It is 11.59 pm and there is an eerie silence. All afternoon, sirens were wailing relentlessly outside my window, pushing through Red Sox traffic to reach Boylston Street ten minutes round the corner where, at around three o’clock, two explosions hit the city. Today (15th April 2013) is Patriot’s Day, a commemoration of the opening […]
David Lock: Organ donation and presumed consent—not a complete answer?
Organ donation presents a unique problem for those concerned with the rationing of medical treatment. Unlike almost any other area of medical care, the constraint on supply of NHS medical treatment is not money to fund services, but the supply of donated organs. The NHS will provide all the funds needed to undertake transplant operations, […]
Paul Glasziou: From mummified evidence to living EBM—a few tools
On a tour of WHO headquarters, in Geneva, I wandered past a vast cellar of shrink wrapped unused and unread guidelines. It occurred to me that, given around 7% of clinical “facts” become outdated each year, these guidelines were rapidly passing, or already past, their “use by” date [1]. While glossy journals, 500 page systematic […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—15 April 2013
JAMA 10 Apr 2013 Vol 309 I try my best, dear Reader, oh I do. When I see an issue of JAMA devoted to Genomics, I don’t just sigh deeply: I brew the coffee and get stuck in. This is the future and it needs to work; the doctor of tomorrow will see this as […]
Richard Smith: Memories of Thatcher
My early years at the BMJ were very bound up with Margaret Thatcher. I started as an assistant editor a month before she became prime minister in 1979 and was appointed editor just before she was dethroned as prime minister in 1990. Whatever I write about her will evoke fury in some quarter, and despite […]
Domhnall MacAuley: No easy prescription for physical activity
April 6th was World Physical Activity Day—did you miss it? Probably good news. Best to keep doctors out of it. Let me explain: I believe passionately in the benefits of physical activity, have researched it, published, editorialised, practised, and promoted it at every opportunity. The benefits of physical activity are undisputed and physical activity is […]
James Raftery: Value based pricing—NICE to have key role
The response of the government to the House of Common’s health committee’s report on the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has provided clarification both on value based pricing and NICE. The committee’s report, published in January 2013, expressed concern that arrangements for value based pricing due to be introduced in January 2014 […]
Readers’ editor: What is a “BMJ man (or woman)?”
In the early 1990s I spent the weekend at the home of a friend’s parents, both of them GPs. I’d recently started work as a political news reporter on the GP magazine Pulse. “Never read it,” said my friend’s dad. “I’m a BMJ man through and though.” He’s now retired, but whenever I visit a […]
Richard Smith: Is email work?
“Email is not work. It’s a distraction.” So said a fierce, bearded lecturer at a talk I attended recently. Is he right? I have every reason to think him wrong because I tend to start every day by answering my emails—after looking at the BBC News website, Twitter, and Facebook, always in that order. I […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—8 April 2013
JAMA 3 Apr 2013 Vol 309 1355 With the runaway success of the Alltrials petition, it may seem as if everyone in the world has now agreed on the need to share every bit of data relating to every medical device and product used on millions of patients every day. In reality, this is going […]