 | Margaret, welcome back. |
| 1:36.8 | Thank you for having me again, James. |
| 1:38.0 | I feel slightly mean today because I'm going to make someone living in Scotland in winter talk about vitamin D, |
| 1:46.5 | the sunshine. Yes, there are several months of the year when I go to work in the dark and I come |
| 1:51.0 | home in the dark. There's not a lot of light in Scotland this time of year and of course it gets |
| 1:55.2 | worse as you go further north. So yes, vitamin D is a bit of a hot topic when it comes to COVID-19 as well. So what do we |
| 2:03.2 | know and what don't we know? Because you don't have to go far to find someone talking about |
| 2:07.3 | vitamin D's potential to help you, you know, survive COVID. And to be honest with you, the literature |
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