JAMA 20 Feb 2013 Vol 309 689 Long back in the last century, I was a hysterectomy robot. This was the lowest form of life in a London teaching hospital obstetrics and gynaecology department. I spent my days clerking patients and feeling gravid abdomens, and my nights (one in two) stitching episiotomies and writing out […]
JAMA 13 Feb 2013 Vol 309 559 Last week I had a go at the editors of the NEJM and The Lancet for publishing misleadingly reported pharma funded trials, in contradiction to their own idealistically stated views. Now, on p 607, the editor of JAMA maps out the moral high ground which he thinks necessary for […]
JAMA 6 Feb 2013 Vol 309 453 Stone the crows, a great little study from Oz that will change your practice at a stroke. They recruited 212 patients with intermittent claudication who had never had invasive treatment—which immediately made me realise the study couldn’t have been done in America, where at the first twinge of […]
JAMA Intern Med 28 Jan 2013 Vol 173 93 One of the chief glories of this journal (formerly called the Archives) lies in the articles labelled LESS IS MORE, which can range from editorials to original research papers, and this issue contains no fewer than four such. The US health economy contains massive incentives to […]
JAMA 23-30 Jan 2013 Vol 309 355 From time to time I like to shock my GP colleagues by saying that the most important part of any health system is the hospital and that secondary care takes rightful priority in any health budget. I’m really sorry to see our college president Clare Gerada, whom I […]
JAMA Intern Med 14 Jan 2013 Vol 173 The Archives of Internal Medicine have now morphed into JAMA Internal Medicine. It would be nice to report that this first issue is a cracker, but unfortunately journals can only be as good as the material that comes in, and the JAMA truck seems to have been […]
JAMA 9 Jan 2013 Vol 309 155 We know in our bones that vitamin D is important, and we even have a rough idea of the blood levels that are needed to keep our bones healthy. Pretty well everything else about vitamin D is still subject to speculation and investigation, and so many claims have […]
JAMA 2 Jan 2013 Vol 309 41 There was an issue of JAMA that appeared on December 26th, but it contained nothing really worth disturbing your Christmastide slumbers. The New Year, however, sees JAMA springing into life with lots to interest most doctors. Many of us have delivered babies in our time—and I even have […]
JAMA 19 Dec 2012 Vol 308 2469 Most healthy people don’t take aspirin, so if you look at a long-term study of aspirin in relation to some clinical event, such as macular degeneration, you have to be very careful to allow for confounding by indication. And what is the main indication for aspirin? Why, it […]
JAMA 12 Dec 2012 Vol 308 2349 The run-up to Christmas never finds me in the best of moods, and now it seems that the editor of JAMA is trying to wind me up by showcasing all my pet hates. Well, some of them anyway: to showcase them all would require a space the size […]