JAMA 16 May 2012 Vol 307 Do we all live on the same planet? I’m nearing the end of an amazing year at Yale, surrounded by superlatively intelligent people working on the outcomes of US healthcare. I myself occupy a space with brilliant newly qualified young doctors from India, Iran, and Brazil, putting together a […]
JAMA 9 May 2012 Vol 307 1925 In a wonderful letter to Humphry Davy in 1800, Coleridge declared that science, as a human activity, “being necessarily performed with the Passion of hope, is poetical.” All good science is inspired with the poetry of hope; but, alas, so also is a lot of bad science. If […]
JAMA 25 Apr 2012 Vol 307 1809 Among the many virtues of JAMA, one cannot number a strong sense of the ridiculous. The poetry and medicine section is the world’s most reliable source of po-faced bad verse, this week’s example being an invective against Decadron; and the first research paper this week is a study […]
JAMA 25 Apr 2012 Vol 307 1717 Any budding young cardiology academic wishing to set up a publication of her own could do worse than start a Journal of Negative Stem Cell Trials in Heart Failure. There are enough of these to fill a volume every quarter-year or so, and editorials could reflect on all […]
JAMA 18 Apr 2012 Vol 307 1583 George Orwell predicted a nightmare world where soothing words would mean their opposites, and gave his dystopia the date of 1984. It was about that year that the term patient centred first appeared in the medical literature, coinciding with the time when the medical-industrial complex went totally out […]
JAMA 11 April 2012 Vol 307 1489 The new editor of JAMA feels that his worthy journal needs a bit of livening up, and who can disagree? He has borrowed an old idea from the BMJ, in the form of head-on for and against articles. “Should a 55-year-old man who is otherwise well, with systolic […]
JAMA 4 Apr 2012 Vol 307 1394 A special dread settles on me this week as I know I am going to have to write about breast cancer screening. But let’s leave the dread question of whole-population mammography for later, and consider the add-on benefit of annual ultrasound or single-screening MRI in selected high-risk women. […]
JAMA 28 Mar 2012 Vol 307 1257 Medical conferences exist to affirm everything that hinders the progress of medicine as a compassionate and honest enterprise. They are a showcase for authority figures, pharma-funded research, half-completed work in the form of abstracts and late-breaking sessions; they use up prodigious amounts of money and carbon fuels; they […]
JAMA 21 Mar 2012 Vol 307 1161 When in Japan, do not attempt to drop down dead. In 800 fire stations around the Islands of the Sun, teams of emergency medical service personnel stand ready to rush out and perform resuscitation for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, which cannot be discontinued until an ambulance arrives and you […]
JAMA 14 Mar 2012 Vol 307 1029 The Viewpoint pieces in JAMA this week are a strange mix of fact and fantasy. The first is a piece about industry payments to physicians and teaching hospitals in the USA. I am currently at Yale University alongside the authors of this piece, one of whom is a […]