It’s been less than a decade since I started medical school and even in my short career the relationship between doctors and the drug industry has undergone drastic change. During undergraduate clinical placements, I spent many lunchtimes making polite conversation about a drug I had no interest in to justify scoffing the indulgent Waitrose sandwiches […]
Category: Guest writers
Kevin Watkins: Universal health coverage—back on the global agenda
A few years ago, I was at a rural hospital in Eastern Province, Zambia. Doctors were trying frantically, and in the end unsuccessfully, to save the life of a five year old boy. He died from acute respiratory tract infection. But what really killed him, as one of the doctors told me afterwards, was poverty: […]
Gwyn Samuel Williams: “Les Miserables” examiners
I recently had the single pleasure of undergoing exit exams run by the Royal College of Ophthalmologists and could not help but wonder at how examiners could on the whole be easily categorised into certain subtypes which readers may find fascinating. This phenomenon has certainly has not been observed before in published world literature. First, […]
Simon Poole: NICE, statins, data, and doctors
In June 2009, the World Health Organization declared the swine flu outbreak to be a pandemic. Most of us will recall the grave concerns expressed by politicians and the media about this potentially fatal illness. I remember at this time being called out late on a Friday evening to a patient suspected to have contracted […]
David Berger: Stoushes, rorts, and cuts in Australian healthcare
To Europeans, Australia resembles the kind of alien planet so beloved of 1950s American science fiction writers. Strange, bounding animals hop across an arid, unfamiliar landscape, dotted with queer trees and even queerer, multi-coloured birds. The indigenous inhabitants of this planet called these birds “kookaburra,” although their meaning was allegedly misinterpreted when the colonists thought […]
Florence Smith: NCDs and HIV—where’s the intersection?
At first glance, NCDs (non-communicable diseases) and HIV/AIDS seem to have little in common. However, a recent symposium, organised by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and FHI360, showed that there is great scope for those working on these two big issues in global health to learn from each other. HIV/AIDS has caused […]
Liliana Gomes: How dirty is your QWERTY?
It all started a few weeks ago in my communicable diseases module at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. During a group brainstorming session we realised how “unclean” keyboards could be. Despite being a public health trainee, I had never thought carefully about how many harmful pathogens could live in a computer keyboard. […]
David Zigmond: Is it time to renationalise the NHS?
Recently the media has told us that the Labour Party is considering a long journeyed return: back to the nationalisation of rail services. Some claim that this will offer better long term value, efficiency, and safety. Many would welcome this, but there is a puzzling anomaly: why do we not, instead, start with the NHS? […]
Jane Feinmann: Is the current system of publishing clinical trials fit for purpose?
This question was the title of a meeting of the Medical Journalists’ Association last week, and, perhaps surprisingly for an audience made up almost exclusively of medical journalists, the response was a resounding no. So what happened? Medical journals, the main vehicles for publishing clinical trials today, are after all the “gatekeepers of medical evidence”—as they […]
Jane Parry: How many cases will it take for policymakers to realize there is a HIV problem in Hong Kong?
Announcing the most recent HIV statistics for Hong Kong yesterday, the Department of Health’s Centre for Health Protection reported 154 new cases from January to March this year. In effect, almost every day two more people became infected with a preventable disease that requires lifelong adherence to a drug regimen in order to stay alive. […]