Collusion, illusion, or delusion?

Fending Off Death 1 by wiebkefesch on DeviantArt Doctors are – in the main – trained to prevent death.  Modern medicine has made huge advances, and life expectancies continue to rise.  However, there remains only one certainty in this life – that we are all going to die. Patients in the last year of life […]

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Turning over a new leaf

  The PMJ blog has been running for 2 and a half years, and in that time I have looked at many aspects of medical practice and education that have been thrown up by papers published in the PMJ. As time has gone on, we have had several submissions to the journal which seem to fit […]

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Hidden in plain sight.

  Patients do not come with diagnoses attached to their foreheads.  If only they did,  huge numbers of hospital visits and admissions could be avoided. To overcome the ever increasing number of potential diagnoses, and the rising tide of illness encountered by our ageing populations, we rely ever more heavily on investigations to guide us […]

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Look not for the fleck in your brother’s eye, but the gorilla in your own…

Teaching for medical graduates approaching clinical exams such as the MRCP PACES exam is an anxious time.  One is expected to ‘perform’ under pressure, wary of the need to elicit signs leading to potentially outlandish diagnoses.  The breadth of knowledge and skills required to confidently identify CMV retinitis at one station, followed by a complicated […]

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Three pipe chest pain…

Medicine is no longer quite so full of time to ponder as it once seems to have been.  Rumination and consideration have taken a back seat to efficiency.  Protocols and pathways seem to be the order of the day, and once a patient is on a pathway, it can be very difficult to get them […]

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The beauty of the written word?

Of the essential skills for doctors, writing has to be up there as one of the most important.  Doctors writing has been the butt of many jokes ove the years – justifiably, and written prescriptions remain a significant source of error in hospitals up and down the land. The medical notes are another area where […]

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It’s good to talk…

When I think about my work on the acute medical unit, or my clinics, it is almost mind boggling, the number of interactions I have with other humans – trainees, consultant colleagues, radiographers, radiologists, professionals from other hospitals, biochemists, nurses, physios, therapists, and of course – patients.  As Atul Gawande points out in this splendid […]

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#SoMe and #MedEd – don’t forget to head for the bed

Medical education is a major concern of the Postgraduate Medical Journal.  Indeed the origins of the journal are in the need to provide medical graduates with a source of education after graduation that would keep them in touch with the goings on in the major centres of medical progress.  A paper in the current issue […]

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What’s important to you?

Patient centred, patient focused, patient oriented, co-design, co-production, co-creation, and so on… The medical world is abuzz with the desire to make patients the central focus of all of our efforts. It is almost so blindingly obvious that patients should be at the centre of everything that we do that very often clinicians feel somewhat […]

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Exercise in older adults – time for a New Year’s Resolution?

Exercise is good for you – but then we sort of know that already – The Earl of Derby had it right back in 1873 pointing out that ‘Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.’   Take a look at this brilliant […]

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