Each Tuesday at our morning meeting, we suggest ideas for the print journal’s “picture of the week” before it goes to press. If today was a Tuesday, I would propose this image (copied below) by GP David Shepherd, which was submitted as a rapid response yesterday to Margaret McCartney’s article, How to undermine general practice. “Our […]
Liz Allen: The economic case for medical research
Former US president Bill Clinton achieved a lot in the White House. He presided over the longest period of peacetime economic growth in American history, he signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, and he was the first Democrat since Franklin D Roosevelt to win re-election. Yet when asked last month to recall his greatest accomplishment, […]
The BMJ Today: Return of the Patient’s Journey and a history lesson from Richard Lehman
Two years ago, GP Michael Frank Harris discovered a right inguinal swelling while looking in his bathroom mirror. He writes about what happened next in the return of our Patient’s Journey series. Harris surprised his haematologist with an alternative diagnosis and together they took a leap of faith—deciding on treatment for stage I follicular lymphoma, […]
Angela Coulter: Person centred care—what works?
“There’s no evidence that it works.” In these days of evidence based medicine, that’s a real clincher—a good reason to avoid a treatment or procedure that offers no proven value. But can we take it on trust that those making this assertion have a good grasp of the evidence, or could this be simply an […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—16 June 2014
NEJM 12 June 2014 Vol 370 2265 Obstructive sleep apnoea is often a result of weight gain, and unfortunately, once it is established, losing weight does not reduce it. But losing weight has benefits of its own (he sighs wistfully), as this trial of weight reduction, continuous positive airways pressure, or both for OSA demonstrates. I […]
The BMJ Today: Is EBM broken? Then how about a nice cuppa
Is evidence based medicine broken? That’s the question that Greenhalgh et al are asking in this Analysis article. From inside The BMJ, with our attempts to shed light on unpublished data, it’s easy to become jaded about the whole medical-industrial complex, and say that yes, it is. But recently, while editing some videos collected as […]
Tom Jefferson and Peter Doshi: EMA’s double U-turn on its Peeping Tom policy for data release
Yesterday’s announcement that the EMA Management Board may have adopted a less obstructive policy to releasing clinical trial data comes hard on the heels of widespread coverage (see here, here, here, and here) and protests (by the EU Ombudsman, us, us again, Trudo Lemmens, the ISDB/AIM/ Nordic Cochrane Centre/ Medicines in Europe Forum, German IQWiG, […]
James Partridge: The face of a warrior for the human spirit
To be chosen as the subject of the first People’s Portrait was, as Simon Weston put it, a very humbling experience. But as he showed consistently throughout the beautifully crafted BBC film about the making of the portrait, he is a delightfully humble man. But not in the way you might imagine I mean. Not […]
Julian Sheather: The man whose mind exploded
Drako Oho Zarhazar has anterograde amnesia, a rare brain disorder that has left him unable to form new memories. The distant past—episodes from before the traumas that disabled his mind: a motorcycle accident; his car crushed beneath the wheels of a monster truck—remains to some degree with him, but he can hold almost no memory […]
The BMJ Today: The rising tide of obesity
Obesity rates are rising worldwide. According to the CDC, in the US, there has been a dramatic increase in obesity over the past 20 years. A similar phenomenon has been observed in other countries. Obesity related conditions (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, hypertension) are also increasing: around a third of adults in England now have prediabetes, and […]