One early August evening, Heather Logghe, a US surgical resident, logged onto Twitter and posed the question, “Is #ILookLikeASurgeon next?” Inspired by Isis Wenger, who sparked the recent #ILookLikeAnEngineer viral campaign, Heather reflected on a recent blog featuring Nikki Stamp, a cardiothoracic surgeon in Australia, noting that surgery also remained a male dominated profession bound […]
The BMJ Today: The migration crisis, vaccine safety, and assisted dying
• The migration crisis and health in Europe Providing preventive care to “irregular migrants”—that is, those who do not have full legal status—as opposed to waiting until a condition must be treated as an emergency, not only improves people’s health but could also save money. The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights studied this in the settings […]
Richard Smith: Disciplined for being human
“Doctors need to bring something of themselves to their patients, to make a personal connection, if medicine is to be a healing science,” writes an anonymous obituarist, somewhat portentously, at the end of an obituary of Oliver Sacks. But if you’re a nurse you might be disciplined for such a human healing action. […]
Trish Groves: How research data sharing can save lives
Everyone’s been missing a trick. The whole debate on sharing clinical study data has focused on transparency, reproducibility, and completing the evidence base for treatments. Yet public health emergencies such as the Ebola and MERS outbreaks provide a vitally important reason for sharing study data, usually before publication or even before submission to a journal, […]
Mike Kendall: What do the new NICE guidelines mean for people living with type 1 diabetes?
As a patient involved in the development process, I hope that these guidelines for Type 1 diabetes in adults have a powerful, positive effect on the lives of many living with type 1 diabetes in the UK. The guideline acknowledges how infuriatingly individual and fickle type 1 diabetes can be for each person, and how […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—7 September 2015
NEJM 3 Sep 2015 Vol 373 895 The cool new look is beige and fat. Understanding beige fat may be the beginning of the end of obesity in humans. Or it may disappear and be forgotten as soon as the next panacea offers itself on the pharma catwalk. The NEJM clearly thinks it is important, […]
Tim Ballard: Will a tax on sugary drinks work?
Channel 4 recently aired a documentary by Jamie Oliver called Jamie’s Sugar Rush. Following on from his successful advocacy aimed at improving the nutritional quality of school meals he has now moved his attention to the obesity epidemic and in particular the part that sugary drinks play. In addition to obesity the documentary aims to […]
Georg Röggla: Refugees and civil society
The migration crisis has reached Central Europe. About 10 000 migrants arrived in Vienna within a few hours on Saturday, most of them on their way to Germany. The situation is dramatic: Four children, including a baby girl, were among 71 migrants found suffocated in a truck on a highway just outside Vienna last week. […]
The BMJ Today: Three views on the “weekend effect”
• Updated analysis of weekend hospital admissions Nick Freemantle and colleagues report on an update of their 2010 study of all NHS hospital admissions in England which showed that admission at the weekend (Saturday and Sunday) was associated with an increased risk of in-hospital death compared with midweek admission. Their new analysis on 2014 data […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Medical onomatopoeia
Seeking early medical words in the Old English dictionary known as the Epinal glossary, I was not surprised to find that one of the dozen examples I unearthed was onomatopoeic: iesca (yesk or yex, a sob, a hiccup, or the hiccups). Perhaps I should have been surprised that there weren’t more; after all, some early […]