The Arab revolution was in our minds during our regular visit to the West Bank for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) child health teaching programme. Would there be an occupied square in Ramallah? Would the youth be on the streets calling for political change? Would the doctors be out bravely supporting […]
Category: Guest writers
Jonny Martell: The Wrong Answer
It had been an awkward pause. Professor Nick Craddock was addressing a lecture hall of students at the recent National Conference of Student Psychiatry Societies in Sheffield. Faced with numerous scenarios relating to mental health, we were to vote on whether a medical, psychological, or social approach best suited the predicament. For the scenario in […]
Cheryl Rofer: Radiation, radioactivity, and other terms
A commenter requested that I explain the difference between radiation and radioactivity. These two words are often used interchangeably by reporters, but they have different meanings. Confusing them is related to other misunderstandings. Radioactivity is the phenomenon of energy emission by unstable atoms. Radiation is what is emitted. More generally, Wikipedia defines radiation as: “a […]
Martin McShane: Patients as customers
Sometimes you get a sense of cultural change: someone tells you a story and simultaneously you think “that’s a good idea” and “times they are a changin’.” […]
David Kerr: Angry bird medicine
“I want this company to be bigger than Sanofi-Aventis in ten years time” was the opening line from a (successful) entrepreneur I met the other day. He might be right given the resources being poured into creating technology for the healthcare market here in Silicon Valley these days. The concept is straightforward – choose a […]
Cheryl Rofer: Is there a leak at Fukushima #3?
We simply don’t know. There are enough radionuclides in the outflow to the sea and in the water in the plant that it looks like a leak is possible, but there are too many other things that we don’t know. If there is a leak, it is not a big one. It’s not a big […]
Ryuki Kassai: Update from Fukushima – the second seven days of the disaster
First of all, I want to express my sincere gratitude to those who provided us with useful information, who kindly donated to us, who warmly encouraged us, who thoughtfully conveyed our messages abroad, and who continue to pray for Japan after the disaster. […]
Tiago Villanueva: Does medicine cater for a truly “global” career?
I was inspired during medical school by Mark Wilson’s “Medics’s guide to work and electives around the world,” which conveys the core idea that medicine can be a “passport to the world.” But at first glance, I feel you can’t really compare a conventional medical career with the often apparently more glamourous careers in business, […]
Cheryl Rofer: Radiation exposure standards – some hard judgments
Radioactive decay is inherently probabilistic. It’s not possible to point at a particular unstable atom and predict when it will decay. Further, some types of unstable atoms have more than one path for decay; it’s also not possible to predict the path of a single atom. The behaviour of large numbers of atoms, however, is […]
David Kerr: Deus ex machina
Forget complementary therapies, the big question is can engineering succeed where traditional medicine has failed? Anyone following the online technology bible “TechCrunch” might be persuaded by this idea. Here in the US and on the West Coast in particular, the belief is growing that the combination of money and mathematical and engineering brilliance (and also […]