Colorado became the first state in the United States to allow the sale of cannabis for recreational use on 1 January 2014. Colorado residents aged 21 years or older may now purchase up to one ounce of cannabis from designated stores around the state (non-residents may purchase up to a quarter of an ounce). Washington […]
Richard Smith: NCD among the bottom billion
My main job these days means thinking about non-communicable disease (NCD) in low and middle income countries (LMIC), but a paper in the Lancet suggests that I may be thinking in the wrong way. It’s always hard to shift your mental model dramatically, but perhaps I need to do so. I and the 11 centres […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—13 January 2014
JAMA Internal Medicine Jan 2014 Vol 174 I was amazed at the richness of the contents of JAMA Intern Med this week, but then I sadly realized that the journal has changed from being a fortnightly treat to being a monthly one. I had been warned this would happen; it’s a natural consequence of online […]
Carl Heneghan: What could cause you to absorb water better than water?
At the same time that a campaign is aiming to cut sugar in food by up to 30%, our sports stars are readily guzzling oodles of sugary drinks. Well, the advertising standards have had enough: sports drinks adverts have been banned for false claims. The Advertising Standards Authority, in the UK, ruled that the campaign […]
Richard Smith: Work from the 1950s that can help us reform healthcare today
One of the questions that occurred to many after the public inquiry into Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust was “How could nurses and doctors behave like that and not do anything?” Similar thoughts arise after multiple examples of patients in care homes being abused and hover in the recurring questions of “Whatever happened to old fashioned […]
Alison Spurrier: What can we learn from the 1950s to improve patient care?
As a frontline nurse for nearly 40 years, I was intrigued to read Isabel Menzies Lyth’s 1960 paper on why a nursing service in a general hospital was on the point of breakdown. My main reaction was that the paper reflected less something universal in healthcare and more the particular circumstances of the time when […]
David Miller and Claire Harkins: Can the influence of the alcohol industry be curtailed?
Reviewing the myriad of connections in “Under the influence,” Jonathan Gornall’s account of the subversion of public health policy by the alcohol lobby, shows just how important complex “webs of influence” are in pushing forward corporate interests. To think clearly about how the tide can be turned for public health […]
David Nutt: Win-win for industry and public health—the UK alcohol industry could take French lessons
One of the paradoxes of current UK alcohol policy is the remarkable differences between ours and that in France. In the UK we have seen the use of, and damage from, alcohol increase very significantly over the past two decades whereas in France the opposite is true, alcohol harms have been falling, and are now […]
Anita Jain: Predatory publishing and open access fees
At the meeting of the Indian Association of Medical Journal Editors [IAMJE] in Delhi recently, a session on predatory or non-legitimate journals stimulated considerable discussion. A sting operation where 157 open access journals accepted a spoof research paper with obvious flaws for publication has brought the problem to the fore again. Some allege that the […]
William Cayley: Evidence based medicine—it’s time to be critical
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” goes the aphorism—and so would say any who trust complacently in the exponential growth of “evidence based” this or that in medicine. Des Spence, for one, disagrees. In a recent BMJ editorial he argues evidence based medicine (EBM) is broken, it is “now the problem, fuelling overdiagnosis and […]