Robin Williams’s recent death is a familiar shock: another premature loss of a publicly loved figure. How do we understand and respond to such tragic discrepancy? On the radio (BBC’s Today programme on Radio 4, 15/8/2014) there were lengthy interviews with two publicly accountable experts: the director of long term conditions for NHS England and the president of […]
Category: South Asia
The BMJ Today: Medicine’s vast horizons
At first glance, three articles published this week in The BMJ appear to have limited relevance to medicine. One, written by an economist, discusses the challenges faced by demographers when making predictions about population changes; a second deals with international drug control treaties and the need for policy experiments to evaluate the benefits and risks […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—18 August 2014
NEJM 14 August 2014 Vol 371 601 The usual wisdom about sodium chloride is that the more you take, the higher your blood pressure and hence your cardiovascular risk. We’ll begin, like the NEJM, with the PURE study. This was a massive undertaking. They recruited 102 216 adults from 18 countries and measured their 24 […]
The BMJ Today: When the worst choice is no choice at all
You would think that any woman raped as an act of war would be given access to a safe abortion by an international organisation providing aid. Sally Howard’s Feature on thebmj.com reveals that, astonishingly, this is often not the case. I would highly recommend reading this article. It explains that the 1973 Helms Amendment to the […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—11 August 2014
NEJM 7 August 2014 Vol 371 497 A new gene for breast cancer susceptibility? The PALB2 gene locus has been known about for several years, but this study puts it firmly on the map by intensively investigating 362 members of 154 affected families. The risk for female PALB2 mutation carriers, as compared with the general […]
The BMJ Today: Boring can be beautiful
Mary E Black’s blog on making data beautiful caught my eye this morning. As a technical editor at The BMJ I see a lot of tables, graphs, plots, and charts. I don’t want to put my job at risk, but I’ve got to agree with Mary when she writes that many of these representations of data […]
Lavanya Malhotra: India’s lost girls and doctors’ complicity
According to India’s 2011 census, the sex ratio in India was 943 women for every 1000 men. Yet a recent report by the United Nations reveals that the child sex ratio in India has declined from 927 girls for every 1000 boys in 2001, to 918 in 2011. Behind this statistic, the report points out, are the clinics and medical […]
The BMJ Today: What good are doctors?
Call it an exercise in reflective learning or a sign of deep insecurity, but articles like Richard Smith’s latest blog (“I hate going to the doctor“) always make me (mentally) replay my most recent consultations as a GP. I can’t always be certain that seeing me helped those patients, although I know that many have […]
The BMJ Today: Going beyond the call of duty
Move over the automation of clinical algorithms and etiquette based checklists, suggests Brian Secemsky, a physician, as he shares a touching account of a patient consultation. Choosing to build a rapport with his patient over several appointments helped unravel the real cause of her suffering, and facilitated appropriate management, which would have otherwise been missed […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—4 August 2014
NEJM 31 July 2014 Vol 371 397 Set aside half an hour to enjoy this week’s New England Journal. The key articles are all about malaria, and they are free. You might expect an account of The Origins of Anti-Malarial Drug Resistance to be both boring and depressing, but this one by Randall Packard is […]