This week’s Annals contain an essay about Montaigne by Alan Wasserstein, entitled “Lessons in Medical Humanism”. Montaigne is generally credited with inventing the literary form called the “essay”, a word which contains a nice ambiguity – an attempt (essaie) to discuss ideas, but also an assay of the reader. […]
All my working life I have been ashamed at the way the NHS treats sciatica. A person – often a mother with young children, or the main family earner – is suddenly incapacitated with nerve root pain and needs to take morphine and diazepam. […]
Well, blessed are the peacemakers, we must say of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley, even if they took their time about it. In the meantime, a lot of people in Northern Ireland have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of terrorism and civil disorder. […]
The “senior” medical journals have both published major trials of vaccines against human papillomavirus in the last month, and without pausing for breath the triallists now bring out a combined analysis proving – as we already knew – that the vaccines are likely to lead to a major reduction in cervical neoplasia. […]
A thousand patients have now taken part in 18 studies of bone-marrow derived cells for cardiac repair. This meta-analysis shows definite evidence of a repair effect, […]
The scents of summer are beginning to hang in the warm air – honeysuckle, jasmine, and roses. This wonderful rose offers a fragrance both sweet and fresh. […]
This issue of JAMA is devoted to malaria, a disease which was banished from Europe and North America in the 1930s and would have been banished from the whole world in the 1950s and 60s had the superpowers not found better things to do, like stockpiling thermonuclear weapons and flying to the moon. […]
The trouble with medical research is that it involves so much boring hard work. First carry out 2,446,431 person-years of follow-up involving questionnaires on aspirin use every two years. […]
Primary care research in the UK is still largely a cottage industry, kept going as much by enthusiastic part-timers as by big-hit professors. That may change when the “big five” English medical schools set up their National School for Primary Care Research in England. […]
We all very much want to believe that aspirin can prevent pre-eclampsia, but since the first positive trial arguments have bounced back and forth. […]