Arch Intern Med 24 Sep 2012 Vol 172 Of Exercise I sing, and that benignant sweat Which from six thousand diabetic brows Exudes. My pen, Hygeia, speed! To save That honey-urined tribe from mortal pains Which Indolence doth breed, and glut of food: That to the treadmill they may go, or healthful jog, Or bicycle […]
JAMA 19 Sep 2012 Vol 308 1122 This week’s JAMA is devoted to obesity. It’s a bit like global warming: we can see it happening around us, we can foresee terrible consequences, we pretend to ourselves we’re doing something about it, but we know that in the end only drastic solutions will work, and these […]
JAMA 12 Sep 2012 Vol 308 981 “Considering the cost, invasiveness, inpatient requirement, and morbidity of bariatric surgery, a truly intensive nonsurgical comparison group is not only justifiable but also necessary to avoid scientific bias. A suitably intensive lifestyle intervention should include multiple components, such as residential treatment for several weeks to initiate rapid weight […]
JAMA 5 Sep 2012 Vol 308 869 Cancer, multiple sclerosis, stroke: do you want your patients to get the benefit of new drugs for these conditions as soon as possible? It’s pretty hard to say no to a question like that, but if you follow the flow of this rhetoric you can easily ignore poor […]
NEJM 30 Aug 2012 Vol 367 787 Most medical research is boring and irrelevant. We take that for granted: most clinicians only read research papers if they urgently need to, and then usually fail to discover what they were looking for. The corollary is that most of the effort of medical academia is futile, and […]
JAMA 22-29 Aug 2012 Vol 308 777 A new stent from Switzerland! Don’t all leave the room at once. Sit down and make yourselves COMFORTABLE while I tell you the story of poor little Bi, who got parted from the rest of the Olimus family early on in life and remained lonely and stranded in […]
JAMA 15 Aug 2012 Vol 308 681 From time to time, most of the medical journals are seized with a worthy impulse to discuss violence. One of its commonest and most ubiquitous forms is intimate partner violence, most of which goes undetected. Occasionally it is first disclosed in the course of a medical consultation, and […]
JAMA 8 Aug 2012 Vol 308 575 When Stephen Lock was editor of the BMJ, he banned the expression “further research is needed” on the grounds that further research is always needed. Here is a piece by John Oiannidis which argues that further research is very often badly needed—and that it is very often instantly […]
JAMA 1 Aug 2012 Vol 308 465 Living with heart failure is a miserable business, and about 40% of patients with this label are clinically depressed. This is due to a complex mix of factors: the biochemical “feel-bad” factors alone are too complex to list here, and they come from every system in the […]
JAMA 25 July 2012 Vol 308 This was the week of the XIX International AIDS Conference held in Washington DC, where the catchphrase everywhere was “an AIDS-free generation.” That forms the title of the first piece in this week’s JAMA, which is given over entirely to HIV-related matters. So also is a large part of […]