I saw an advertisement for the Clegg scholarship in the Student BMJ magazine and decided to apply on impulse, mainly because our supervisors were urging me and my second year colleagues to find a worthwhile experience and not waste another preclinical summer by innocently enjoying life. To me, someone with an interest in writing and […]
Category: Students
Jonny Martell: Surviving burnout
Nothing much sprung to mind. A friend had just asked me an odd question, paraphrasing the mystical scholar Andrew Harvey, “what breaks your heart the most?” Was this an early showing of the carapace of cynicism to come? A day later it came back to me: the thought of my father’s final walk around the […]
Eva Dumann: So this is victory—treating adolescent idiopathic scoliosis
One of the great things about being a BMJ Clegg scholar is unlimited access to BMJ articles, coupled with enough free time to read about the weird and wonderful topics that the “real” medical world concerns itself with. Sometimes, however, the findings are not so pleasing. A recent Clinical review on adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) […]
Rhys Davies: Chronic frustrating syndrome
A wise man once said that he knew nothing at all except that he knew that he knew nothing at all. Socrates would have made a good medical student. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is characterised by overwhelming fatigue, post-exertional malaise, cognitive symptoms, sleep disturbances, and a vague constellation of muscle and joint aches. It is […]
Isobel Weinberg: The Foundation Programme Office giveth and it taketh away
On Monday, a friend posted a picture of an enormous, triple layered chocolate cake on Facebook. It was, she wrote, a present for her boyfriend—a final year medical student—to celebrate his being awarded his top choice of location for his first job next year. Getting the first choice has meaning beyond simple preference: it enables […]
Anna Allan: Training? What training?
The junior doctor’s applications process has metamorphosed from an individual interview process, to modernising medical careers (MMC), to the foundation programme application system. There has been a big push towards centralising services for the majority of NHS training applications. This year has also seen a change with regards to the application itself. A two hour […]
Jonny Martell: What they don’t teach at medical school
Tomorrow I’ll go to work and among other things, prescribe drugs. I’ve been told that they work and that they’re mostly safe. There’s plenty to encourage me in believing this: whether enshrined in official guidelines or treatment protocols (or not), lots of other doctors prescribe these drugs in the same or similar patients, for the […]
Lifebox Q and A: El Salvador—education, education, education
A pulse oximeter in the operating theatre doesn’t make surgery safer; it’s the anaesthesia provider using the oximeter effectively who will save lives. For Lifebox, the BMJ’s Christmas charity, provision of education is inseparable from donating equipment. That’s why we’re excited to share a recent conversation with Sandra Leal the president of the association of medical […]
Geoffrey Roberts on using Lifebox pulse oximeters in Zambia
My wife and I arrived in Zambia in August 2012 for a six month placement as surgical registrars in a busy rural hospital in the Eastern Province. This was my first experience of hospital care in the developing world and I was soon working all hours of the day and night, operating on everything from […]
Lifebox Q and A: Togo—facing the facts and making a difference
When people talk about the crisis of unsafe anaesthesia worldwide, there’s one particular publication that is frequently referenced—it’s too shocking to ignore. “Deaths associated with anaesthesia in Togo, West Africa,” published in Tropical Doctor in 2005, demonstrated that anaesthesia mortality in Togo could be as high as 1:133 patients. Lifebox recently spoke to lead author […]