Last week I took part in a debate at the Cambridge Union on the motion “This house needs new drugs.” The motion was proposed by the chief executive of AstraZeneca, a global pharmaceutical company that is moving its global headquarters to Cambridge and emphasising science over marketing. The Cambridge Union is designed in part to […]
Matt Morgan and Peter Brindley encourage us to take a deep breath […]
Last week I discussed meldonium, which was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in January 2016 for use by sportsmen and women, because it supposedly increases blood flow and therefore exercise capacity. Meldonium is the International Nonproprietary Name (INN) of 3-(2,2,2-trimethyldiazaniumyl)propanoate, an analogue of the immediate precursor of carnitine, trimethylaminobutyrate (Figure 1). Meldonium is […]
There have been concerns about antibiotic resistance for decades. But concerns have grown in recent years as the problem continues to get worse. Various strategies have been used to address it—from medical education, to restricted formularies, to directly observed treatment. Strategies have targeted a variety of groups including doctors, students, allied healthcare professionals (such as […]
One of the successes of health workers concerned with climate change has been to get climate change framed as a health issue as well as an environmental issue […]
Meldonium is in the news again. It was banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in January 2016 for use by sportsmen and women, because it supposedly increases blood flow and therefore exercise capacity. A few months later, the tennis player Maria Sharapova was found to have taken it, reportedly to “combat a magnesium deficiency, […]
When I visited the clinical ethics department at Washington Hospital Center some years back, I was impressed by how acute ethical dilemmas, once resolved, led to presentations in the affected department to reflect on the problem and find ways to minimise its recurrence. These ways included imparting factual knowledge, whether medical, ethical, or legal, or […]
It is comparatively easy to find funding for the randomised trials that may or may not show the effectiveness of innovations, but much harder to fund scale-up […]
Matt Morgan and Peter Brindley have been studying human doctors in their native conference environment […]
“I switched over to vaping but someone told me they were just as bad as cigarettes so I went back to smoking again.” A depressing thing to hear in a COPD clinic, but unfortunately not that uncommon. Worryingly, the proportion of the population with the erroneous belief that vaping is as hazardous as, or more […]