Junior doctors are clearly extremely angry. Some 15 000 junior doctors recently protested against changes in their contract. As there are about 55 000 junior doctors in England, that’s the equivalent of about 16m of the general population protesting a change. That would be a revolution. But why are junior doctors so angry and what should they do about their […]
Gutkha, a chewing tobacco product responsible for oral cancer and several other negative health effects, has been banned in 26 states and six union territories in India since 2011. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) issued the Food Safety and Standards (Prohibition and Restrictions on Sales) Regulations in 2011 (2.3.4). This prohibits […]
Since my last blog (“Mental health issues among medical students“), I have been thinking about how mental health issues affect doctors. If such issues arise among medical students who have not yet stepped into the working world, what about doctors who have dedicated decades of their life to the medical profession? Through looking into this […]
You might not have heard about the humanitarian emergency that began to unravel in Western Sahara last week. The Saharawi people live in exile in one of the world’s harshest climates. They cope well with dry desert heat, choosing to stay inside during the hottest part of the day and sometimes covering themselves with blankets […]
As part of The BMJ‘s mission to make health information more available to our readers, I am employed to create infographics, often interactive, for our website (and sometimes the print journal too). Earlier this year, I worked on The BMJ‘s investigation into the sugar industry and its links to UK government advisory bodies. This development blog […]
As I write this, the strongest hurricane ever detected in the Western Hemisphere is approaching the coast of Mexico, where my son lives. It may have nothing to do with climate change (or disruption, as I prefer to call it), but it probably does. Recently we heard that the permafrost is thawing faster than ever and […]
Earlier this month Canadian news sources, including the CBC and the Toronto Star, reported on Dr Navindra Persaud’s success in securing unpublished data from Health Canada about the safety and effectiveness of Diclectin (a widely used treatment for nausea during pregnancy). To its credit, the country’s drug regulator handed him thousands of pages of data […]
The expression magic bullet is due to the German medical scientist Paul Ehrlich, who was seeking a cure for syphilis. He wanted to find chemical substances with specific affinity for the pathogen. The one that eventually proved effective, which Ehrlich named Salvarsan, was the 606th of a series of arsenical compounds tested, although the 914th, […]
The iconoclastic psychiatrist Thomas Szasz said that mental illness was metaphorical, not real, because mental diseases lacked biological substrates. The absence of a substrate predisposes psychiatry to overdiagnosis and avoiding overdiagnosis is psychiatry’s biggest challenge. This challenge has been taken up by Allen Frances in Saving Normal. Like Szasz, Frances writes in cultured, erudite prose. Unlike Szasz, […]
I appreciate Timothy Caulfield’s exploration of the “straw men” set up in many a discussion over integrative, complementary, or alternative medicines (CAM for short). However, I think we need to take the argument one step further. As he makes clear, many of the arguments proposed by “CAM-ers” against “conventional” medicine also apply to and undercut […]