WHO have cancelled Mugabe’s goodwill ambassador role, but this was an uncharacteristic misstep by the WHO DG […]
Robert Mugabe is an improbable Goodwill Ambassador for Health
Christine Stirling: Move over RCT—time for a revised approach to evidence based medicine
We are stifling our capacity to use research evidence for patient centred outcomes by privileging RCTs […]
Tom Treasure: The birth of heart surgery
The beginnings of heart surgery are known from the published record of momentous “first” operations on congenital and acquired malformations, retold in the biographies and reminiscences of the surgeons responsible for them. In contrast in my recent book “The Heart Club” I present a very different account; it is a consecutive contemporary record, in real […]
Kishore Jayakumar: Is it time to expand immunisation mandates in the US?
Though vaccines are among the most successful public health interventions in history, childhood vaccine refusal among parents is increasingly prevalent in the United States. Vaccine refusal increases the risk of developing a vaccine-preventable disease both for unvaccinated children and fully vaccinated individuals living in the area. According to the 2015 National Immunisation Survey, only 91.9 […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Tectonic shifts
When I equated the quantum leap to the big bang, I overlooked another term borrowed from another science: tectonic shift. The adjective tectonic is older than modern geology; it comes from the Greek, meaning pertaining to building or construction in general (OED). We are familiar with it for its application to the tectonic plates underlying […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Modes of speech: can and may, must and should
Which is better: “Aspirin can cause Reye’s syndrome” or “Aspirin may cause Reye’s syndrome”? The answer lies in a consideration of modal verbs, also called modal auxiliaries. Modal verbs are used to express modality, in other words, they modify the meaning of a verb, indicating how to interpret it. The main (or central) modal verbs […]
Protect public health by making water services resilient in a changing climate
Safe water, drainage, and sanitation are essential for public health—we need to make these services resilient […]
Richard Smith: Searching for an effective system to manage the world’s biggest killer
Hypertension is the world’s leading cause of premature death, ahead even of tobacco and obesity, and most of those deaths occur in poor countries. Yet the health system in most of those countries is unable to help people with hypertension. Tazeen Jafar, a nephrologist and professor of health services and systems research at Duke-NUS Medical […]
The collapse of Trumpcare and the rise of single payer
Single payer bills signal a new era in American healthcare politics […]
Niall Dickson: The CQC’s annual report should cause everyone to sit up and listen
The CQC’s annual State of Care report for 2017 says future NHS quality is precarious—but is anyone listening? […]