When the G7 got together last year, they committed to protecting the poorest and most vulnerable people against the impacts of climate change. One year and a Paris Agreement later, those countries are convening again in Japan, where public health emergencies will be a key priority for discussion. Health professionals from around the world have […]
Reena Aggarwal on the politicisation of junior doctors
The term junior doctor has entered into vernacular. We have become a news story with media, politicians, and satirists all using it as subject matter. Last year little was known about junior doctors and it would have seemed very unlikely that the medical fraternity would have routinely filled headline news as they do now. I […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Once it was just oil, now it’s investigators
A curious thing has happened to pipeline. The word—although originally, as happens with many words, as two separate words—is first recorded by the OED in the early days of the oil industry in the last quarter of the 19th century. Its first metaphorical use was recorded in Aldous Huxley’s first novel Crome Yellow (1921). Not […]
Ian Roberts: Misleading meta-analyses of small trials?
In September 2015, under the banner “Trusted evidence, Informed decisions, Better Health,” a Cochrane Collaboration press release proclaimed to the public that “preoperative statin therapy reduces the odds of postoperative atrial fibrillation and shortens the patient’s stay on the ICU and in hospital.” No adverse effects, no caveats, no calls for bigger and better trials, […]
William Cayley: Evidence based medicine—are we really there yet?
“People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof, but on the basis of what they find attractive.” Blaise Pascal Can we make evidence based medicine work if we don’t understand the evidence? I appreciated this week’s BMJ analysis piece by Margaret McCartney et al, which gave recommendations for ways to make […]
Tara Lamont and Tom Quinn: Driving better care—research and ambulance services
What do you get with twenty pigs and ten humans? Not a giant hog roast or a bad joke about xenotransplantation. No, this appeared to be the full extent of testing of one type of emergency equipment before it was widely used in ambulances. The “can do” attitude in emergency services means that new technologies […]
Georg Röggla: Health and migration
I attended a remarkable reception with a focus on health and migration at the UK embassy in Vienna last week. The ambassador Susan le Jeune d’Allegeershecque shared her personal experiences of when the wave of refugees reached the eastern Austrian border in 2015. She had seen completely exhausted and traumatised children and a pregnant woman whose waters […]
Heidi Larson et al: Vaccine crisis in China—act now to rebuild confidence
The recent unfolding of a five year old story of two million doses of vaccines illegally procured and sold across China is a confidence breaker. Worse, it is not a new episode of abusing a public health good for personal financial gain, but the latest of a series of public health incidents in China. Twenty nine companies have […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—16 May 2016
NEJM 12 May 2016 Vol 374 Smoake is dangerous to ye Lungs 1811 A new study of smokers with preserved pulmonary function finds that a lot of them have lung symptoms. And even if they don’t fulfil the criteria for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), they still experience the familiar pattern of exacerbations and limitation […]
The BMJ research editors: Why The BMJ rejected a “weekend effect” paper
Recently, perceived shortcomings of The BMJ peer review system have been extensively discussed on Twitter and elsewhere because we rejected a research paper by Rachel Meacock and colleagues examining the “weekend effect.” The paper was ultimately published in The Journal of Health Services Research and Policy. An author of the paper took the unusual step […]