• Advice on alcohol for pregnant women is the topic of this latest head to head debate. Mary Mather and Kate Wiles argue that current advice to pregnant women is contradictory and confusing, and they should know that “there is no threshold of alcohol consumption that is certain to be safe.” On the opposing side, Patrick O’Brien […]
Emma Ladds: Remembering to care
There is something both heartwarming and heartbreaking about the sight: an older man, so stooped he is bent almost double, pushing an empty wheelchair down the pavement. His wristband marks him out as a hospital inpatient. Step by faltering step, he totters back towards the large white building and the awaiting ward. A woman—his wife I […]
Tessa Richards: “Millennials” seek to reshape health
What better place to debate how emerging technologies are transforming healthcare than the Silicon Valley? Bathed in sunshine, the Stanford University campus is a magnet for people with the vision and skills to create new futures, and Stanford Medicine X (#MedX) attracts health innovators from a wide range of disciplines. Now in its fifth year, […]
BMJ Today: Warriors and worriers
Nobel warriors: The story behind this year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine is one of meticulous and methodical laboratory toil that led to the discovery of two important drug treatments for many millions of people in the developing world affected by roundworm parasites and malaria. Avermectin (later ivermectin) has led to the near edradication […]
Jocalyn Clark: World Association of Medical Editors’ first conference—an international affair
For its first ever conference, the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) chose New Delhi, India as the inaugural location—a reflection of the global nature of medical science and publishing, and to emphasise the organisation’s growing commitment to global health. Over three days this past week, 220 delegates from 17 countries learned about professionalism and […]
An MSF nurse recounts the horror of the aerial bombardments in Kunduz
MSF nurse Lajos Zoltan Jecs was in Kunduz trauma hospital when the facility was struck by a series of aerial bombing raids in the early hours of Saturday morning. He describes his experience. “It was absolutely terrifying. I was sleeping in our safe room in the hospital. At around 2am I was woken up by […]
Ahmed Rashid on #RCGPAC 2015: We’re in it together
At the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) annual conference in 2014, the chair of council, Maureen Baker, likened UK general practice to a dam that was at bursting point. The metaphor was a fitting one and there was a sense amongst the Liverpool audience of GPs that it captured the enormous pressure that they […]
Richard Smith: Memory—the view from the humanities
To a neuroscientist, said Hugo Spiers, a psychologist from UCL chairing a meeting at LSE last week, memory is just a physical and chemical arrangement of synapses. That’s a supremely reductionist view, the view of a NeuroNazi, said Sebastian Groes, a professor of literature from Roehampton University. Although chaired by the neuroscientist, it was the […]
The BMJ Today: When is humane discretion in the NHS an offence?
• While Jeremy Hunt prepares to tell the Tory party conference about his plans for a seven day NHS, one doctor suggests there are more immediate problems that he should address, namely overcrowding in today’s hospitals. David Oliver, consultant in geriatrics and acute general medicine, Berkshire, says: “I have a confession: I sometimes allow patients […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—5 October 2015
NEJM 1 Oct 2015 Vol 373 1307 What will happen to all the overweight children and young adults we see around us? The honest answer is that nobody knows. There has never been such a generation before in human history, and it is entirely possible that during the next decade or two they will all […]