One thing’s for sure: Heather Bresch, the CEO of Mylan Pharmaceuticals, looks good in orange. She’s the subject of a recent New York Times article that opens by declaring “America has a new pharmaceutical villain.” (Martin Shkreli, former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals who raised the price of an essential toxoplasmosis drug by 5000%, is the old […]
Nick Hopkinson: The burden of asthma—how to frame it and what needs to be done?
A study this week from the Asthma UK Centre for Applied Research at the University of Edinburgh, widely reported in the media, estimates that asthma costs the UK £1.1 billion/year in direct healthcare and disability allowance payments. News reports focused on the scale of these costs and the suggestion that 1100 people are dying “needlessly” each […]
Claire McDaniel and Daniel Marchalik: Drawing a line in research
The Doctor’s Book Club Lily King’s Euphoria The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga — Sylvia Plath “Edge” Set in the 1930s, Lily King’s Euphoria tells the story of the river tribes of New Guinea and the […]
Kawaldip Sehmi: Shopping around for the best system of universal health coverage
In September 2015, 194 member states of the United Nations agreed to adopt the resolution A/RES/70/1 from Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. By accepting this resolution they have set themselves 17 social, economic, educational, and health goals to achieve by 2030. Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG 3) declares that the state will […]
Richard Smith: Making workplace health work after 40 years of failure
What is it that makes a company successful? Could it be strategy, leadership, funding, great products, luck, or something else? All of those things are secondary to the “essence” that make for a successful company—which is the habits of the employees—argued Andrew Sykes, an actuary who is the founder of a company called Habits at […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—30 August 2016
After a month’s break, I’m catching up with articles of interest in the main non-BMJ journals throughout August. Normal service will be resumed next week. NEJM Aug 2016 Vol 375 No parasites for five years 405 Following its famous “data parasites” editorial last January, the NEJM has struggled to find a comfortable position on the […]
John Davies: Providing medical care in rural Brazil
The Olympic Games are over, and what a wonderful two weeks they were. We finished the last events at the Olympic Stadium the day before the last day and there was a slight element of going mad. Hundreds of volunteers flooded onto the track. Shirts of different colours were swapped, and there were selfies and mass group […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Junior
The President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh has asked Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state for health (the SoSH), in a letter that also dealt with other more important matters, to find a less pejorative term to describe “junior” or “trainee” doctors, since “they are highly skilled, dedicated professionals and should be […]
Madhukar Pai: New insights into the tuberculosis problem in India’s private sector
As a result of the overuse or misuse of antibiotics, antimicrobial resistant superbugs represent an extraordinary threat to global health. This threat is particularly great in India, the world’s largest consumer of antibiotics and the country facing the highest burden of tuberculosis (TB) in the world. Two studies, published simultaneously in The Lancet Infectious Diseases this […]
Lisa Steen: The wilderness of the medically unexplained
This patient perspective essay was written by Lisa Steen. She has since died. We have permission to publish the piece from her husband, Raymond Brown. I am a GP, formerly a trainee psychiatrist and now 43 years old. In July 2014, I was diagnosed as having kidney cancer with multiple bone metastases. The cancer was […]