Final year medical students in the UK currently face an uncertain future as they wait to find out what foundation school place they have been allocated following the muddled “situational judgement test” (SJT). They can take cold comfort in the fact that at least they do not have to do the All India Centralised Entrance […]
Rachel Hendrick on the “Selling Sickness: People before Profit” conference
The conference “Selling Sickness: People before Profit” was held in Washington, D.C. on 20 – 22 February 2013. It was organised by Leonore Tiefer, a scholar and activist in sexuality, and Kim Witczak, an activist who became involved in pharmaceutical drug safety issues after the death of her husband, Tim “Woody” Witczak, in 2003, as […]
Jeremy Hill: Teaching family medicine in Bangalore
“Please come to Bangalore” was the invitation. In my day job I am a British general practitioner with special interests in dermatology and medical education—so what was I doing teaching family medicine trainees in Karnataka? The “Resolve more, refer less” initiative was started by Vinod Shah in 2006 and offers a distance learning diploma in […]
Amir Attaran on tackling counterfeit medicines
Vienna—Efforts to rid the world of dangerous medicines have been given a boost by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. Delegates of UN member states, police, manufacturers, academics, and pressure groups gathered recently at UNODC headquarters in Vienna to discuss the present and future criminalisation of “fraudulent” medicines, which increasingly threaten the international […]
Paul Glasziou: Can’t buy me love … but can money buy me clinical quality?
When the Beatles claimed that they “don’t care too much for money, money can’t buy me love,” they did not provide scientific references. While we might hope that statements of fact or causation in popular songs are based on a systematic review of the controlled trials, my guess is that we are a long way […]
Elizabeth Loder: How medical journals can help stop disease mongering
It would be hard to collect a more fascinating bunch of topics or people in a hotel conference room. The 2013 Selling Sickness conference recently held in Washington, DC was among the most thought provoking and just plain interesting conferences I’ve been to in a long while, and I go to a lot of conferences. […]
Readers’ editor blog: Comments, comments everywhere
Yesterday morning the BMJ’s press officer needed to locate a rapid response about Tamiflu from Peter Doshi, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. Doshi’s response accuses the drug’s manufacturer Roche of “all talk and no action” following its promise to share full clinical study reports (CSRs) for 10 treatment trials. Our Tamiflu open […]
Richard Smith: Research and the Arab Spring
The Arab world, despite its proud intellectual history and some of its countries being among the richest in the world, produces little research. Now the Arab Spring has shaken the whole region, and researchers in the Arab world think that the time has come to relate to the social earthquake and to promote research for […]
Tracey Koehlmoos: Beating on the glass ceiling
In July 2012, Anne Marie Slaughter, who is a professor at Princeton, resigned from her high profile position as the director of policy planning for the US State Department in Washington in order to spend more time with her teenage sons. Her resignation was accompanied by her well circulated article, “Why women still can’t have […]
Pritpal S Tamber: How digital health will humanise care
I have always been troubled by the “disconnect” between clinical practice and real life. Clinical evidence recommends a standard intervention, according to research, but it often flounders in the messy heterogeneity of the real world. This week I found myself worried about replicating this “disconnect” in the online world, especially with the addition of gamification, […]