When I said last week that the true scientist rejoices when her/his hypothesis is refuted, I wasn’t trying to restate Popperian orthodoxy but making the point that those who wish to see knowledge expand shouldn’t care whether it does so by proving them right or wrong – the main thing is that they’ve helped in […]
A big prospective North American trial – COURAGE – confirms the message of the BMJ a fortnight ago: for chronic stable angina, percutaneous coronary intervention offers no advantage over optimal medical therapy. […]
786 Several years ago, Philip Poole-Wilson issued a warning that too many cardiovascular trials use composite end-points and that this can seriously distort their conclusions. […]
Another very promising new drug for HIV has arrived – the HIV-1 integrase inhibitor raltegravir. It produced good results in this phase II trial in multi-drug resistant patients and “the safety profile of raltegravir is comparable with that of placebo at all doses studied. […]
The fashion for chocolate-drinking in England faded more than two hundred years ago, to be replaced largely by tea […]
These vernal delicacies tend to grow where you can least easily spot them – on burnt ground, in grass around old apple trees, or amongst bark and wood chips used to mulch flower beds. […]
This Japanese study breaks new ground in attempting to establish the prevalence of neuraminidase resistance in influenza B viruses. At present it is low, but of course selection pressure could change all that if these drugs were widely used in an epidemic. […]
If, as Michael Baum states, you have to screen 1,000 women with mammography for ten years to save one death from breast cancer, is computer-aided detection going to transform the scene? […]
In England, we are lucky to have our screening programmes presided over by a sceptical Scot (Muir Gray) who is alert to the dangers of screening. Nevertheless, argues Nicola Law here, we are in the process of adopting a policy for opportunistic Chlamydia screening in young women based on evidence that is contradictory and frequently […]
Just after the editorials comes a short clinical update on essential tremor which usefully summarises the clinical features and how to distinguish this from other tremulous disorders. When it comes to treatment, however, the evidence is generally shaky. […]