Last February, the UK Home Office announced changes to immigration rules that would mean non-EU nurses would not have their visa applications prioritised. The decision not to add nursing to the list of “shortage occupations” reflects the government’s belief that nursing posts can be filled without international recruitment, but has received criticism from the Royal College […]
Navjoyt Ladher: Preventing Overdiagnosis 2015—winding back the harms of too much medicine
“Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left”—Aldous Huxley Today sees the start of the third annual Preventing Overdiagnosis conference, this year hosted by the National Cancer Institute in Washington DC. The BMJ has been a partner in this event since its inception and it forms an important […]
The BMJ Today: Searching for the seven day services plan
• A freedom of information (FOI) request from BMJ Careers has found that there was no formal correspondence between the Prime Minister and the medical director of NHS England on the definition of seven day services before Cameron announced his plan to create “a truly seven day NHS.” The BMA said it was astounding that […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—1 September 2015
NEJM 20-27 Aug 2015 Vol 373 726 We start with a basket trial. Say you are in a supermarket and put lots of brown things in your basket—bread, a joint of lamb, a tin of brown beans, some kiwi fruit, and a shirt. Now, out of scientific curiosity, you decide to dip the contents of […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . The first medical word
In an earlier blog I noted the impossibility of knowing which words came first, language having evolved thousands of years before written records, although claims have been made for the longevity of words such as I, we, and thou; this and that; who and what. One can, however, discover the earliest known recorded words in […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Powerhouses and workhorses
The mitochondrion was termed the “powerhouse of the cell” in a Scientific American article in 1957 by Philip Siekevitz, who died in 2009. I suspect that anyone with biological knowledge would recognise the phrase instantly, and it’s an appropriate metaphor, so it’s odd that I couldn’t find it in any of the obituaries and articles […]
Khaled El Emam, Tom Jefferson, Peter Doshi: Maximizing the value of clinical study reports
In late 2010, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) became the first regulator in history to promulgate a freedom of information policy that covered the release of manufacturer submitted clinical trial data. Under a separate, new policy (policy 0070), the EMA will take an additional step and create a web based platform for sharing manufacturers’ clinical […]
Jonathon Hope: What happens when doctors don’t know best?
A recent story of how a teenage cancer patient’s online research of symptoms was dismissed by doctors before death raises the question of where patients go to get information when the system fails to deliver. Modern medical treatments, especially for LTC’s (Long Term Conditions), can lead to a devastating, often unrecognised, or untreated symptom burden […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—27 August 2015
NEJM 6-13 Aug 2015 Vol 373 503 Outcomes in early breast cancer surgery just keep on getting better. But between 20-40% of patients who have a partial mastectomy need to undergo further surgery soon afterwards because the excision margin shows possible tumour involvement. A team at Yale decided to see if this could be averted […]
Anant Bhan: The Call to Action Summit 2015—thoughts on some key areas for discussion and action
India is hosting the Call to Action Summit on the 27-28 August in New Delhi. The summit is focused on ending preventable child and maternal deaths, and will be co-hosted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the Government of India, the Ministry of Health Government of Ethiopia, USAID, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates […]