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 […]
Tag: diagnosis
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 […]
Aiming for ‘normal’
Normal ranges are papered to the door of almost every clinical medical student’s lavatory door or fridge, inside the cover of every notebook in the wards – accompanying every result on the EHR – everywhere we are told confidently what normal is. But as this paper studying the laboratory findings of several thousand inpatients at a […]
Observe, record, tabulate, communicate…
When I was knee high to a grasshopper, I had a teacher that used to be incredibly irritating. Instead of getting away with a lucky guess, or a grasp at a faded memory, we had to be able to ‘show our workings.’ This meant we had to understand where our answers came from, from first […]
#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 […]
Can do, or should do?
Modern medicine is advancing at an eye-watering pace, and treatments are being utilised for ever-widening patient groups, who might not have been offered similar therapies even a few short years ago. In this context, it is increasingly important to know that these remarkably effective, expensive, and life-changing treatments are aligned with the wishes of our […]