I’m not the type to stay at hospital placement all day long, looking around for things to do. Don’t get me wrong; I do the basics: go to lectures, attend bedside teaching, write up histories, and shadow junior doctors. But I can’t help but feel a strong lack of encouragement from senior doctors and consultants. […]
Category: Students
Emily Arthurs: Five year survival
Having gone through a tough five years, following on from a previous four year science degree, I was all set to finally finish being a student. With nine years of study under my belt I was ready to step outside the university and into the real world. My FY1 placement was organised; I had my […]
Richard Smith: Medical schools to close?
Until now medical schools have had it easy. They have lots of high quality applicants, most students graduate, and all of them can find jobs. Suddenly, as for many others in Britain, the world looks more hostile. I hang around medical schools, and many people think it likely that one or two medical schools may […]
Neil Graham: Don’t underestimate your audience, science journalists
Reading science blogger Martin Robbins’ meticulously observed, not to mention witty article “This is a news website article about a scientific paper“, I was overcome by a warm, fraternal feeling. It seems that I’m not the only person to have been infuriated by the difficulty regularly experienced in trying to navigate from the coverage of a scientific […]
Alexander Romain on NHS sponsored homeopathy
NHS sponsored homeopathy is being financially strangled amidst the baying cries of clinicians. In the ritualistic chanting of “placebo” and “evidence based medicine” they gleefully recapitulate the paucity of evidence underpinning this form of witchcraft. […]
Beth Cherryman: A graduate tax
Business secretary Vince Cable has proposed a “graduate tax” as a solution to university funding. Graduates will be taxed according to some percentage of their income (once earning over £15,000 a year). In this system higher earners will pay more tax. Cable argues this is a fairer option than that employed currently, in which, after […]
James Clark on health provision for asylum seekers
The person I was speaking to turned to me with tears in her eyes and whispered, in her broken English: “I’m scared. I been scared for so long.” I had never counted myself among those who read the Daily Mail, but knew so little about asylum seekers that my views had long been distorted by […]
Kayte McCann on health inequalities
If I were to ask you what the primary care trusts of Gateshead, Lambeth, Rotherham, Liverpool and Tower Hamlets had in common, what would you say? […]
Anna Mead Robson: Psychiatry – a specialty for failures?
I once met a medical student who had failed his first year exams. “It’s ok,” he said, as I tried to console him. “I know I’m not very bright, but I can always be a psychiatrist after medical school.” Two years later, after I had professed an interest in psychiatry, a doctor told me: “You […]
Kayte McCann: Standing up for science
Are we standing up for science, or have we all become so laid back about it that the very basis of medicine and research are now lost to us? Earlier this week I attended the Sense About Science annual lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine in London. The lecture was entitled “It’s time to […]