NEJM 21 Jan 2016 Vol 374 Share data or be damned OL The most important article this week also appears on the websites of JAMA, The BMJ, Annals of Internal Medicine, and The Lancet. It’s a proposal from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors to move towards a requirement that all published research should […]
You don’t have to look too far to see the benefits of systematic reviews and their summary results. The well known Cochrane logo depicts a real example, highlighting the value of systematically pooling data for meta-analysis and in this case demonstrating the clear benefit of corticosteroids in accelerating lung maturation in preterm babies. Systematic reviews […]
This is the fiftieth blog in my “When I Use a Word” series. You’ve been counting, of course. To appreciate fully the range of words that imply “five” and “fifth”, “fifteen” and “fifty” requires an understanding of the phonetic phenomenon of assimilation, which is the modification of a sound in a word, phrase, or sentence, […]
My mother, who has had no short term memory for nine years, has lived in a nursing home for almost three years. I visit her most weeks, but I constantly fret if I should visit her more or less. What, I ask you, reader, is the way to calculate the right amount of time to […]
I have a new medical assistant (MA) and I’m trying to learn how to get along with him. My new MA is named Tech and I bet you have one too. I see him with nearly everyone in clinics and it seems no one can do their rounds without him in the hospital. Everybody, every […]
“Thirdly, we will post the protocol of our trials as they are started and the results of trials once they are completed on two websites which are available to the public, clinicaltrials.gov and roche-trials.com.” So states Roche in describing one element of its 2013 policy on clinical trial data sharing. Such a policy would place […]
“Thank you for remembering us and being here.” These were the grateful words of a Syrian man who had migrated to Jordan in the wake of the conflict in Syria. I was volunteering in Jordan with an American medical charity (Salaam Cultural Museum), which specialises in medical relief missions to help Syrian refugees who need […]
Week after week, NHS general practitioners receive messages about changes they should consider making to their clinical practice. These messages come from national and local guidelines, research papers, blogs, social media, and articles in the medical and lay press. It can often feel like these messages are pulling doctors in all sorts of different directions. […]
Jeremy Hunt has been talking “tough measures.” Not junior doctors’ contracts, but migrants. Overseas visitors and migrants who get sick in Britain should be charged for using A&E and primary care health services, the Health Secretary says. Until now, non-UK residents have only ever had to pay for non-urgent hospital care. Jeremy Hunt proposes that […]
The BMA’s consultation with doctors and members of the public on their views and perceptions of end of life care and the assisted dying debate is a welcome step forward. A postcode lottery of care is unacceptable and no campaign group involved in the assisted dying debate disagrees with making end of life care a […]