“Longevity is one of the greatest curses introduced by the scientists,” wrote Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Harold Action in 1961, a few days after his 58th birthday. I read this a few days after I had given a talk on the pandemic of NCD (non-communicable disease) where I emphasised that the pandemic was […]
The infamous Delhi gang rape led to an outpouring of public outrage across the country. It signalled a tipping point in people’s angst with the growing pervasiveness of such incidents. Shaken by the brutality of the act, people took to the streets to question the state of affairs of women’s safety in India. With relative […]
When learning biology for my school exams (longer ago than I imagine but not so many years ago) I clearly remember that atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) was rounded down to 0.03%. If I gave that answer today it would be marked as incorrect. According to the US government’s Mauna Loa laboratory, atmospheric CO2 has now […]
NEJM 30 May 2013 Vol 368 2059 Don’t read this paper, but rejoice that it exists. It’s proof that cancer genomics is the best kind of science—incomplete, dynamic, complex, and full of hope. It is also open to all who can make use of it: “We identified at least one potential driver mutation in nearly […]
Last month, women’s rights activists in Mumbai took up a protest along the lines of the “Occupy Men’s Toilets” campaign in China, and demanded more public toilets for women. Last year it was headline news that India has more temples than toilets, so the need is clearly not a new one. In addition to diseases […]
The third Basic Surgical Skills Course for Palestinian trainees at Augusta Victoria Hospital (AVH) in East Jerusalem concluded on a hot afternoon last week. The major achievement this year was the involvement of senior Palestinian surgeons from West Bank, East Jerusalem, as well as Gaza, in delivering some of the teaching sessions. All the teaching […]
“Although they are trendy money spinners, best evidence shows little effectiveness”—An attention grabbing subheading to an editorial by Nic Maffulli in the BMJ commenting on an intriguing randomised controlled trial (RCT) from New Zealand on the use of autologus blood injections in treating Achilles tendinopathy. It doesn’t work. […]
The future of junior doctors’s careers in Portugal has recently been all over national television. It comes just a few weeks after I blogged about the potential brain drain of doctors in Portugal. It has all come to head because of a recent conference organised by the “Association of Junior Doctors” and the Faculty of […]
It is hardly surprising that hard pressed GPs have reacted angrily to unjustified criticisms by the secretary of state for health that they are to blame for faults within the NHS. It is a gross simplification to suggest that removing responsibility for out of hours care from GPs is the main cause of increasing attendances […]
On 23 and 24 May the final workshop of the OPEN project took place in Freiburg, Germany. OPEN—To Overcome failure to Publish nEgative fiNdings—is an EU funded project to study publication bias in medical research. It brings together research groups from Germany, Italy, France, Croatia, Spain, and the UK, and it aimed to assess the […]