Sometimes we all need cheering up on a Monday morning, and today I couldn’t recommend more highly this parody of “Happy” by Pharrell Williams, which sings the virtues of the Choosing Wisely campaign. Featuring some very sprightly OAPs and lyrics such as “antibiotics for a cold will do nothing but make you ill, a routine screen for many […]
Category: The BMJ today
The BMJ Today: Things worth getting depressed over
The summer may not have brought out the lighter side of The BMJ Today: austerity, assisted dying, medical overuse, and osteoporosis in men. Don’t be put off though. In two Features, Gareth Iacobucci looks at the UK government’s changes to the welfare system since 2010. The articles use the results of The BMJ’s online survey […]
The BMJ Today: The BMJ goes to a major European conference
GPs are a key audience of The BMJ, and we work hard to develop content that is highly relevant for the needs of GPs around the world. This week, The BMJ’s staff is in full swing in Lisbon, Portugal, and the occasion is the regional conference of WONCA (The World Organization of Family doctors), which […]
The BMJ Today: Statins and uncertainty
And so the debate about the adverse effects of statins rumbles on. Nigel Hawkes reported from yesterday’s press briefing at the Science Media Centre saying that the ‘Statins War’ shows ‘no signs of a ceasefire’. Six leading professors of cardiology and epidemiology present at the meeting backed the NICE guidance on extending the use of statins, expressing conviction that benefits […]
The BMJ Today: New name, new logo, new website, some bugs
Writers of this daily update about new stuff published by The BMJ usually face an embarrassment of riches—more than 100 articles go online each week, along with dozens of rapid responses, video abstracts, and audio interviews. But yesterday hardly anything got published because we needed to clear the decks for a new website, which heralds […]
The BMJ Today: Sugar—public enemy number one?
The crackdown on sugar continues. The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition in the UK has recommended that people reduce their daily consumption of added sugar so that it makes up around 5% of the average dietary energy intake, reports Matthew Limb. As Ian Macdonald, professor of metabolic physiology at Nottingham University and the advisory group’s […]
The BMJ Today: Troubling statistics—and calls for sweeping reforms
The BMJ has published some recent statistics that are more than a bit disconcerting. The first set regard corruption. Surely hard to measure, but “best estimates are that between 10% and 25% of global spend on public procurement of health is lost through corruption,” Anita Jain, Samiran Nundy, and Kamran Abbasi write in an Editorial. In […]
The BMJ Today: Sugar the bogeyman and slim boy fat
I stopped adding sugar to my tea when I was a teenager. Up until then (which was sometime in the mid 1970s), I had been wont to fill the cup with several heaped spoonfuls. I regularly covered my morning Weetabix with a glacier of granulated. And I drank a can of Coca-Cola or Pepsi (not […]
The BMJ Today: Whooping cough and getting vaccination right
California is in the grip of a whooping cough epidemic, with 800 cases reported in the first two weeks of June alone. Outbreaks like these are not uncommon in the US. It’s nothing short of “insane,” fumes political blogger Ezra Klein, founder of news site Vox: “These sentences should only exist in musty newspapers from […]
The BMJ Today: What about the patients?
“The BMJ is to be applauded for taking the lead in facilitating meaningful patient partnership,” posted Effy Vayena, senior research fellow at the University of Zurich, yesterday on bmj.com in response to an Editorial by our own Tessa Richards and Fiona Godlee. Their Editorial, “The BMJ’s own patient journey,” described the launch of the journal’s […]