In Athens this week, at a meeting about Europe’s obesity crisis organised by the Greek government, talk is dominated by the expanding waistlines of Europe’s children. At the event’s smart Hellenic building surrounded by orange trees, and where lunch is veg-heavy and carb-light, it’s hard to believe that Greek’s young are ditching the Mediterranean diet. […]
Richard Smith: The history of surgery—my contribution
In his book “Adolf Hitler: my part in his downfall,” Spike Milligan modestly suggested that his part had been small. My contribution to the history of surgery is even smaller and much more ignominious, but I’m prompted to tell the tale by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh deciding to make me a fellow. […]
Jonathan M Glass: Blood taking is so much more than phlebotomy
Blood taking is so much more than phlebotomy. It’s so much more than the mere act of putting a needle in a patient’s arm. It’s so much more than filling up a syringe with the most wondrous liquid that will ever be created. It’s so much more than filling out a form and requesting an […]
David Buck: Tackling health inequalities: we need a national conversation
In one of The King’s Fund’s most popular and commented on Time to Think Differently blogs last year, Gabriel Scally questioned whether we had lost the battle to tackle health inequalities. In December last year, NHS England released a document on their approach to reducing inequalities and now Public Health England has launched, rather quietly […]
James Raftery: NICE proposes alternative for value based pricing
Recent headlines have indicated NICE’s displeasure at how it has been asked to implement value based pricing. The stories are based on a paper, “Value based assessment of health technologies,” which was considered by the NICE board on 22 January. The paper proposed two main changes: a) an alternative approach to the Wider Social Benefit […]
Wilson Cheng: Misguided messages on safe male circumcisions
Three large randomised clinical trials that took place in Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa were published in 2007, and showed that medically performed circumcision is safe and can reduce men’s risk of HIV infection by 60%. The World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS therefore recommend safe male circumcision (SMC) as an essential part of HIV […]
David Payne: Books for the incurably curious
When John Keats switched from medicine to poetry he found a different way of healing people, according to Andrew Motion. Motion, a former poet laureate, attributes his interest in medicine and literature to the Romantic poet, whose biography he wrote in 1997. Unveiling the shortlist for 2014 Wellcome book prize in London this week, Motion, […]
Julian Sheather: Ugandan anti-homosexuality legislation: bad law, bad science
For all the fanfare that headline science can generate, it is usually quiet science that arouses my sympathies. Carefully uncovered facts can settle like welcome oil, stilling the troubled waters of moral panic and vengeful politics. I am more drawn to the Victorian naturalists who posted songbirds to each other, carefully mapping variation, than to […]
BMJ Journals research highlights—24 February 2014
BMJ Journals research highlights is a regular round-up of research papers appearing in the BMJ Journals. Thorax If clotters fibrose what do bleeders do? Evolution has ensured that numerous genes associated with a profibrotic state have survived through the generations. These genes might lower the risk of peri-partum bleeding, but they increase the risk of […]
Colin Brewer: Is addiction a disease?
Last November, The Spectator held a debate on the proposition that drug addiction is not a disease. Former BMJ columnist Theodore Dalrymple was one of the proposers (I was invited to join him but couldn’t be there), and the motion was carried by a substantial majority. Apart from telling us what many ordinary people think […]