NEJM 25 September 2014 Vol 371 1189 This week we start with mepolizumab. Before we know it, we encounter losmapimod. Enough is enough. I think the World Health Organization should convene an extraordinary meeting of the International Nonproprietary Names Committee with the sole purpose of Stopping Silly Names. Medical practitioners are serious people and they […]
How viable is a system of “verbal autopsy” to determine future health policy in a country where most deaths occur outside hospitals, are not attended by doctors, and are not medically certified? Meera Kay finds out more about India’s recently completed Million Deaths Study and the training of non-medical field workers to record written narratives, from […]
When paradigms shift it’s always disconcerting. Thomas Samuel Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 and it’s become a decisive text on the nature of science. He used the term “paradigm” to describe the belief system that underpins puzzle solving in science. Far from discovering any absolute “truth,” normal science progresses routinely within […]
Medicine can do great things, but at today’s thebmj.com things look rather bleak. Nine out of 10 people who are transferred to hospital with cardiac arrest don’t survive to discharge. Some argue that most of these ambulance transfers should not happen at all; others disagree. It’s not about the cost, as Americans have calculated the savings […]
The news that a Cochrane Review has concluded that Avastin (bevacizumab) is as safe as Lucentis (ranibizumab) to treat patients with wet age related macular degeneration (“wet AMD”), along with other studies that have shown the two drugs have broadly the same level of clinical effectiveness, comes as no surprise to those of us who have been […]
Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, illustrated the state of public health at last week’s Public Health England conference by showing the audience his assistant’s lunch deal bought on the way to Warwick. A cheese and pickle sandwich is not bad, but why include the sugary drink and packet of crisps? He then pulled […]
Linda is 58 and has been diagnosed with breast cancer. She would have preferred not to have surgery but was convinced by her surgeon that it would be the best option. After her operation, the hospital contacted her to apologise as she had not had breast cancer. She’d been misdiagnosed. An inquiry, legal action, and […]
No sooner had I finished reading my colleague’s blog about taking a global view of health, than I found myself reading Jocalyn Clark’s analysis, which questions where the efforts for solutions to global health issues should be focussed. She states her case clearly: good health is interlinked with the economy and the “medicalisation of global health […]
The chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, recently called for more support for mental health services in her annual report, which highlighted how mental illness led to the loss of 70 million working days last year—an increase of 24% since 2009. Of particular importance is the report’s call for improved support for young people with mental […]
Listening to the news here in the UK this past week, you would find it easy to forget that there is a world outside this small island. But visit bmj.com and you get a different perspective, with a range of international stories. First, to the Netherlands, where Tessa Richards describes how Radboud University Medical Centre […]