“I’m not talking to you about Ebola or Zika virus but about a virus that everyone in this room has had and everyone of your children and probably all children in the world get in their first few years of life,” said Roger Glass, director of the Fogarty Institute, as he began his Wolfson Lecture […]
… NHS England has recognised that it should not fund homoeopathic remedies. First, consider the highly versatile IndoEuropean root, SM, meaning one or as one. In Latin, semel meant once only or once and for all, and simul had various meanings related to togetherness, in one company. A semelparous plant or animal reproduces only once […]
NHS trusts are still treating junior doctors as if they are expendable at a time when low morale should be a priority […]
Robert Boyle, Ireland’s most famous scientist, thought that the first aim of science was to develop practical applications to make life better. Earlier in his life he wrote in ecstatic terms about how science should glorify God. Boyle’s thinking on the functions of science underpinned the discussions at the Robert Boyle Summer School held in […]
Medical risk calculators should not be a step towards cookbook medicine, but help to tease out patients’ thoughts and worries and prejudices […]
As I discussed last week, the physicist Alan Sokal has pointed out that “ . . . well tested theories in the mature sciences are supported in general by a powerful web of interlocking evidence coming from a variety of sources; . . . the progress of science tends to link these theories into a […]
A friend is frightened by reading the headline “Chemotherapy may spread cancer and trigger more aggressive tumours, warn scientists” in the Daily Telegraph. A close friend of hers has had breast cancer successfully treated, but reading the headline, writes my friend, “fires me back to the very physical response I had [when her friend was […]
The IndoEuropean root WED, with its o-grade form WOD, meant to speak. Hence the Greek word for a song or lyric poem, an ode, ᾠδή, and derivatives such as odeon, epode, hymnody, melody and melodeon, monody, palinode, prosody, psalmody, rhapsody, threnody, comedy, and tragedy. A parody is “a literary composition modelled on and imitating another […]
Daniel Sokol provides an ethicist’s point of view on the latest hearing in the case of Charlie Gard […]
I enjoyed reading Victoria Twigg’s piece on the training needs of Generation Y recently. It is obvious we need to think much more about what attracts people into medicine and why people want to stay given that we’re in the middle of a recruitment crisis. Having a conversation about the future and what sustains us […]