NEJM 11 Feb 2016 Vol 374 The decline of Alzheimer’s 523 Let’s start off on a happy note, and think about dementia. On Saturday morning the BBC News website ran a story about a new molecule tested on worms in Cambridge that could block the deterioration of brain cells. So there is hope. For the […]
While I was reporting on a study for The BMJ, I suddenly felt as if I’d walked through Alice’s Looking Glass. You’ve possibly heard about the study by now: researchers found that patients treated by sleep-deprived resident doctors were no more likely to die or suffer serious complications than patients under the care of doctors […]
The H in NHS stands not for hospital or healthcare but health, and the NHS needs to do better at promoting health, said Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, this week at a meeting organised by the University of Southampton. If England can’t do better at prevention then the NHS will be overwhelmed, said […]
Today, 12 February, is the 75th anniversary of the first clinical use of penicillin in Oxford in 1941 (picture). Image: A plaque commemorating the first administration of purified penicillin to a patient in the Radcliffe Infirmary on 12 February 1941 by Dr Charles Fletcher; the word “systematic” is not necessarily an error; the word has occasionally, […]
My induction was interrupted by a loud siren bellowing out across County Buchannan. My supervisor, consultant forensic psychiatrist, Dr Reynolds, ran me out of the hospital into the courtyard shouting “Tornado!” I stared up at the fast moving grey clouds and, as I set off to dive into the nearest bush, I heard my supervisor […]
It was Boxing Day weekend. The consultant surgeon summoned the on-call team. “We face a calamity,” he said. The house officer had called in sick. The locum wasn’t going to arrive for another 12 hours. This meant that I, the senior house officer, would have to be the house officer. The registrar would take my […]
When I first became a GP, general practice was organised in a way that was so easy to describe to people. We had practices serving defined local communities and we had family practitioner committees (FPCs), which provided a bit of light touch administration. And that was that. Compare this blissful simplicity with the plethora of […]
One of the greatest challenges for us as we age is “bar stool gerontology.” For most complex subjects—nuclear physics, molecular biology, or philosophy—most of us recognise that some learning and education are required to grasp their fundamentals. Yet despite the fact that we are at our most complex in later life, it remains acceptable in […]
In my 40 years of messing around with medical journals I’ve tried to contribute to promoting patient safety and the use of evidence. Generally things seem better from a time when patient safety was largely ignored and evidence used haphazardly rather than systematically, but I fret now that doctors are using both safety and evidence […]
Since 2005, the Health Consumer Powerhouse has produced its annual EuroHealth Consumer Index, ranking European health systems according to their performance on a host of indicators around (i) patient rights and information, (ii) accessibility, (iii) outcomes, (iv) range and reach of services, (v) prevention and (vi) pharmaceuticals. In its most recent iteration, the United Kingdom […]