Welcome to a series of blogs on sustainable healthcare that look at health, sustainability, and the interplay between the two. The blogs share ideas from experts across the healthcare field, some of whom are speaking at a major European conference looking at Pathways to Sustainable Healthcare in September 2013. More about the […]
Eva Dumann: So this is victory—treating adolescent idiopathic scoliosis
One of the great things about being a BMJ Clegg scholar is unlimited access to BMJ articles, coupled with enough free time to read about the weird and wonderful topics that the “real” medical world concerns itself with. Sometimes, however, the findings are not so pleasing. A recent Clinical review on adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) […]
Readers’ editor: Authors “ignoring” readers
Joginder Anand, a longstanding reader of the BMJ, wants to know how we can encourage authors to respond. In a recent email he asks: “Should the BMJ not make it mandatory for the leading authors of all articles to respond to criticisms or requests for clarifications? My question back to him is how? What would […]
Martin McKee: Coalition u-turns and how the EU is leading the way on smoking legislation
Is the UK coalition government losing its touch? It has just revealed how weak it is when faced with demands from its own supporters in big business and, specifically, in the alcohol and tobacco industries. Firstly, it announced a u-turn on the pledge to introduce minimum unit pricing of alcohol made personally by the prime […]
Yusef Azad: The changing face of injecting drug use in the UK
One of the major successes in UK HIV prevention is the low rate of HIV amongst people who inject drugs (around 1%). However, there are a number of developments that threaten this success. Newer demographics of people are starting to inject drugs and the government has made worrying comments which appear critical of opioid substitution […]
Domhnall MacAuley: On being an editor
Why be a medical editor? Pippa Smart, with whom I run a course for medical editors, asked me recently if she could reproduce something I had written. As a strong advocate of open access—free access and unrestricted reuse—I had no hesitation in saying yes. I wrote this paragraph in 2010 to be included in “Why […]
Krishna Chinthapalli: The birth and death of the Liverpool Care Pathway
Birth of the pathway A few miles west of Mont Blanc, eighty years ago, Marie Curie arrived at a sanatorium in the foothills of the Alps to spend her final days. But they were not pleasant: “At times [her daughter] had to leave the room, because she could not bear to see her mother in […]
Soumyadeep Bhaumik’s review of Indian medical papers—16 July 2013
A sudden burst of massive untimely rainfall and the consequent floods in Uttarkhand last month has killed thousands of people and affected millions more. The good news is that there have been no public health disasters, fingers crossed not yet at least. The Uttarakhand floods remind us that the issue of climate change is having […]
Richard Smith: Race relations in Florida
Those of us outside the US think of holidays, sun, Disney, and orange juice when we think of Florida. We don’t even think of it as part of the slavery, blues, and cotton South, and so I was shocked to read in the magnificent, Pulitzer prize winning book, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the […]
Deon Louw: The doctor, the environmentalist, and the gospel of sustainable healthcare
Let’s be honest. Lester Brown sounds like the name of a musician from the Deep South. In fact, Brown is an acclaimed scientist and I had the pleasure of attending one of his lectures. He has 25 honorary degrees and has published more than 50 books on how human systems (e.g. food systems) react to […]