“I am furious, sad, and scared for the NHS” —Margaret McCartney’s opening words in the introduction to her latest, timely book, The State of Medicine (Pinter and Martin 2016). Understandable sentiments, as the NHS heads for £20 billion/year underfunding by 2020 and politicians can launch thinly veiled xenophobic attacks on our colleagues born overseas. McCartney’s writing […]
Helen Macdonald: Fixing evidence based medicine
Love it or hate it—we must all consume evidence. Now is your chance to have your say on what its future should be like. Yesterday the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University launched a new manifesto calling for better evidence for better healthcare. The BMJ team is partnering with them. Writing to launch the manifesto The BMJ says: […]
Lara Fairall: Where there are nurses and community health workers
August marked the fourth anniversary of the shootings at the Marikana mine in North West Province of South Africa. It’s one of those events that so etches itself onto our collective soul that you remember exactly where you were when you learnt about it. I was in an upmarket coffee shop—I live in one South […]
Desmond O’Neill: Mozart in the ballpark
A live telecast of The Marriage of Figaro to a baseball stadium from the Kennedy Centre provided a delightful and illuminating synergy with the 2016 conference of the National Centre for Creative Ageing in Washington DC. After attending the conference’s opening reception at an exhibition of art by older people, we had a short walk to this […]
Avril Danczak: When is a disease not a disease?
Most GPs will recognise the dispiriting conversation that can happen when a patient discovers that they have Chronic Kidney Disease Stage 3 (CKD). “A disease? Where did I catch it from? Will the grandkids get it? What is the treatment?” Patients know what a disease is; a condition that you acquire or catch, that makes […]
Richard Thorley: Exception reporting—let’s show Jeremy how hard we really work
The day we have all been dreading in obstetrics and gynaecology has arrived. Some trusts started to roll out the new contract for junior doctors last week. The cancellation of strike action recently left a select few determined strike activists fuming, but while it seems most of us welcomed the decision, it has left us bereft of any […]
Paul Buchanan: What are we meant to eat?
The devil is in the detail, so the saying goes, and the detail has been supplied by decades of peer-reviewed and published research which told us all that fat is the enemy. Generations of people have been born into a world where all sections of society—the media, film, fashion, food, and healthcare have directed us […]
Partha Kar: Diversity in the NHS matters
The world we live in is in a fascinating space at the moment. Tolerance seems to be at a low ebb—whether that is due to the rhetoric fuelled by the Donald Trumps of this world or not—it has created a climate of interesting proportions. Against the backdrop of this febrile atmosphere, came a speech by Jeremy Hunt, England’s health […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—10 October 2016
NEJM 6 Oct 2016 Vol 375 MI: better care counts in long term Forty years ago, it was generally safer to stay at home with a myocardial infarction. Archie Cochrane demonstrated this in a talk where he deliberately switched his slides round. The cardiologists present declared that the figures mandated the immediate adoption of coronary care […]
Richard Smith: Epidemiology—big problems and an identity crisis
The Germans probably have a more precise word for it, but it’s close to schadenfreude as an outsider to watch a professional group agonise over who they are, whether they matter, whether their methods are adequate, and whether they are missing something important. I had this experience in Bristol last week as a gaggle of […]