What links grief, the early suffragette movement, and evolution? All are themes in books shortlisted for this year’s Wellcome Book Prize, announced by writer Bill Bryson at Wellcome Collection’s shiny new Reading Room in London earlier this week. The Wellcome Book Prize celebrates “books for the incurably curious” that explore issues of medicine and, as […]
Category: Editors at large
David Payne: How to be an academic social media star
Melissa Terras is the most downloaded academic in her faculty at UCL, and attributes her success to social media. Eight years ago Terras (pictured below), director of UCL’s Centre for Digital Humanities, was supervising a PhD student’s research into the history of blogging. She started her own blog in response to this, but it was […]
Tessa Richards: Big data—jam tomorrow
Rest easy in your beds overworked doctors and ailing patients, for tomorrow, all will be well. Big data will revolutionise healthcare. Processes in creaky health systems will be streamlined, patients empowered, and outcomes improved. Upbeat messages permeated the air at the UK e-health meeting at Olympia in London this week (ukehealthweek.com). E-health is more a […]
Sally Carter: Dolls’ houses, index cards, and standing inside a mortuary fridge
I often try and whizz round an exhibition during a lunch hour, but the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition on forensics is not one to rush. My visit was how I imagine it must be to work on a crime scene. You take in a lot of detailed and gripping information from different places, and then […]
Elizabeth Loder on the proliferation of medical research reporting guidelines: A checklist too far?
If reporting guidelines and checklists are the answer, what is the problem? That’s easy: their development was motivated by the realization that critical information was vague, missing, or misreported in an unacceptably high proportion of published medical research papers. Reporting guidelines take aim at this problem by specifying a minimum set of items that should […]
The BMJ Today: Salty sputum and self dialysis for Swedes
Research What are the long term effects of multidisciplinary biopsychosocial rehabilitation for patients with chronic low back pain? News • Chicago born Frances Glessner Lee (pictured), the “mother of CSI” and dollhouse-style dioramas, features in “Forensics: the anatomy of crime” exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London. • The 2015 version of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans […]
The BMJ Today: Readmission rates and a second look at torture
Readmission rates to hospitals are often used as markers for quality of care, although a consistent link between readmissions and quality has not been established. Leora I Horwitz and colleagues conducted a retrospective cross-sectional study from 4651 US acute care hospitals. They found that standardised readmission rates are lowest in the lowest volume hospitals. This is highly […]
The BMJ Today: Rabies, stroke, and screening
Rabies is a neglected tropical disease that predominantly affects the most vulnerable humans—children living in the most disadvantaged areas of the poorest countries. Many countries have successfully reduced the impact of the disease by tackling the gap between public and animal health through a concerted “one health” approach. […]
The BMJ Today: Raising funds for the fight against Ebola
After a hiatus of more than 18 months, blogger Sandra Lako provides an update from Sierra Leone, where she has been working for the past nine years, improving access to and quality of healthcare for women and children. “A year ago I would not have believed anyone who told me that I would be in […]
The BMJ Today: Working all hours and alcohol use
You would have thought that working long hours would leave people with little time left for an after work drink, but according to this meta-analysis by Virtanen and colleagues, people who have long working hours are at higher risk of alcohol use. Editorialist Cassandra A Okechukwu says that the findings of this study add impetus to further […]