Alan Carson

@A_MacLullich Should we have all these ‘champions’ and wellbeing practitioners etc or just use the money for extra staff numbers on wards? I generally think time rather than knowledge is the enemy of good care

Every hospital should have a delirium champion. We have stroke and sepsis champions - why not #delirium? #PatientSafety

@SanjayP30043502 @movedisorder @MDCP_Journal @PRDAssociation @FNDSociety @jonstoneneuro @amritafbd @kailashbhatia What a fabulous event

The foundation of the FNDS-AOS section during MDSICON 2026 at Amrita Hospital, FBD, Prof. K Bhatia delivered the first Mark Hallett memorial lecture on this occasion..@movedisorder @MDCP_Journal @PRDAssociation @FNDSociety @AlanCarson15 @jonstoneneuro @amritafbd @kailashbhatia

🧠Retired athletes with cognitive symptoms? Not all cases are neurodegeneration - many are treatable (sleep, mood, pain). Take a careful head injury history, but don’t overcall CTE. 🔗 pn.bmj.com/content/26/2/1… #Neurology #BrainInjury #NeuroTwitter #MedEd #FOAMed

Lyndon proposes that functional neurological disorder reflects disordered precision control in predictive coding. Arousal can transiently over-amplify confidence in maladaptive predictions so that they override sensory feedback, giving rise to symptoms. shorturl.at/FYqYG

There’s been a pattern lately of journalists asking HoL opponents of the #AssistedDyingBill if they are trying to amend or wreck it. Are they so opposed in principle that no version would be acceptable? It’s a reasonable question for many of us. Here is my answer. Short 🧵

Our new multilevel meta-analysis of 49 studies (N=21,755) shows that interoception & depression are reliably associated. Depression is most strongly associated with problems in: Trusting our body, Self-regulation, and Not worrying about bodily sensations #s0115" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

@opus__33 I m taking your tone as implying you think this is a mjor finding?? What do you think this shows? And in what way does it differ from studies in depression?

@AlanCarson15 how best to downplay these findings? onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…

@thbaketal Heartfelt congratulations to you Thomas

The moment I have been waiting for decades... Signing the professorial roll @ University of Edinburgh, originally a written oath not to teach anything contrary to the Holy Scriptures & the Church of Scotland. Nice to be in the company of Joseph Lister, though not David Hume...)

@DrPhilipMosley Yes fair point

@AlanCarson15 Indeed, but it’s important to lay out these “obvious“ conclusions in a scientific fashion, if the regulatory bodies are to take note (if they are indeed motivated to do so). In Australia, the RACGP report EIGHTY THOUSAND prescriptions are issued per month!

I m surprised this comes as a surprise to anyone

Private equity firms bought 500 hospitals. Death rates in their emergency rooms went up 13%. They fired 12% of the staff. Then they paid themselves billions in dividends. A Harvard study just confirmed what doctors already knew: people are dying so investors can hit quarterly targets. Exactly what happens. A PE firm buys a hospital using debt. The debt gets placed on the hospital's balance sheet, not the firm's. Now the hospital owes hundreds of millions it never borrowed. To service that debt, the hospital cuts costs. Costs mean nurses. The numbers from the Harvard/University of Chicago study are horrifying. After PE acquisition, emergency department salary spending dropped 18.2%. ICU salary spending dropped 15.9%. Hospital-wide employees were cut 11.6%. Emergency department deaths rose 13%, seven additional deaths per 10,000 visits. A separate study found patients undergoing surgery at PE-acquired hospitals had 17% higher odds of dying within 90 days. Steward Health Care, owned by Cerberus Capital, filed bankruptcy with $9 billion in debt after closing hospitals across Massachusetts. The CEO lived on a $40 million yacht while emergency rooms went dark. Eight hospitals serving 2 million people nearly disappeared because a PE fund extracted more cash than the system could survive. The private equity industry has poured over $1 trillion into healthcare. They operate a quarter of ERs nationwide. This isn't going away. The investing angle nobody talks about. Non-PE hospital operators like HCA Healthcare (HCA) and Tenet (THC) are the direct beneficiaries. Every time a PE hospital closes or deteriorates, patients flow to the nearest competitor. HCA has returned 1,200% since 2011. Patient volume from PE closures is a structural tailwind nobody's pricing in. Medical staffing firms (AMN Healthcare, Cross Country) charge premium rates specifically because PE hospitals cut staff. The staffing shortage IS the business model for these companies. The disruption play: outpatient surgical centers (SCA Health, now part of UnitedHealth) are pulling profitable procedures out of hospitals entirely. PE-owned hospitals lose their highest-margin surgeries to outpatient, and the death spiral accelerates. Pull up tradevision and monitor healthcare M&A alerts, hospital closure filings, and patient volume migration data. When a PE-owned hospital announces "restructuring," the patient volume shift to competitors like HCA starts within 30 days. That 30-day window is when the competitor's earnings revisions haven't updated yet. Free to try. (a private equity firm bought your local hospital. borrowed $500 million in the hospital's name. fired 12% of the nurses. emergency room deaths rose 13%. then they paid themselves dividends. nobody went to prison. they're currently buying another hospital.)

As an Edinburgh doctor working in elderly care medicine, I have written to my Members of the Scottish Parliament urging them to vote against the Assisted Dying Bill. I can understand why people say they want this choice. But my central concern is the risk to vulnerable older people: some would choose this not because of unbearable suffering, but because they feel they are a burden on family. I do not believe safeguards can solve that. The bill would then mean the state authorising medical participation in the deliberate ending of the lives of patients who, in some cases, do not actually want to die - but feel pressure from others, or feel a duty not to burden their families. It would be a moral disaster if even one person chose assisted dying for that reason.

🎙️Looking forward to the first Functional Neurological Disorder Society Asia Oceania Section Symposium this week. Check out the details below.

@TomChivers I agree with your premise but on onions i ve noted that homegrown onions with superior flavour make you cry far more than a tasteless onion- so maybe the crying bit correlates with something one wishes to keep - and you can always wear a mask and snorkel a la Diva

I immediately get annoyed by articles like this. "Some of the magic would be lost" if we use GM onions that don't make us cry? Why? If you prefer the old ones, use them. I find "we should keep things difficult on purpose" arguments incredibly frustrating ft.com/content/e09f40…

Congratulations Stuart James for winning volunteer of the year award from Glasgow Health Care and Social Partnership You’ve done an amazing job growing the Glasgow group with regular events and peer support bit.ly/4rERxCd

📢📢 New Study Alert📢📢 Necessity is truly the mother of invention. This article was borne out of necessity - pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41485277/ Faced with the service challenges of treating Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), I began exploring hypnosis as an additional tool. What started out of necessity has now become an important part of my therapeutic armamentarium. What struck me most was the patients’ feedback: • “Felt like a weight had been lifted off.” • “Life-changing.” • “Like there was a breakthrough.” • One patient walked into clinic with a stick, leaning on their son—and walked out without either. • Another said it “gave me hope that symptoms could improve.” In our NHS service evaluation 94% supported making hypnosis-based therapy routinely available in #NHS. Our DELPHI study on Hypnosis in FND is ongoing and soon we will be out with a detailed guideline. Sometimes innovation in medicine starts in the clinic, listening carefully to patients and being willing to try something different. #FND #Neurology #Hypnosis #NHS #MindBodyMedicine @BSCAH1 @RoySocMed @WilliamMcGeown @EdinPublishing @LSCICB @LancashireRKE @BBCLancashire @leponline @lancstelegraph @Uni_Lancashire @LancsHospitals @GrahamLiver @FNDSociety @NIRSlearn @FNDAction @KH118118 @jonstoneneuro @AlanCarson15 @SelmaAybek @TomPlender @fndfriends @FNDDimensions @ConnectFnd @FndRecovery @FndIreland @MattBurkeMD @DavidLewisPerez

Everyone can speak with some authority about the particulars of their own experiences (even as we recognize our state of self-ignorance and capacity for self-distortions), but if we are interested in *generalizable knowledge*, there is no substitute for a community of truth-seekers interested in meticulous observations, creative conjecture, open critique, and error correction. The idea that any single person has some unique access to truth is a fantasy.

@AskVirginMoney hi whats the point of a fraud line only open mon- fri 9-5pm?

😅