Fake news is in the news. So what about fake illnesses? When Richard Asher described “a common syndrome, which most doctors have seen, but about which little has been written”, he called it Munchausen’s syndrome, because “the persons affected have always travelled widely; and their stories, like those attributed to [the famous Baron von Munchausen], […]
Reducing health inequalities, even in affluent areas, needs to be a priority for government and society, say Sian Griffiths and colleagues […]
President Donald Trump touched a raw nerve with the executive order to ban, temporarily, visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Amid the wide global outcry, there were also calls from international clinicians and academics, including Nobel laureates, to boycott medical meetings in America. Yet at the same time, health professionals here in the US and elsewhere appear […]
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature article provides a summary. When I visited Dumfries and Galloway in 1999, information technology was described as “a black hole.” The hospital didn’t have electronic […]
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature article provides a summary. When I first visited Dumfries in 1980 the Crichton Royal, a psychiatric hospital, had extensive grounds and multiple buildings, including a […]
Last week I discussed the origins of words to do with snakes, such as serpent and sepsis, derived from the IndoEuropean root SERP, meaning to creep or crawl. However, that wasn’t the only such root; SNEG was another. And while SERP led to Greek and Latin words, SNEG led to Teutonic ones, such as snail, […]
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature article provides a summary. It is never going to be easy to provide health services in a small town that is 73 miles by a […]
How should a European clinical academic react to the fact that the US election appears to have sent a racist, misogynist, climate change denier to the White House? One response, arising in the context of President Trump’s ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries entering the US, has been a call to boycott US […]
Although Valentine’s Day is often criticised as a cynical creation of florists and the greeting cards industry, it is a useful focal point for considering love and sexuality as elements of human wellbeing that often escape attention in healthcare. This neglect is most marked for later life, when popular discourse on late life romance is […]
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature article provides a summary. Annan is the third biggest town in Dumfries and Galloway, in the East of the Region, and so the least remote. […]