Best Science Medicine Podcast – BS without the BS

Show notes

THE CASE
M is a hard-working clinician in primary care aiming for high professional standards; they passed all their exams at medical school and post grad training, and continue to engage in regular CPD. To their surprise, medicine in practice seems to get more and more difficult as time goes on. Many patients have vague symptoms, unlike any textbooks, the guidelines are complex and hard to remember, they hear a lot about complaints or being sued and some grumpy unsatisfied patients make M wonder what they are doing wrong. Now M gets anxious they may have missed something, going over their cases in their mind, rechecking their case notes, looking for errors. They find it hard to stop worrying about complaints or being sued; why did no one tell them that getting the right answers was so difficult? In this episode, Avril and James invite a couple of younger GPs, Sarah MacDermott and Joseph Rylands, to talk about what their concerns are around litigation. We go over the numbers around litigation and we discuss approaches as to how to reduce that risk, but also how to deal with what you should do if get a complaint. At the end we discuss many tips and suggestions around litigation that may help you, at least a little bit, be a more contented clinician.

In episode 599, James and Mike invite Roni Kraut to the podcast for the first time to talk about a common problem that has a simple answer. What route and/or duration of antifungals is needed when treating uncomplicated vulvovaginal candidiasis in non-pregnant women. Tune in to find out all the simple details.

Show Notes
Tools For Practice
A single dose for treating yeast infections: Is it really this simple?

MEME Conference 2025 Vancouver – May 9/10, 1025

In episode 598, James and Mike continue to talk with David Gardner about the issue of insomnia. We discuss his latest, very cool, Your Answers When Needing Sleep (YAWNS NB) randomized clinical trial. YAWNS was a pragmatic, open-label, minimum-contact, RCT where people with long-term use of benzodiazepines and current or past insomnia were randomly allocated to different mailed behavior change interventions or no intervention. They found that in people who got the intervention more of them stopped or reduced the dose of their benzodiazepines and more improved their sleep. Tune in for the numbers for this simple intervention.

Show Notes

The YAWNS NB trial

Booklets: order booklets via the Resource Centre

Sleepwell, a research and knowledge translation program based out of Dalhousie University in Halifax, includes tools, resources, and recommendations for patients, the public, and health care professionals.

Some features and resources to explore are:
Sleepwell stories (patient and health care professional video and written accounts)
Clinicians – short videos on how to use get what you need from the website for patient care, and CBT-I training options
Sleepwell recommends – vetted reviews and recommendations for self-help CBT-I programs
Sleeping pills – content to motivate and facilitate safely ending long-term use of sedatives
Tools – sleep diary, online sleep calculator (with guidance for time-in-bed restriction therapy), behaviour change tools (CBTi vs. Sleeping Pills)

Zopiclone’s residual effects on actual driving performance in a standardized test: a pooled analysis of age and sex effects in 4 placebo-controlled studies
Clin Ther 2014 Jan 1;36(1):141-50. doi: 10.1016/j.clinthera.2013.11.00