My Facebook feed was filled with complaints after the National Football League’s Superbowl broadcast last week. The target? A commercial from an insurer highlighting the importance of preventing childhood accidents. While commenters seemed to acknowledge the importance of the topic, they felt that the message was too dark for an event that is otherwise generally […]
Category: The BMJ today
The BMJ Today: Patient centered care
In May 2013 in The BMJ, a group of patients, clinicians, and editors called for a patient revolution, which would empower patients to “work in partnership . . . [with their doctors to] improve healthcare and challenge deeply ingrained practices and behaviors.” To further foster the revolution, The BMJ has published several articles that put the spotlight on patient […]
The BMJ Today: Readmission rates and a second look at torture
Readmission rates to hospitals are often used as markers for quality of care, although a consistent link between readmissions and quality has not been established. Leora I Horwitz and colleagues conducted a retrospective cross-sectional study from 4651 US acute care hospitals. They found that standardised readmission rates are lowest in the lowest volume hospitals. This is highly […]
The BMJ Today: Start your week by fine tuning your clinical research skills
Most doctors are dedicated clinicians who have worked extremely hard to earn the privilege of practising the art of medicine and caring for their fellow human beings. But there are, unfortunately, always some doctors who don’t live up to the oath they took when they finished medical school. Yet I always feel a mix of […]
The BMJ Today: Food everywhere
I visited an old friend recently and we realised that we’d spent two hours of the evening watching a television channel devoted to cookery programmes, while eating. Food is everywhere as two news stories in The BMJ show us. MPs on the parliamentary health committee were told, “People are exposed to an ‘astonishing’ amount of […]
The BMJ Today: The FDA and CDC’s disagreement over Tamiflu, and the spy who isn’t
If you remain uncertain about the benefits or otherwise of oseltamivir (Tamiflu), you may not be much helped by consulting and comparing the pronouncements and statements issued by the two leading healthcare authorities in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As Jeanne Lenzer […]
The BMJ Today: Torture, training, and role models
Unsettlingly recent media coverage seems to be full of articles and images of torture which raises the questions for our profession of “What is the role of doctors when faced with victims of torture?” and “Where should their loyalties lie?” Torture as described in a recent editorial is “a complex, politically driven phenomenon that is […]
The BMJ Today: When is a doctor a GMC doctor and when is a doctor a Robodoc?
Plans to move doctors’ full registration with the General Medical Council from the end of the first year of foundation training to the point of graduation from medical school was first mooted over a year ago in a major review of postgraduate medical education and training. The plan was voted down at the BMA’s annual […]
The BMJ Today: Will the mitochondrial horse fall at the last hurdle?
Suddenly last week, the Church of England and the Catholic Church weighed into the debate about mitochondrial replacement—the use of the mitochondria from a healthy woman to replace the faulty mitochondria in the egg of a woman wishing to have a baby. The Churches’ message was dramatic: by voting on this issue in the House […]
The BMJ Today: Are public health campaigns a waste of money?
As pressure to squeeze costs rises across the whole NHS, the increasing prominence of government funded public health campaigns is coming under greater scrutiny. Chris Mahoney has taken a look at how doctors and the public can know whether public health campaigns work. In a feature on The BMJ this week, he asks whether these campaigns offer good […]