What links blogs to logs (wooden ones)? The Sailor’s Word Book: An Alphabetical Digest of Nautical Terms (1867), compiled by Admiral W[illiam] H[enry] Smyth and revised for publication by Vice Admiral Sir E[dward] Belcher, gives the answer: “LOG-BOARD. Two boards shutting together like a book, and divided into several columns, in which to record, through […]
Category: Columnists
The BMJ Today: How much do you know about mind altering drugs?
Martin Mckee, a prominent public health academic and a prolific writer for The BMJ, is featured this week in the always entertaining BMJ Confidential. As professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, his work has had worldwide impact. He is constantly travelling around the world because of his work, […]
Richard Smith: Loneliness—the “disease” that medicine has promoted but cannot help
According to the Canadian psychologist Ami Rokach who has long studied it, “acute loneliness is a terrorising pain, an agonising and frightening experience that leaves a person vulnerable, shaken, and often wounded.” In our world of anomie and divorce and where medicine has extended life beyond usefulness, loneliness is one of the main causes of […]
Desmond O’Neill: Older drivers and medical fitness to drive
Does life really imitate art, or is it the other way round? Listening to an exhilarating live performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra of Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, the droll tone poem about a famous trickster by Richard Strauss, I was struck by the notion that this might be the first description of ADHD through music. […]
Richard Smith: Would you like to die at 75 or 150?
“Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind,” said W B Yeats, so, although more of a flippant than a serious mind, I return to death after my last pondering on the subject that spread literally across the globe. I’m asking whether it would be better to live to 75 […]
William Cayley: “Enjoy in struggling”
“Struggling is the meaning of life. Victory and defeat are in the hands of God, so one must enjoy in struggling.” The saying above the doorway caught my attention as I settled in at my friend’s home for a weekend visit. I was a medical student, rotating at a mission hospital in rural Africa, and […]
Sandra Lako: The impact of Ebola in Sierra Leone
Today is the 228th day of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. A year ago I would not have believed anyone who told me that I would be in the middle of an Ebola outbreak in January 2015. A confirmed Ebola case in West Africa never crossed my mind. Even in May of last year, […]
The BMJ Today: Getting to grips with research and research papers
The BMJ Today blogs this week are all written by research editors, who handle original research manuscripts from submission up to eventual acceptance (even though that only applies to a very small percentage of submitted papers). Many of our authors are practising doctors, as well as highly experienced researchers in top medical research centres who […]
David Oliver: Discharging patients from overcrowded hospitals—fewer “progress chasers” and more “doers” please
This year, urgent activity in English NHS hospitals has reportedly hit a record high. Officially reported “delayed transfers of care” (inpatients medically fit to leave, but awaiting community health and care services) have also peaked. These figures routinely underestimate the real number of people in beds whose needs no longer require the full facilities of the […]
The death debate: a response from Richard Smith
I’m sorry that I’ve upset many people who have cancer or who have had a bad experience of somebody dying of cancer [see previous blog]. That wasn’t my intention. I was writing for The BMJ and so primarily for doctors. My main intention was to urge people to think much more about death and dying […]