Recently the UK’s press went into overdrive reporting on the recent change in emergency contraceptive pill ellaOne’s product licence—now available to buy over the counter for women of “all reproductive ages,” and therefore including under 16s. Of course levonorgestrel was already available to under 16s in pharmacies in many areas through patient group directions. In […]
Category: Guest writers
Anne Gulland: Mental health problems—a gender divide
Feckless, hysterical, neurotic, sluttish: these are just some of the adjectives used to describe female patients suffering from psychological illness in the book Good General Practice, an investigation into general practice published in the mid 1950s. [1] The author was Stephen Taylor, an eminent GP and civil servant whose views were typical of an age […]
Athene Donald: Learning lessons from Tim Hunt
Many years after his Nobel Prize winning discoveries in cell cycle regulation, Tim Hunt made some inappropriate and indefensible comments. It seems like the whole world wants to discuss those comments. Or rather, it’s as if they want to demonise the man and forget the totality of his life. Scientists are supposed to like evidence. […]
Sioned Gwyn on sexism and women in medicine
Sir Tim Hunt, British biochemist and Nobel Laureate, had until recently enjoyed relative anonymity outside of scientific fields. Recently, at an international conference of science journalists in Seoul, he was invited to speak at a meeting for women in science and delivered as part of his speech an extraordinarily ill judged few sentences which have […]
Karsten Juhl Jørgensen: Why do five recent reports on breast screening reach conflicting conclusions?
Since 2012, five collaborative efforts to quantify the benefits and harms of breast screening have been published. These are the UK Independent Review, the EUROSCREEN Working Group series (both 2012), the Swiss Medical Board report (2014), the updated IARC/WHO Handbook, and a report from the Research Council of Norway (both 2015). The approach to put […]
Neel Sharma: We need to improve feedback to medical students
The other day I made a point of observing the number of people walking whilst using their mobile phones. I am sure we have all made a similar observation of people staring down at their phones. The vast extent of the problem has even been characterised clinically as “text neck.” I recall the days of […]
John Moxham: Smoking still kills
Smoking still kills. Today it will kill 200 people. [1] People will die from heart attacks, from cancers, from respiratory illnesses, and many other conditions. But smoking doesn’t just kill. For every person that dies today 20 more will live with their illnesses needing the care and support of the NHS, social care services, and […]
Jean Riley: A carer’s perspective on personal health budgets
I am Jean Riley, the mother of a beautiful 26 year old daughter who has profound and complex needs. When we adopted our daughter from an orphanage in Romania, we thought we were bringing her home to die between clean sheets, but she survived. She was 5 years old and weighed just 12lbs. She has multiple […]
Kenneth Collins on patient attitudes to women doctors
Hetty Ockrim qualified in medicine in 1943, and after a short spell as a general practitioner in a mining community in wartime Blantyre and some hospital experience in obstetrics, she entered general practice in a working class area of Glasgow in June 1946 in partnership with her husband. After she retired in 1989, she carried […]
Adam Smith: The life and legacy of oncology PROMs
Since the 1980s, patient reported outcomes measures (PROMs) have been incorporated in cancer clinical trials providing invaluable information about symptoms, functioning, and quality of life from the patients’ perspective. In 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), issued industry guidance on the use of PROMs in product label claims [1]. The guidance stressed the […]