Gavin Francis

speaker

523 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 13 Jun

Gavin Francis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · Gavin Francis & Philippe Sands: The Unfragile Mind · 13 Jun 2026 podcast

Your blood pressure is a bit high, I'll say.

Whenever you come in here, do you want to go down that line?

Now... So...

But there are different things going on in physical medicine.

So for example, if I'm worried that somebody's got primary sclerosing cholangitis, I will do some blood tests and I'll do a liver scan and I'll find out if they've got primary sclerosing cholangitis.

That's a digital situation.

There's not a kind of mild version of that that I'm not picking up so much because I'll pick up the fact that their liver is struggling.

And I think it's a lot easier in a lot of physical medicine to make those distinctions or those arguments

But you're quite right that we are less certain in the mental health fields of where we should place these cutoffs.

And there is a wonderful interview on, there was a series about autism on Radio 4 a few months ago, which interviewed Francesca Happi at King's College London.

I don't know how many people heard it.

I'm trying to remember what the program was called.

Francesca Happi is one of the world's specialists on autistic spectrum disorder who was involved in the shift for the DSM-5 in taking away Asperger's syndrome before the scandal about Asperger came out and his Nazi collusion.

Taking Asperger's syndrome out and making autistic spectrum disorder a thing on its own.

And she is very, very firm on the idea that nature does not tell us with any of these problems, that is autism, that is not.

There's spectrums and grades everywhere.

And we decide as a culture, we get to decide because if we're wise about it, we should decide based on what's gonna be most helpful.

So we do that with blood pressure, where when we get to about 150 systolic, we say, do you know what?

You should take an ACE inhibitor because if we leave it like this, you're more likely to get a stroke in your 60s.

So we decide to label them as hypertensive and we give them drugs.

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