It wasn’t until the last couple of weeks that I began to have terrible, panic-stricken nightmares about my dreadful communication skills. I wake in a trembling state, sweating because I can’t remember how to ask my patient ‘Does the pain radiate anywhere else? Does it come and go? Is it sharp, stabbing pain?’ In my […]
Category: Guest writers
Annabel Bentley: Pregnancy and swine flu: facemasks and self imprisonment?
If you’re pregnant lock yourself in the house, shut the curtains and wear a facemask if you so much as put your nose outside the door… has advice to pregnant women finally gone too far? Or, given that at least six healthy women in their second and third trimesters of pregnancy are reported to be in […]
Miriam Longmore: Iran puts MTAS in its place
Iran has done what the United Kingdom has not dared: it has devised a single exam to be taken by its 20,000 doctors who are competing for 1600 residency positions. The UK system seemed to me unfair, but then an Iranian doctor explained Iran’s system. Rather than the UK’s online medical training application service (MTAS), […]
Mark Jadav: My experience of catching swine flu
After reading my colleagues’ comments on the discussion fora of the harmfulness of playing our ace too soon, I bear the shame of being one of those low-risk (fairly) fit, (relatively) young people with a mild self-limiting viral illness who is consuming the precious stocks of Tamiflu and probably helping develop the resistant strains which […]
Ohad and Michal Oren: Cordon Sanitaire hospital; a humanitarian road map
The corridors of the hospital were packed with worried expressions. Individuals were hysterically clarifying the status of their relatives following a vicious violent eruption between Arabs and Jews at the outskirts of an Israeli settlement. […]
Vidhya Alakeson on the CLASS Act
As disability and aging advocacy groups continue to wait for the publication of the UK Government’s social care green paper, advocates on the other side of the Atlantic have been celebrating Obama’s show of support for the inclusion of social care reform as part of healthcare reform. Social care, or long term care as it […]
Julian Sheather is anti anti-psychiatry
In my early twenties I was felled by a bout of mental illness. It started with a panic attack. I was standing on the station at Leamington Spa waiting for a train and shivering slightly in the early autumnal chill when, without warning, a paralysing wave of fear broke over me. The terror that swept […]
Phil Hilton on men’s health
So inevitably as a middle-aged family man with a home in the suburbs of North London I meet health professionals over dinner. ‘This is Peter, he’s a consultant anaesthetist…’ my host will say and I translate as ‘This is Peter he’s far more interesting than you and will hold court for the rest of the […]
Olivia Roberts: “Lies, damn lies, and statistics”
The recently released World Health Organisation statistics on progress to meeting the health-related Millennium Development Goals reveal little progress in some areas. But closer analysis reveals some huge achievements and underlines the need for greater evaluation of what works and what doesn’t, rather than cutting development aid. […]
Vidhya Alakeson on affordable health choices in the US
An audible gasp went around Washington last week when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its first estimate of the cost of healthcare reform: $1 trillion. The cost seemed all the more eye watering given that it would only cut the numbers of uninsured Americans by 16 million or around a third of the total […]