In each of the following pairs of generic drug names one is the International Nonproprietary Name (INN) and the other is not: • beclomethasone/beclometasone • betamethasone/betametasone • chlorthalidone/chlortalidone • ethacrynic acid/etacrynic acid • indomethacin/indometacin Before you read on, decide which you think is the INN in each case. […]
Category: Columnists
David Oliver: Minding our language around care for older people and why it matters
I love to plough through the newspapers, with radio or TV news on in the background. My enjoyment can be punctured by annoyances. Recurring candidates for this personal “room 101” are ageist language and attitudes. Comparing 2015 with my youth, I’ve seen a welcome sea change in the language deemed acceptable regarding race, sexuality, or […]
Richard Smith: Keeping the NHS alive
The NHS has to change radically if it is to survive. All those who study the NHS closely know that, but I’m not sure that all those who work in the NHS know it. And the necessity for radical change—as opposed to more money—features hardly at all in our depressingly shallow election. But how do […]
Richard Smith: Australians fire an editor of the MJA for the fourth time
The Australian Medical Publishing Company (AMPCo), a creature of the Australian Medical Association, has just fired another editor of the Medical Journal Australia; that’s at least four (and probably more) in my professional lifetime. Over the same period the Canadian Medical Association has got rid of two, and the American Medical Association one. The British […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Grimm’s law
In 1998, The BMJ—which had previously been able to publish only one third of all letters received, and then only weeks or months after the articles to which they referred—took advantage of the advent of electronic publishing to publish pretty much everything immediately on the web, which they likened to a garden. Letters were called […]
Julian Sheather: Shaping the ends of our lives
Very difficult to know how we will approach our death until we are in the shadow of it. Will we hold to the ideals we formed when we were healthy, or will fear, or pain, or desperate hope overturn them? There is an interesting blog touching on this theme over at the New York Times. […]
William Cayley: Are you depressed?
“Do you feel down, depressed, or hopeless? Are you bothered by little interest or pleasure in doing things?” Now that the practice I work for is part of an accountable care organization, one more measure on which our (supposed quality of) patient care is being assessed, is our screening for depression. While that sounds initially […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Nose-ography
While editing the forthcoming edition of Meyler’s Side Effects of Drugs: The International Encyclopedia of Adverse Drug Reactions and Interactions, I came across a suspected teratogenic effect of high dose oral contraceptives (no longer used)—multiple bony defects with pretibial dimples. Dimples are mentioned in many entries in Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), a comprehensive source […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Conjugation
A case of Vernet’s syndrome, unilateral paralysis of the 9th, 10th, and 11th cranial nerves, caused me to read up about the jugular foramen and tumours therein. The jugular foramen, a triangular structure at the base of the brain near the mastoid process, nearly long enough to be regarded as a canal, contains numerous important […]
William Cayley: Who are you?
“The Patient” is everywhere. He is in consult notes, she is in hospital admission notes, he is in letters, and she is even in my daily dictations and procedure notes. “The Patient” is that anonymous moniker that gets plopped, intentionally or not, into clinical documentation of our medical care. This struck me today as I […]