• “We were on the fifth floor of the Yellow Pagoda Hotel discussing radiotherapy for lung cancer at about noon on Saturday 25 April when suddenly the floor lurched and we were thrown to the ground with chairs falling. A second later the electricity failed. For what seemed an age, but seemingly was only 40 seconds, the […]
Alex Langford: Doctors should try to be politicians
In psychiatry we’re taught to consider our patients in “biopsychosocial” terms. This is useful, but the term has become a bit of cliché. If I mention it when teaching medical students I can see the lights go out in their eyes. I wonder if this is because when we analyse the roots of our patient’s […]
Richard Lehman’s weekly journal review—5 May 2015
NEJM 30 April 2015 Vol 372 1684 “Virtual Visits—Confronting the Challenges of Telemedicine” is a Perspective piece which starts full of optimism about the potential of telemedicine and then switches tack half way through. “For providers, using telemedicine may be more efficient than seeing patients in brick-and-mortar offices, since it reduces the time and space […]
Allison Trimble: A new relationship with patients and the community?
There are welcome signs that policy makers and NHS leaders are becoming more open to exploring how health professionals could work more collaboratively with patients as leaders—and support patients to be fully involved in their own care. The NHS five year forward view rightly calls for a new relationship with patients, citizens, and communities, describing […]
Richard Smith: Australians fire an editor of the MJA for the fourth time
The Australian Medical Publishing Company (AMPCo), a creature of the Australian Medical Association, has just fired another editor of the Medical Journal Australia; that’s at least four (and probably more) in my professional lifetime. Over the same period the Canadian Medical Association has got rid of two, and the American Medical Association one. The British […]
Toby Shipway: Ticking away
It is surprising how young some patients in the Northern Territory, Australia, present with medical conditions that are traditionally the preserve of older patients. I am sitting in a clinic room on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is 3:30 am and there is a patient in their late 20s in front of […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Grimm’s law
In 1998, The BMJ—which had previously been able to publish only one third of all letters received, and then only weeks or months after the articles to which they referred—took advantage of the advent of electronic publishing to publish pretty much everything immediately on the web, which they likened to a garden. Letters were called […]
Jane Barrett on experiencing the Nepalese earthquake
25 April 2015—my birthday Five British/Irish cancer specialists were in Kathmandu lecturing on a course on implementing modern radiotherapy in Nepal. We had planned two workshops, one in Kathmandu on the 24/25 April and one in Bharatpur to the south on the 27/28 April. We were on the fifth floor of the Yellow Pagoda Hotel […]
Alex Scott-Samuel: Simon Stevens—cheerleader-in-chief for NHS privatisation
Simon Stevens’ Wikipedia entry describes him as “a health manager and politician.” This is appropriate not only because he was once a Labour councillor in Brixton but also because his output (since April 2014 he has been Chief Executive of NHS England) continues to demonstrate his deep ideological commitment to a commercial insurance-based market in […]
Paul Wicks: Making sure conferences are “Patients Included”
Picture this: you’re a medical professional and are about to open the doors to a conference you’ve spent years pulling together. You’ve booked your venue, have your sponsors lined up, got top headliners to give keynotes, picked your Twitter hashtag, and have invited every industry pro to be a part of the event. In walk […]