All over England, buddleias have been in flower for weeks already, often sprawling over railway embankments and waste ground, or lodged in the mortar of high walls and chimneys to the greater peril of the populace. […]
This trial prejudged its outcome by calling itself the Women’s Healthy Eating and Living (WHEL) study; it was based on the supposition that a diet very high in vegetables, fruit, and fibre and low in fat might reduce cancer-related events and mortality in women with breast cancer. […]
A big international trial gives a nice clear answer to an important clinical question: might patients with peripheral vascular disease do better taking warfarin as well as an antiplatelet agent? […]
This study of self-monitoring in type 2 diabetes calls into question a widely-used and expensive intervention and has drawn a stream of responses ever since it was first posted on the BMJ website some weeks ago. […]
A useful short reminder piece about new treatments for age-related macular degeneration. The story is much as was told in the New England Journal last October, under the apt heading “The Price of Sight”: […]
When penicillin was a new drug in short supply, its use in gonorrhea became the subject of heated debate; after that, decades passed before the first penicillin-resistant gonococci emerged and led to the abandonment of penicillin in favour of fluoroquinolone antibiotics. […]
Man’s one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality. R Louis Stevenson […]
Because it is often difficult to conduct randomised trials in children, paediatrics can sometimes remain a bastion of untested dogma, as with the vexed question of recurrent urinary tract infections in children. […]
Carriers of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations are of course much more likely to get breast cancer, but is it also true, as sometimes stated, that their cancers are more aggressive? […]
Reading research papers is for most doctors an effort of duty rather than love, and although I have tried for nearly ten years to make it sound like fun, even for me the same usually applies. […]