This morning I read the line “The gift of forgetting” in a poem by Wisława Szymborska. Immediately I asked myself if it is a gift to forget, and quickly—and somewhat counterintuitively—decided it was. Something else that I’d read this morning in a book by a neurosurgeon supported the conclusion. Henry Marsh in his uncomfortably honest […]
Regardless of what happens with Brexit negotiations, there are now three fundamental threats to the NHS and health policy in the UK, says Martin McKee […]
When I read the paragraph that follows I thought how it accurately sums up how many people feel in 2017 and explains the political upheavals of 2016. But it was said in 1972 when Jimmy Reid, a leader of Clydeside shipworkers, was elected rector of Glasgow University. Some, with understandable excess, have called it the […]
Current working models and poorly designed working environments need to be improved […]
The IndoEuropean root KWEL, which implied turning in different ways, has turned into many different linguistic manifestations. Through the Greek κύκλος, a circle, we get cycle, cyclone, and encyclopaedia. A consonantal shift gives τέλος, that which turns out, the completion of a cycle, anything final, whence teleology, teleoanalysis, and entelechy, the Aristotelian realisation of potentiality. The […]
During my morning drive recently, a radio story on the “productivity paradox” caught my attention. Briefly put, the story explored economists’ concerns that despite ongoing technological development, our actual work productivity (ie. value produced per hour worked) on a global scale has stagnated. We seem to be coming up with fancier and more developed ways to […]
My friend Nicholas Christakis recently tweeted: “Critique of evidence based medicine on grounds that it is exclusionary and ‘colonized’” providing a link to the critical article. He added an NB to me, and the result was that I was a witness to a Twitter squall (not quite a storm). Most of the tweeters were appalled by […]
What we are witnessing is war without restraint. But what do we do to stop it? […]
The chaos that has resulted from the result of the general election has important implications for health, says Martin McKee […]
The term “monoclonal” is over 100 years old, having been first recorded, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in a 1914 paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, by W E Agar, in which “polyclonal” was also first recorded. “Clone” and “clonal” are even older, dating from 1904. “Monoclonal” is derived from two […]