Last month BBC Radio 4’s Today programme transmitted more ominous alarms about dementia. The rate of our dying from dementia is rapidly increasing, we are informed. But this is a misconstruction (commonly repeated in the popular press and even in more official channels) and can easily mislead. Most (though certainly not all) dementia is age […]
Category: Guest writers
Collette Isabel Stadler: Childhood and adolescent anxiety and social media
Recently the NSPCC revealed that it had counselled 11,706 young people for anxiety in 2015-2016 via its Childline telephone counselling services—a 35% rise from the previous year. Most shockingly, a child in distress telephones Childline every thirty minutes to talk about feelings of suicide. The first academic studies investigating the growing problem of childhood and adolescent […]
Tim Cross: Should we screen heavy drinkers for liver disease?
The festive season is behind us and many people’s thoughts are now turning to the new year and New Year’s resolutions, which for many may include an aim to cut back on the amount of alcohol they drink. NICE recently released a draft consultation on liver disease. As a society, we have an awkward relationship […]
Daniel Sokol: The ethics of the on-call rota
A colleague is sick. Someone is needed to cover him tomorrow. There are no locums and no volunteers. Who should be selected? Few issues generate more passion and cause more heartache to doctors than filling a gap in the rota. Over the Christmas period, it is likely that tears have been shed and friendships lost […]
Tom Jefferson: Adapting pharmaceutical regulation to more transparency
On the 8 December the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the EU Commission hosted a workshop to discuss Adaptive Pathways, formerly known as Adaptive Licensing. The 180 physical and 155 remote attendees included regulators, representatives of patients’ organisations, payers, academics, industry, and health technology assessment bodies. The aim of the meeting was ostensibly to discuss […]
Sally Browning: Acts of kindness
Five days after starting chemotherapy for lymphoma, I knew, in the night, that I had an acute abdomen and needed to go to hospital. The two paramedics who arrived were professional and efficient. As they quickly asked me sensible questions, I vomited copiously all over the tiled hallway. “You won’t want to come home to […]
Nick Hopkinson on Steve Biko, the NHS, and the mind of the oppressed
It would have been Steve Biko’s seventieth birthday this weekend. The anti-apartheid leader was beaten to death by the South African Police in a jail cell in 1977. His death was a medical scandal too—doctors acquiesced in his being driven, semi-conscious and chained, the 700 miles from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria. Developing his program of […]
Mark Mikhail: The death of bedside teaching
Teaching in medical school has thankfully and quite rightly changed. Gone are the days when a consultant in a three piece suit, bow tie, and braces would float from bed to bed, without any discussion or consent, pointing out painful and disfiguring pathologies on traumatised patients, and only revealing the eponymous syndrome after 17 anxious, […]
Katherine Sleeman: The price of life
“More life with your kids, more life with your friends, more life spent on earth—but only if you pay” was the message of AA Gill’s posthumous essay published in the Sunday Times this week. His death from lung cancer, at 62, saddened and shocked readers of his column, where he had announced less than a […]
Tara Lamont: Seize the day or the decision maker—making research count
Timing can be everything. A policymaker once said to me that a perfect piece of analysis arriving the day after a decision has been taken is useless. Obvious, but worth repeating. Because in discussing how we maximise the impact of research, we often overlook the role of serendipity and timing. We advise researchers on careful […]