The common pejorative names for peddlers of ineffective medicines relate to advertising. A quack, wrote Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary, is “a murderer without a license”. The origin of “quack”, originally “quacksalver”, is unclear. One explanation is that they “quacked” or boasted about their salves. This has a feeling of folk etymology about it, […]
Richard Smith: Learning from ruins
Whenever I wander through ruins I imagine people centuries hence picking through the ruins of my world and wondering about the people who lived there. We can learn from ruins, and as I walked through those of the Mayan city of Chichen Itza last week I learnt not only about the Mayan world but also […]
Sally Marlow and Sadie Boniface: From “plucked out of the air” to grounded in evidence—UK drinking guidelines reviewed
This week the Chief Medical Officer has published new guidelines on drinking alcohol. Was a revision necessary, and if so why? The old guidelines were two decades old, and we know more now than we did then about what diseases alcohol contributes to, and about any health benefits. Also, the old advice was confusing at […]
Graham Prestwich and Roland Valori: Management opportunity—Job title: Patient
We are seeking motivated and determined project managers with a keen interest in healthcare to join our team of health professionals to improve the health and wellbeing of our population. You will be working on a voluntary basis. There is support available, but be warned, this is variable, and sometimes sparse and difficult to find. […]
BMJ in the news: round-up of 2015
From the Ebola crisis to the weekend effect on hospital death rates, The BMJ publishes articles that receive extensive media coverage from top global news outlets. Here we present some of The BMJ’s biggest stories in 2015. […]
George Gillett: Medical schools should teach students to combat disease, not terrorism
The winter holiday is a busy time for medical students. In anticipation of another year of clinical rotations, we’re faced with the annual onslaught of online training activities to prepare for our upcoming placements. These tasks invariably feature the relatively tedious topics so-cherished by our course organisers; health and safety, data protection, and manual handling. Yet […]
Jørn Olsen et al: The future of birth cohorts
The origins of some common chronic diseases lie early in life, often before birth. This observation, championed by David Barker, has spurred several countries to start national pregnancy or birth cohorts in order to identify early determinants of chronic diseases. [1] Some efforts have been successful, for example in Norway, Denmark, and Japan there have been exciting early […]
Ian Forgacs: Will senior doctors and the public support junior doctor’s strike action?
Support for their junior colleagues from senior doctors has thus far been strong. What surely must have been almost the entire consultant body at the Royal Free Hospital (505 of them) wrote to The Guardian in their favour, the presidents of (almost) all the Royal Colleges were also behind them in their letter written not […]
Jessamy Bagenal: Junior doctors strike action—frustration and mistrust
Junior doctors received a text on Monday 4 January informing them that the negotiations over the junior doctor’s contract had ended. Industrial action in England is going to proceed. It left one feeling somewhat flat. The first day of industrial action will be on the 12 January when only emergency care will be provided for […]
Zahra Al-Asaadi: Medical volunteering in the refugee crisis
The current refugee crisis and mass migration into Europe is the biggest since World War Two and is probably the greatest humanitarian challenge of the century. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that at the end of last year almost 20 million people worldwide were living as refugees. I had been particularly […]