The petrol-fuelled motor car gives us comfortable mobility and independence, but at the cost of denaturing the entire landscape of the developed world, the future of our climate, the very air we breathe. […]
NEJM 1 Feb 2007
Category: Richard Lehman’s weekly review of medical journals
BMJ 3 Feb 2007
What is your advice to young doctors starting out on a generalist career? Get the MRCP, for a start – that guarantees class. Train for general practice, if you can endure the indignities – that guarantees money (for the present). […]
Lancet 3 Feb 2007
The amazing technical feat described in this paper may herald a new era of prosthetic limb function with sensory feedback – gory detail a-plenty in the illustrations, and optimistic speculation a-plenty in the accompanying editorial. […]
Plant of the Week: Arbutus x andrachnoides
The “Killarney strawberry tree […]
Scots Poet of the Week: Robert Henryson
Whatever the merits of Burns’ verse, I think that its main purpose nowadays is to help Scots annoy the English. On these occasions of national display I try to exempt myself on the grounds that though I was born in England my parents were Polish and a lot of their friends were Scottish. But if […]
JAMA 24 Jan 2007
We’ve known for some time that about a quarter of patients in hospital with coronary artery disease are depressed, and that this worsens their prognosis – hence those questions we are supposed to ask patients when they come to our CHD clinics. […]
NEJM 25 Jan 2007
I can’t remember when the New England Journal last published a paper from a team of British gynaecologists, so the REST group from Scotland will have had something to celebrate this Burns’ Night. […]
BMJ 27 Jan 2007
The unnamed hero of this editorial on permanent ventricular assist devices in the UK is Peter Houghton, who, more than six years ago, was dying of heart failure. Stephen Westaby wanted to fit him with the then-experimental Jarvik 2000 LAD, and Philip Poole-Wilson was sent in to explain to him that it might not work. […]
Lancet 27 Jan 2007
“Intravenous alteplase is safe and effective in routine clinical use when given within 3h of stroke onset […]
Arch Intern Med 22 Jan 2007
A review that looks at randomised controlled trials comparing oral anticoagulation with and without added aspirin in various clinical contexts. In all of them except patients with mechanical heart valves, there is little evidence of clinical benefit and lots of extra bleeding. Here’s a paper which combines two QOF areas which have caused much exasperation […]