Meta-analyses can be dull reads, but, when done properly, they are the best summaries of available evidence for doctors to base their decisions on. Today we see two new meta-analyses on diabetes and cancer, a new reporting statement for meta-analyses, and finally, if you have read all these, you can test yourself in the Endgames […]
Margaret Cooter: Suffering for art
It is a truth generally acknowledged that artists must suffer for their art. Also, it is widely believed (in the art community at least) that good art has its basis in the artist’s unique personal experience—and, especially among artists and critics, that a viewer is needed to “complete” the work, in that they will bring […]
Billy Boland: Some New Year’s resolutions
Earlier this week, I saw someone put up their New Year’s resolutions from last year (NYE 2013) on social media to evaluate what they had achieved. It was, in fact, rather a lot, and got me wondering how successful I am at staying committed to change. Now I’m as blindly optimistic as the next person when […]
Ted Willis: Can the NHS meet the challenges of the next 20 years?
Expenditure on our health services in the UK has been rising consistently at around 4% per year in real terms for the last 30 years. It has doubled in real terms in just over 10 years. If this trend continues, this would mean us spending the real term equivalent of £230 billion in 2030, which would […]
The BMJ Today: Baby doctors refuse to be babied
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance on home births attracted a flurry of media attention when it was first published at the end of last year, with headlines boldly announcing the safety of home births. In a letter in The BMJ, a group of fetal medicine doctors take another look at […]
Aoife Molloy: Where your baby is born—informing mothers about the choices they face
This is not a birth story blog, hear ye! However, as a doctor and a mum who’s gone through the whole process of childbirth twice in the last two years, coupled with the scores of birth stories I’ve exchanged in playgrounds and toddler clubs, and the timely release of updated guidance from the National Institute for […]
Richard Smith: Dying of cancer is the best death
Luis Buñuel, filmmaker, surrealist, iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary, thought a lot about death. “Sometimes,” he wrote in 1982, a year before he died at 83, “I think the quicker the better—like the death of my friend Max Aub, who died all of a sudden during a card game. But most of the time I prefer […]
The BMJ Today: Second UK Ebola patient identified, and how 3D printing could affect clinical practice
The BMJ has been tracking the developments of the Ebola virus outbreak throughout 2014, and it continues to be in the news as the year draws to a close. Today, Anne Gulland’s story updates us on the UK nurse who contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone and has been admitted to the high level isolation unit […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: CARE-ing for wounded warriors
From 4-6 December 2014, I had the good fortune to attend the 5th Annual Comprehensive Advanced Restorative Effort (C.A.R.E.) Summit at the Naval Medical Center, San Diego (NMCSD). I travelled to California and attended with representatives from the Medical Officer of the Marine Corps and the Navy Bureau of Medicine, and healthcare representatives of the […]
K M Venkat Narayan: Is health simply organized kindness?
My big public health hero (who is a hero to many) Dr Bill Foege once said that, “Civilization is organized kindness,” and my three days in Copenhagen made me feel that the Danish have mastered this principle as a fine science and art. When you arrive in Copenhagen, it is hard for a visitor to […]