Carillion, an outsourcing company that had become a major provider of support services in the NHS and other sectors of the economy has joined a select group of once great corporate players, including Enron, Lehman Brothers, Northern Rock, and Royal Bank of Scotland. All, in their times, fell into the category considered “too big to […]
A young doctor friend sends me a link to a piece he has written in the Guardian newspaper. I praise the simplicity and clarity of the language and suggest that next time he sends a piece to an academic journal he uses the same language. “But will the editors accept it?” he asks me. I’d […]
As I noted last week, “spuria”, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “spurious works, words, etc.”, was first recorded in 1918. The word appeared in Rupert Brooke: a Memoir by Sir Edward Marsh, who also edited Brooke’s Collected Poems in the same year (pictures). Commenting in a footnote on Brooke’s use of “your” […]
What would be required if we were seriously to contemplate the replacement of the chest x ray with CT scanning in the acute setting? […]
There have been big changes in science publishing in the 25 years since the appearance of the internet, but at the same time science publishing is still dominated by journals, a 17th century invention. The tipping point when true transformation begins has long been predicted and may now be close. Why do I say this? […]
It is difficult to envisage a worse outcome for the United Kingdom than “no deal” Brexit—it would have serious implications for health […]
Medicine needs to make, adapt, and find its own strategies, instead of borrowing from other industries […]
My list of medical anniversaries in 2018 is restricted to those that are multiples of 50 years. Thus, I have not included, for example, the 40th anniversary of the first test tube baby, Louise Brown; nor the 40th anniversary of the poisoning, supposedly with ricin, of Georgi Markov; nor the 60th anniversary of Ian Donald’s […]
In 2011 the United Nations held a high level meeting on preventing and controlling non-communicable disease (NCD) and produced a declaration on what countries should do. In 2018 it will hold another meeting to review progress, and unless there is a dramatic acceleration the meeting is likely to conclude that progress has been poor, said […]
Although there is political hysteria about migrants in Europe, the health of migrants receives insufficient attention. That was the main message to emerge from Imperial College’s Institute of Global Health Innovation’s forum on migrant health in December. Definitions are a besetting problem in studying migrant health. A migrant is anybody who moves across borders away […]