In October 2019 we audited 200 UK patients treated for PANDAS over the pevious 12 months. During this audit we identified 100 patients that had good laboratory data that in turn allowed us to develop a clinical model with 10 different sub-groups. These sub-groups were based on the laboratory findings along with the clinical features […]

Many years ago, whilst working in a large teaching hospital, I enquired about the cost of office renovation work that was being done in the department that I was working in. The job involved splitting an office into two by putting in a partition wall and adding a door. I  was having some renovations done […]

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a treatment for certain types of mental illness including severe depression, schizophrenia, catatonia or mania. With this treatment a current of electricity is passed through the brain (under anaesthesia) causing a fit or seizure. Although this treatment has been approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for […]

My first experience of disaster relief work came after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. This killed more than 230,000 people from 14 countries after a 9.1 magnitude earthquake struck off the northern tip of Sumatra in Indonesia. The tsunami had the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima type atom bombs, causing the largest magnitude earthquake in […]

Over the years I have come across many stories of patients being let down by the poor mental health services in the UK. It is good to know that mental heath is now a top priority for the NHS because if we ignore it, the problems will be much worse. There are however still cases […]

PANDAS stands for “Paediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorder Associated with Streptococcus” whilst PANS stands for “Paediatric Neuropsychiatric Syndrome”. Many consider PANDAS to be a sub-set of PANS but is this correct or are we seeing two different pathologies? Indeed, we have to ask ourselves if instead of two distinct disease entities we are actually dealing with […]