I seem to be at an age when every summer weekend involves a wedding. When it came to my own wedding this summer I had to face the dilemma of whether or not to change my surname. This has been a fairly hot topic amongst my friends, many of whom are doctors, and seems to […]
Category: Guest writers
Richard Smith: A ripping yarn of editorial misconduct
In what has been called the age of accountability, editors have continued to be as unaccountable as kings. But stories of editorial misconduct are growing, and another story, nothing less than a ripping yarn, has recently appeared in the Harvard Health Policy Review (2008; 9: 46-55.) The story is told by Donald Light and Rebecca […]
Julian Sheather on top-up payments
Every so often a story comes along that unexpectedly sheds light on a far more widely shared unease. Top-up payments is one of those stories. For many years we have lived, more or less happily, with a simultaneous headline commitment to an NHS that is free to all on the basis of need, an implicit […]
William Lee on Philip Nitschke
Dr Philip Nitschke, director of the Australian pro-euthanasia group EXIT International, has come to the UK to promote the launch of his ebook ‘The Peaceful Pill Handbook’ – a controversial guide to methods of suicide. The paper version has been banned in Australia and published in New Zealand with some pages blacked out. […]
Rob Siebers: Inadvertent duplicate publication
Duplicate or highly similar publications are unethical and unacceptable in the biomedical literature. Déjà Vu, a freely accessible database of highly similar and duplicate publications, is a valuable tool for journal editorial staff to identify whether a submitted article has previously been published and has the potential to be a powerful deterrent to this behaviour. […]
Tauseef Mehrali on the universal strategy
With the month of fasting behind me and afternoon blood sugar levels now soaring above 3mmol/l, I’m really quite getting into the swing of general practice. It’s the Russian roulette of the medical world. Your fate is simultaneously within and way beyond your control. After all, it was you that called that patient in during […]
Vidhya Alakeson on parity for US mental health patients
Buried in last week’s legislation to bail out Wall Street was a small but important victory for healthcare in America. At the same time as passing a $700 billion rescue package for the financial sector last Friday, the US House of Representatives also passed a bill on mental health parity. Rumour has it that parity […]
Harriet Adcock: Pharmacist bashing – it’s just not cricket
The bad press heaped on pharmacists this week no doubt raised a few smiles among BMJ readers. But doctors should remember that pharmacists are easy targets for consumer watchdog Which?, whose survey found that more than a third of pharmacies give unsatisfactory advice. […]
Pat Sidley on South Africa after Mbeki
South Africa’s newly elected president, Mr Kgalemo Mothlante, acted swiftly to end an era of ugly controversy and extreme incompetence in the health ministry by appointing a highly regarded, new health minister and effectively demoting the previous one, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who implemented all of former president Thabo Mbeki’s eccentric AIDS beliefs, which has laid […]
Joe Collier: Coping with conflicts and uncertainty
Recently I met a student who had been in a Problem Based Learning (PBL) group that I had ‘facilitated’ in 2006. During the PBL we will have spent around six hours together each week for a full trimester (so around 72 hours contact time in all) and I was interested to know if he could […]