Corruption is “the abuse of power or position to acquire a personal benefit.” For individual doctors corrupt behaviour would include ordering unnecessary tests, prescribing irrelevant medication, or performing unwarranted operations in order to make money. Such corruption may be commonplace in many countries where doctors charge patients real money for their services. Surely such things […]
Athene Donald: Learning lessons from Tim Hunt
Many years after his Nobel Prize winning discoveries in cell cycle regulation, Tim Hunt made some inappropriate and indefensible comments. It seems like the whole world wants to discuss those comments. Or rather, it’s as if they want to demonise the man and forget the totality of his life. Scientists are supposed to like evidence. […]
Sioned Gwyn on sexism and women in medicine
Sir Tim Hunt, British biochemist and Nobel Laureate, had until recently enjoyed relative anonymity outside of scientific fields. Recently, at an international conference of science journalists in Seoul, he was invited to speak at a meeting for women in science and delivered as part of his speech an extraordinarily ill judged few sentences which have […]
Karsten Juhl Jørgensen: Why do five recent reports on breast screening reach conflicting conclusions?
Since 2012, five collaborative efforts to quantify the benefits and harms of breast screening have been published. These are the UK Independent Review, the EUROSCREEN Working Group series (both 2012), the Swiss Medical Board report (2014), the updated IARC/WHO Handbook, and a report from the Research Council of Norway (both 2015). The approach to put […]
The BMJ Today: Dementia and doctors at the frontline
• Saying the “D” word The global population is rapidly ageing and, as a result, dementia is now a major concern worldwide. Robinson et al summarise current evidence and best practice in the diagnosis and early intervention in dementia care, with helpful tips for GPs who are often the first point of contact for patients […]
William Cayley: To doctor is to diagnose
I appreciated Richard Smith’s recent discussion of mental models—too often, I think, we simply carry on with practice as usual (or, “life as usual”) without sufficient critical attention to the paradigms on which we rely to organize our thinking and doing. I would beg to differ with him, however, on the argument that “diagnosis is […]
The BMJ Today: Global access to health services
• The WHO and World Bank have released a report showing as many as 400 million people around the world do not have access to essential health services. The report, published in the year of expiry of the United Nations’ deadline on its millennium development goals, found that while good progress had been made in some […]
Jocalyn Clark: The surprising links between child marriage, climate change, and health
It seems obvious that child marriage—marriage before 18 years of age—would be bad for girls’ health. It risks injury and death due to early pregnancy and abuse, and usually means girls stop going to school. But the link to climate change is less conspicuous. A new Human Rights Watch report, focused on Bangladesh, which has […]
Richard Smith: “Diagnose, treat, and cure” is largely dead
I don’t suppose that the people who taught me at medical school thought that they were promoting particular mental models. They were trying (and sadly failing) to make me the best doctor they could. But just like the man who didn’t know he’d been speaking prose all his life, they were promoting mental models. One […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—15 June 2015
NEJM 11 June 2015 Vol 372 2307 Here at last is a study that shows some benefit from out of hospital cardiopulmonary resuscitation. It’s not a randomised trial, since that would be considered unethical, or at least heretical. Instead it comes from interrogating a big Swedish database of outcomes following cardiac arrests outside hospitals. “CPR […]