The rhetoric of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the medical royal colleges, and medical researchers is that the future of healthcare is bright. Personalised medicine is coming; diseases that are currently incurable will be cured; life expectancy will increase; big data will bring untold benefits; and the quality of care will steadily improve. But through […]
Dinesh Seemakurty’s idea for a business came to him as he sat by his grandfather’s hospital bed in Kakinada, India. His grandfather had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and had been treated initially in the intensive care unit. He’d been discharged, which Seemakurty and his family interpreted as a good sign, but during the night his […]
The recognition of a new clinical entity, “chronic breathlessness syndrome” has been proposed, following an international Delphi process to achieve an expert consensus.1 Why does this matter and is it a useful idea? Breathlessness on exertion is a feature of a normal healthy life, but undue breathlessness is also a common symptom, affecting around 10% […]
To recap, for many years medicine has been regarded as both an art and a science. Is it? As we have already seen, the word “art” has its origin in the IndoEuropean root AR, to join or fit together. In contrast, the word “science” comes from the root SEK, or in an extended form SKEI, […]
Matt Morgan discusses the gradual increase in volume of mental workload that doctors have to deal with […]
Funders and regulators have the principal power to implement most of the solutions needed to reduce research waste […]
By Richard Smith and David Pencheon In 2007 Fiona Godlee, editor of The BMJ and somebody who has been concerned about the environment for at least 30 years, was outed as a “climate criminal” for flying too much. We too are concerned about the environment, but we both have cars, washing machines, dishwashers, and tumble […]
The IndoEuropean root from which the word “science” eventually descends is SEK, or in an extended form SKEI, meaning to cut. In Greek σχίζειν meant to split or rend, giving us schism, schist, schizoid, and schizophrenia. The hypothetical Germanic derivative skaith gave the word sheath, which was regarded as a split stick, so fashioned as […]
Cyril Chantler—paediatric nephrologist, medical school dean, NHS manager, former chair of Great Ormond Street, and much else—is quite possibly the wisest man in the NHS. So we should play close attention to his plan—set out in one and a half pages—for saving the NHS. (Chantler submitted a longer version to the House of Lords report […]
Ancient physicians considered medicine to be an art, typified by an aphorism of Hippocrates: Plato repeatedly referred to medicine as an art, for example in the Gorgias and the Symposium, as did Roman writers, such as Cicero, Ovid, and Celsus. However, the idea that medicine was also a science gradually emerged. Galen, for example, wrote […]