Captain Hawkeye Pierce of the 4077th MASH unit is one of the great fictional doctors. Battered by the US army, and brutalised by death and disfigurement in a war far from home, he made mistakes, he was human, he cared. We laughed, cried, and loved him. Alan Alda and the rest of the cast of […]
Richard Smith: Where is the value in medical care?
We have an old dog we love, and my wife and I have been debating whether to take him to the vet. Will it be worth it, asks my wife. The dog is coming up to 13 (91 in “human years”). He has a large lipoma. Some of his teeth are bad. He may be a […]
Kevin Watkins: Universal health coverage—back on the global agenda
A few years ago, I was at a rural hospital in Eastern Province, Zambia. Doctors were trying frantically, and in the end unsuccessfully, to save the life of a five year old boy. He died from acute respiratory tract infection. But what really killed him, as one of the doctors told me afterwards, was poverty: […]
The BMJ Today: Sick notes for “World Cup fever” and Obama pushes health benefits of carbon cuts
With the 2014 World Cup in Brazil fast approaching, hundreds of workers in China have been struck down with a serious bout of football fever. As Jane Parry reports, an online vendor on Taobao.com (China’s equivalent to eBay) has sold 440 fake sick notes in just one week, as scheming workers seek to avoid work […]
Gwyn Samuel Williams: “Les Miserables” examiners
I recently had the single pleasure of undergoing exit exams run by the Royal College of Ophthalmologists and could not help but wonder at how examiners could on the whole be easily categorised into certain subtypes which readers may find fascinating. This phenomenon has certainly has not been observed before in published world literature. First, […]
Muir Gray: Population health—what’s in a name
Suddenly the word population is everywhere. The Oxford University Department of Public Health is now the Department of Population Health Sciences, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement has added population health to form its triple aim, the American Hospital Association talks about a second wave of hospitals with population health as their theme. Furthermore, Public Health […]
Desmond O’Neill: Some illuminations on caring for older people
Gothenburg is a handsome city with imposing stone and brick buildings, simultaneously sober and ornamented, set among green hills falling to not one but two archipelagos. It was particularly striking during the unseasonably fine weather that greeted the 22nd Nordic Gerontology Congress last week. This leading regional gerontology conference in Europe is biannual, broad in […]
Simon Poole: NICE, statins, data, and doctors
In June 2009, the World Health Organization declared the swine flu outbreak to be a pandemic. Most of us will recall the grave concerns expressed by politicians and the media about this potentially fatal illness. I remember at this time being called out late on a Friday evening to a patient suspected to have contracted […]
The BMJ Today: Cozy conversations—coffee breaks and integrated care
If, like me, you have struggled with defining “integrated care,” then Richard Vize’s Feature on the subject is definitely worth a read, if only to be reassured that it is, as you suspected, an “imprecise term.” Despite the lack of a concrete definition, most people, Vize says, agree that integration will be better for patients. But […]
David Berger: Stoushes, rorts, and cuts in Australian healthcare
To Europeans, Australia resembles the kind of alien planet so beloved of 1950s American science fiction writers. Strange, bounding animals hop across an arid, unfamiliar landscape, dotted with queer trees and even queerer, multi-coloured birds. The indigenous inhabitants of this planet called these birds “kookaburra,” although their meaning was allegedly misinterpreted when the colonists thought […]