By Tony Waterston and Elizabeth Mason. A collective sigh of relief could be heard from many paediatric associations around the world, after the RCPCH made known its decision to accept funding from the Baby Food Industry. There need be no self examination of the sponsorship of conference travel, educational courses, ITU equipment, gifts of all […]
Category: Guest writers
Mary-Ellen Lynall: Translating new advances in neuroscience into psychiatric care
The popular press and scientific journals are littered with exciting advances in basic and clinical neuroscience. But what does this mean for psychiatry, and for psychiatric training? Current trainees will one day prescribe new and better treatments that have grown out of a deeper understanding of brain function (or if not, I’ll be deeply concerned). But […]
Ahmed Rashid: Humanity as the bigger picture in medical education
Looking back at the kind of medical school environment that previous generations were exposed to, I often wonder what the clinical teaching must have looked like. Having graduated from medical school in 2009, I’ve spent my entire career being taught according to evidence-based medicine and clinical guidelines and it’s not easy to imagine what life […]
Neena Modi: The RCPCH and funding from infant formula companies
Breastfeeding is good for babies and mothers. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) has long been a champion, advocating vigorously for policies that support mothers and improve breastfeeding. There has also long been genuine and heartfelt unease among paediatricians around interactions with companies manufacturing breast milk substitutes (BMS) because of the strong […]
C.R. Chandrasekar: Raising awareness of sarcomas
Many years ago I saw a young man who helped me to focus on the importance of raising public and professional awareness of sarcomas, a rare cancer. He had a painful thigh swelling. This was initially presumed to be a sports related injury and resulting haematoma and he was referred to a local hospital. He […]
Joanna Lyall: Feeding the 400
The comfort of food is not a concept readily accepted by institutions, be they hospitals, schools, or nursing homes. As well as financial constraints—many NHS trusts in England feed inpatients for under £10 a day—there are the logistics of serving large numbers of people three meals a day. This is vividly brought home by Feeding […]
Bengt Fadeel: Bob Dylan, the Nobel Prize, and The Day of the Locusts
Our paper, published last year in The BMJ, on the tendency among scientists in the biomedical field to cite Bob Dylan’s lyrics in their own papers,1 seems to have struck a chord. At the time of writing, the paper has been viewed or downloaded about 15,000 times and has an Altmetric Attention Score of more than […]
Laura Burkimsher: The art of medicine
“The art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.” — Voltaire This was the opening sentence of my personal statement for my application to medical school. At the time it fitted the brief of being catchy and unique for my application and it appealed to my sense of the “treating […]
Mary Higgins: Remembering
Recently we held our annual service of remembrance—the 20th time we have formally celebrated the brief lives of babies that died. This is an important part of our care of women, reflecting that for many their pregnancies do not always have a happy outcome. There are many words that could be used to describe this […]
Hitesh Bansal: When the worlds of medical student and medical patient collide
A 20 year old male presented to A&E with abdominal pain. The pain was sharp, constant, severe, located in the epigastric region, radiating through to the back, and had been present since waking that morning. It was associated with profuse vomiting, no hematemesis, no change in bowel habit, no history of unfamiliar food, or travel […]