It’s the conference season and I seem to have ended up talking a lot with doctors about multimorbidity and polypharmacy. There’s pretty much universal agreement that there is too much medicine. I hear tales of wholesale crossing out of drugs from lists of medicines and how much better everyone is………and I do an “Oh really?” […]
Category: Columnists
William Cayley: Continuity over efficiency
It has become fairly clearly established that a strong primary care system is associated with better overall health for a society and a more equitable distribution of health in the population. A recent modeling study in the Annals of Family Medicine, which evaluated the “primary care paradox” (lower levels of evidence based care for individual diseases, […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Red fire
The Indo-European root ATR, which gave the Old English word atter, listed in the dictionary called the Epinal glossary, was not the only one that connoted fire. The word fire itself comes from PEUOR, from which we also get pyre, a pile of wood or any other combustible material on which to incinerate a dead body. […]
Richard Smith: How public health moralists are promoting harm from tobacco and helping the tobacco industry
David Sweanor, a Canadian lawyer who has many times successfully sued the tobacco industry, believes that those who instinctively react against e-cigarettes on moral grounds are making a bad mistake. We all, he says, have the fast form of thinking that is often morally driven, but when it comes to ways of reducing harm from […]
The BMJ Today: China, philanthropy, statistics, Minerva, and what your patient is thinking
• In his acclaimed weekly blog, Richard Lehman highlights a cluster of articles on healthcare in China. Acute kidney injury seems to be an emerging problem in China as many traditional herbal products may contain nephrotoxic plant substances, with more than 70% of patients giving a history of possible toxic drug ingestion. • Peter Sandercock, featured in the […]
Richard Smith: How global health can help the NHS
Africa has 25% of the global health burden and 2% of the health workforce. In contrast, North America has 2% of the health burden but 25% of the health workforce. This is the inverse care law (those who need healthcare the most get the least) on a gargantuan scale. And now the US is trying […]
Desmond O’Neill: Welcoming the new ageing in a global context
Expenditure in older populations is an investment, not a cost, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) With relatively little fanfare, the World Report on Ageing and Health—one of the most important WHO documents in recent years—was launched in New York to coincide with the UN International Day of Older Persons on 1 October. It represents a […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Black fire, spiders, and dogs
Most of the dozen words with medical connections that I found in the Old English dictionary called the Epinal glossary are obsolete, with modern equivalents. For example, átr or atter. “Atter”, meaning poison, gall, or, figuratively, bitterness, is not documented later than the 16th century, although it lived on, at least until the late 19th […]
Richard Smith: Memory—the view from the humanities
To a neuroscientist, said Hugo Spiers, a psychologist from UCL chairing a meeting at LSE last week, memory is just a physical and chemical arrangement of synapses. That’s a supremely reductionist view, the view of a NeuroNazi, said Sebastian Groes, a professor of literature from Roehampton University. Although chaired by the neuroscientist, it was the […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Adam’s navel
Zeus one day, having nothing better to do, released two eagles from the easternmost and westernmost edges of the world. Flying at the same speed, they met over Delphi, where the god dropped a stone and proclaimed it the centre of the earth or omphalos. Some have suggested that the stone was hollow and that […]