JAMA 25 Aug 2010 Vol 304 859 The first paper in JAMA comes from Denmark for a second week running, meaning that I have to rummage through Hamlet yet again for a suitable quotation. But alas (poor Yorick), I can find nothing at all about antiviral drugs used in pregnancy. I can’t even find anything […]
JAMA 18 Aug 2010 Vol 304 763 Some time ago I suggested that the best time and place to have a myocardial infarct was at about 10 am on a Thursday morning in October in a large city. That way you would get your primary percutaneous intervention as quickly as possible performed by a team […]
JAMA 11 Aug 2010 Vol 304 641 All this week the media has (sic) been proclaiming the end of the antibiotic era, on the basis of data which shows (sic) that new multi-resistant plasmids can cross from one bacteria (sic) to another in Indian hospitals. Give or take a few plurals, you get my gist. […]
JAMA 4 Aug 2010 Vol 304 This week’s JAMA is about the health consequences of violence. These are bad, and these articles just act as gloomy reminders of how bad they are, and how little medicine can do about them. I suppose it’s worth trying a brief intervention to reduce violence and alcohol abuse in […]
JAMA 21 July 2010 Vol 235 JAMA 28 July 2010 Vol 469 469 It is a solemn sight to see the great medical journals gathering to pronounce that rosiglitazone is dead. Like the bird of loudest lay in Shakespeare’s The Phoenix and the Turtle, JAMA leads the troop of mourners with this big observational comparison […]
JAMA 21 July 2010 Vol 235 This issue of JAMA is devoted to human immunodeficiency virus infection in resource-poor countries and as usual I won’t attempt to comment on issues such as preventing mother-to-child transmission in Africa and the benefits and limitations of using generic antiviral drugs in resource-poor settings. We’re talking here about individuals who are […]
JAMA 14 July 2010 Vol 304 163 The classic hero of palliative care used to be the personal doctor who turned up in the middle of the night to administer symptom relief and consolation. Most doctors have done that from time to time, and found it immensely satisfying and immensely tiring. So what, by contrast, […]
JAMA 7 July 2010 Vol 304 45 Glucosamine is the doctor’s best friend. It doesn’t do anything, but people believe it might, and so if you have trouble treating their joint symptoms you can always say “have you tried glucosamine?”. Note that you are not obliged to lie: the most you have to say is […]
NEJM 1 Jul 2010 Vol 363 11 So far, the trials of carotid stenting versus endarterectomy have sent out mixed messages, but the CREST study sends out a message of equipoise. The triallists decided to recruit asymptomatic patients mid way through, to bump numbers up to 2502, but the main population was fairly homogeneous and […]
Richard fancied a change, so is currently blogging on BMJ Group’s new professional networking site for doctors, doc2doc. You can read his weekly journal watch blog there. This week he turns his attention to gene gnomes, finds the Lancet a bit waffly and the New England Journal of Medicine in self congratulatory mode. To comment on his blog, […]