My weekly run with a GP friend has become a breathless litany of the ways in which she feels she and her practice are failing patients. Last week, she resigned after almost 20 years as a GP partner. She left with regret—still loving the doctor-ing, but no longer feeling she can do it properly. How […]
David Kerr: Will smart pills help improve patients’ compliance?
In a recent YouTube video the NHS Confederation highlighted that by 2050 one quarter (18 million) of adults in the UK will be living with a long-term medical condition. In my own speciality of diabetes, people living with this condition are prescribed multiple classes of medications including drugs and injections to control glucose levels, two […]
Jett Aislabie: Airport noise and cardiovascular disease
Last week we published a cluster of papers on airport noise and cardiovascular disease. One US based study found a statistically significant association between exposure to aircraft noise and risk of hospitalisation for cardiovascular diseases among older people living near airports, and another found that high levels of aircraft noise were associated with increased risks […]
James Partridge: Reflections on Niki Lauda: A face from the flames
1 August 1976. A date to remember. Niki Lauda crashes, and the world stops. It stopped me in my tracks and forced me to think back. I had handed in my MSc thesis the day before and was set on a month’s holiday before starting a first—unexpected—job. Instead, it was four tough weeks reliving my […]
Kailash Chand: Health tourism does not cost the NHS vast sums of money
The government this week announced the first part of its planned crackdown on health tourism, with the Home Office unveiling a host of measures, including plans for a health levy on the visas of migrants seeking to settle in the UK. The debate around this issue often focuses on the misconception, sadly sometimes repeated by […]
Julian Sheather: To see the world in a grain of wheat
Many years ago I was walking along Kilburn High Road with a sharp-eyed naturalist friend when he spotted an ear of domestic wheat growing in one of those squares of soil cut into the pavement for urban trees—forlorn scraps of earth that litter gets stuck in, cigarettes get put out in, and dogs (and the […]
Mark Taubert: Palliative care—a “depressing” specialty?
As part of the Dying Matters Awareness Week in the UK, we were all encouraged to talk openly about dying in an attempt to be more ready for it. [1] This is something that those working in specialties like palliative care encourage and embrace. But are we truthfully that willing to talk more about our […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—14 October 2013
NEJM 10 Oct 2013 Vol 369 1395 It’s been known for at least four thousand years that the heart has two ventricles, but what they actually did was a source of confusion until William Harvey began to sort things out in the seventeenth century. In the twenty-first century, cardiologists remain obsessed with the left ventricle […]
Seye Abimbola: Polio eradication and the lens of established thought
In the introductory essay to their timely collection of ethnographic papers on global health, “When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health” (which I think everyone working in global health should read), the editors, anthropologists João Biehl and Adriana Petryna, referred to the need to interrogate the “realities that we encounter in the [global […]
Edward Davies: How health is being hit by the US shutdown
The closure of Panda Cam at the Smithsonian National Zoo may be the highest profile casualty of the government shutdown in the US, but with a third week edging ever closer, some of the emerging consequences are a cause for considerably more concern. The nature of a shutdown means a comprehensive national picture is difficult […]