Edinburgh University’s Global Health Academy has together with Stanford University created a Global Compassion Initiative, and, as I walked last week towards the launch of the initiative in one of Edinburgh’s most elegant houses I wondered exactly what compassion is. I wondered too whether you can teach and promote compassion. What I was sure about […]
Last week Andrew Brown, obituaries editor at UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, gave a great talk to me and other colleagues at The BMJ about the Telegraph‘s approach to chronicling the lives of assorted establishment figures, rogues, villains, entertainers, and clergy. The Telegraph’s obituaries are legendary, and Andrew described how the title had historically used […]
NEJM 10 Sep 2015 Vol 373 997 Are any readers looking for a nice short term research project in evidence based medicine? Here you have it. On 1 September, the MATRIX triallists reported the results of a trial which randomised 7213 participants with an acute coronary syndrome to receive either bivalirudin or unfractionated heparin prior […]
Last year, government cuts to basic health services for refugees—especially those meant for women and children—outraged Canadian physicians to the point of petitioning the courts to intervene. The Federal Court agreed with the physicians, and in ordering the restoration of these services, it described the conservative government’s policy as “cruel and unusual.” Indeed, the past […]
The swine flu epidemic caused by a new strain of the influenza A (H1N1) virus became a public health problem in India in 2014 for the second time in the last decade. In 2009, it was categorised as a pandemic by the Indian government and all public health centres were advised to take strict measures […]
Although I found only one onomatopoeic word (iesca, a sob, hiccup, or belch), among early medical words in the Old English dictionary called the Epinal glossary, another, throtbolla (throat-boll, the Adam’s apple), of which more next time, was a translation of an onomatopoeic Latin word, gurgulio. The Indo-European root GARG was an echoic representation of […]
The BMJ covers the refugee crisis with four recent articles. • Kamran Abbasi, Kiran Patel, and Fiona Godlee state that offering asylum is a minimum standard of civilised society. They say that Europe’s refugee crisis is the greatest test of humanity faced by the world’s rich countries this century. […]
UK general practice receives an unprecedented level of scrutiny to verify that quality is maintained. We have the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) to incentivise GPs to provide better quality care; we have NHS England Area Team visits for contract breaches; we have Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspections; we have appraisals and revalidation; and, depending […]
Sometimes it takes a visual cue, a short reference, or a good analogy for one to grasp the philosophy of a place. This was certainly so when I visited Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, South India. As a Ghanaian born, British trained ophthalmologist, I have always had a yearning for developing country eye care work, […]
It was estimated that nearly one million new cases of cancers will have been diagnosed in India by 2015, of which 0.67 million people are expected to die of conditions related to cancer. Cancer of the mouth and lungs in men, and cervix and breast cancer in women account for more than half of all […]