Hardly a month passes by without press reports of new wonder drugs offering glimmers of hope to patients with dementia. Unfortunately, most of these stories prove to be misleading: like in the case of internet scams (lottery wins, free i-pads or miraculous princes offering their inheritance), if it sounds too good to be true, it […]
Category: Guest writers
Frank Dobson on the opening of The Francis Crick Institute
The Francis Crick Institute for bio-medical research will open today. The present Government will claim credit for it. But the project is nearing completion only because of far-sighted decisions by the Labour science minister David Sainsbury and, above all, by the personal commitment of Gordon Brown. It is a shining example of a government working […]
John King: Adapting to Brexit
As the shock of the referendum fades away, a deathly silence has come over the remain camp. The defeated remainers have gone to ground, while the process of leaving the EU has taken on a life of its own. All the talk is of Brexit, for “we are all Brexiters now.” In a sense this […]
Wendy Reid: Postgraduate medical training in the NHS: complex and transforming
Junior doctors’ anger and disillusionment during their recent dispute highlight the need for a new approach to ensure that they feel valued and able to work in supportive and accountable environments. Rather than wait for the contractual dispute to be resolved, Health Education England (HEE) has been working with others, including postgraduate deans, the BMA’s […]
John Davies: Providing medical care in rural Brazil
The Olympic Games are over, and what a wonderful two weeks they were. We finished the last events at the Olympic Stadium the day before the last day and there was a slight element of going mad. Hundreds of volunteers flooded onto the track. Shirts of different colours were swapped, and there were selfies and mass group […]
Rammya Mathew on the national childhood obesity strategy—doctors need to champion public health
I was left mortified after reading about the long awaited national childhood obesity strategy. “Underwhelming” would be the single best adjective to describe it. On reading the newspaper headlines, however, it is all too tempting to pass the buck to Public Health England and Dame Sally Davies et al. However, there is a sense of […]
Christopher Martyn: Research round-up
Annals of Internal Medicine Mistreatment of residents in nursing homes Conditioned by reports in the media about mistreatment of residents in nursing homes, one leaps to the conclusion that it must be the staff who are doing the mistreating. This study suggests that it’s more likely that the other residents are to blame. Two thousand […]
Mary Higgins: The second victim in modern healthcare
First do no harm. It’s one of the fundamental rules, but what experienced clinician has not, at least once, done some harm? Medicine is intricate, and imperfect, with increasing number of diseases and disease processes occurring in complex people within a multifaceted world. The tests we use are not perfect and the decisions we make […]
Bayad Nozad: Rio, cupping, and public health risks
The Olympic Games are a major inspiration for people from all backgrounds and ages to participate in sport and lead more healthy lifestyles. We noticed great public engagement in all forms of sports following the London 2012 Olympics. This year, Public Health England and other organisations made use of the Rio Olympic Games to launch […]
Colin Brewer: Assisted suicide and people with intractable psychiatric illness
When a former editor of The BMJ and respected health academic like Richard Smith even tentatively argues the case for medically assisted rational suicide (MARS) to avoid the slow and progressive personality annihilation that we call dementia, it can’t be dismissed as a fringe opinion. Dementia worries people more than cancer and that’s hardly surprising […]