I have a good memory. Actually I’m being modest. I have an amazing memory, according to friends and family. 29 June 1974. A Saturday. I was eight. We went on holiday to Hopton-on-Sea. 1 September 1977, a Thursday. My first day at secondary school. There was a girl in my class called Sarah Lowe. She […]
Category: Editors at large
Juliet Dobson: Open journalism and social media
The Guardian is well known for being at the forefront of journalism and for pushing forward ever more innovative ways of covering the news. A talk at King’s Place on Friday 14 September looked at how journalism is changing and how social media, particularly Twitter, are changing the way news is reported and read. The […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Top ten sports medicine publications in the last year
The top ten publications of the last year in sport and exercise medicine? It is inevitably, a personal choice and I selected these papers because they challenge, educate, and question current practice. Some papers—great papers—that didn’t quite make my top ten: Sudden deaths among competitors in big city marathons always prompt media soul searching. It […]
Elizabeth Loder: Why can’t a headache clinic be more like a Cheesecake Factory restaurant?
I hate to think of myself as prejudiced, but a night out at a Cheesecake Factory chain restaurant is not my idea of fine dining. I’ll go there if I have to, of course, and in the end I did. Once a month, the doctors from the Graham Headache Center (where I work when not […]
Tessa Richards: Forget fashion—go for value
How much of the care patients receive is determined by their doctor’s decision to provide it as opposed to their need and preference for it? And how much money might be saved if investigations and treatments of limited or no value to patients were stopped? These questions were debated at two recent meetings on practice […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Mental rehearsal in medicine
Let’s try a few mental exercises. Can you tell me how many windows you would see if you stood at the front of your house, do the first three notes of three blind mice go up or down, or can you throw a tennis ball up in the air and catch it—in your mind? Not […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Santa Claus and Lance Armstrong
Santa Claus and Lance Armstrong. From the moment you stop believing—it’s never quite the same. After ten years of outrunning his accusers, Armstrong says he is not going to fight a United States Anti Doping Agency case that claims he used performance enhancing drugs and implicated him in systematic doping of his tour winning teams. […]
Tessa Richards: Personal information empowers and its shift to the people makes sense
Given that health is our most precious commodity it is odd that many of us know so little about it. Part of the reason is that we are not used to seeing and thinking about our own health information, for most us don’t get much of it. But things are changing. The NHS has pledged […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Some Olympic reflections
It’s the smile that gives it away. The Olympic smile. Couch potatoes, academic nerds, fashionistas, computer geeks, and sporty types united. All bewitched. With life on hold for the last two weeks, its now back to the real world, but almost everyone one seems touched by a little bit of Olympic magic. So, what about […]
Richard Hurley: Extreme pornography and how doctors became the arbiters of decency
This week, the defendant in the latest in a spate of obscenity trials in the UK was found not guilty on all counts (see links to other recent cases in The Daily Telegraph and Guardian newspapers). Summing up, Judge Nicholas Price QC asked the jury to focus on the testimony of medical experts in reaching its verdict. The prior Labour […]