As the 2015 deadline for the attainment of the millennium development goals (MDGs) approaches, a UN working group has released a draft proposal for their successors. Among the health related targets of the proposed new sustainable development goals (SDGs) are: • Reduce maternal mortality to less than 70 per 100 000 live births by 2030 […]
Jean Riley: A carer’s perspective on personal health budgets
I am Jean Riley, the mother of a beautiful 26 year old daughter who has profound and complex needs. When we adopted our daughter from an orphanage in Romania, we thought we were bringing her home to die between clean sheets, but she survived. She was 5 years old and weighed just 12lbs. She has multiple […]
The BMJ Today: Waterpipe smoking and Pfizer launches fightback
• Pfizer steps up battle to defend control of Lyrica—Andrew Jack reports on how Pfizer has launched a charm offensive on UK doctors after a barrage of criticism over action to maintain exclusive control of the main use of its valuable pain drug pregabalin (Lyrica). Despite the expiry of the drug’s original patent, Pfizer holds […]
Richard Smith: Time for GPs to be leaders not victims
General practitioners are overworked, underappreciated, and perhaps underpaid. Politicians are unsympathetic to their plight and expecting more of them. Hospital doctors dump work on them. Nurses are after their jobs. Patients are demanding and ungrateful. Bureaucrats and regulators are making their professional lives a misery. General practitioners have replaced farmers as the profession that complains […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—8 June 2015
NEJM 4 Jun 2015 Vol 372 2185 If you are the sort of exciting doctor who looks after adults with acute hypoxaemic respiratory failure, here is just the article you need. It’s a French trial comparing the effect of high-flow oxygen therapy, standard oxygen therapy delivered through a face mask, or noninvasive positive-pressure ventilation. The […]
Kenneth Collins on patient attitudes to women doctors
Hetty Ockrim qualified in medicine in 1943, and after a short spell as a general practitioner in a mining community in wartime Blantyre and some hospital experience in obstetrics, she entered general practice in a working class area of Glasgow in June 1946 in partnership with her husband. After she retired in 1989, she carried […]
The BMJ Today: Transgender care, stroke care, alcohol industry lobbying, and who was the best health secretary?
• The rise of transgender care In February 2013 Kaiser Permanente was the first mainstream US healthcare provider to open a transgender health clinic, in Oakland, California, Bob Roehr reports. Kaiser had anticipated about four surgical patients a month. But a few weeks later state regulators said that managed care organisations could no longer exclude […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: human to animal
The Rorschach inkblot test, used for psychological profiling and introduced in 1921, is well known, even if now little used. Few know of a similar test that was introduced in 1937. The “animal metaphor test” required the subject to draw the first two animals that came to mind and describe certain qualities of those animals: […]
Georg Röggla: The political culture on refugees has tilted
David Berger and Kamran Abbasi wrote an important editorial about refugees, saying that it is time for moral leadership from Western democracies. I cross the border between Italy and Austria by train every weekend. Italian, German, and Austrian police catch at least ten, and sometimes many more, migrants heading northwards out of each train. I […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word … Phonetic alphabets
So, there are phonemes and graphemes. A phoneme is a basic indivisible unit of sound, the linguistic atom. A grapheme is a symbol that represents a phoneme. Each grapheme in any well-defined system represents a single phoneme. However, there are several different systems, and a grapheme can represent several different phonemes, depending on the system […]