“Oh, you do medical humanities,” they say, before making excuses to change the subject or sidle away from me. Of course, that’s if they’re being polite. My friends just make fun instead. During this year of my studies, I have intercalated in a degree in biomedical science. This culminates in an academic project. While my […]
Anya Sarang and Tim Rhodes: “The last way” clinic: why tuberculosis remains an incurable disease in Russia
Yekaterinburg city tuberculosis (TB) clinic on Kamskaya Street specialises in the treatment of TB/HIV co-infection. We first visited in November 2009, as part of an ongoing qualitative study undertaken by the Centre for Research on Drugs and Health Behaviour at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and funded […]
Mike Knapton and Tom Pierce: Doctors should take a leading role in tackling climate change
The recent Cambridge University Leadership Programme looked at sustainable development in health services worldwide. It was an opportunity to hear the evidence and arguments which were both persuasive and alarming. The link between population growth and our reliance on a carbon-based economy, leading to rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the consequent changes […]
Richard Smith: Confusing animals and people
My Kenyan friend thinks that Americans are mad. He worked for a while in an American hospital, and one day a colleague disappeared for a few hours. When he came back in the afternoon he said that he’d been to his father’s funeral. “He didn’t even seem sad,” said my friend. “In Kenya when a […]
Andrew Moscrop: Road traffic injuries in Pakistan
Lying on his back, a trail of his drying blood scuffed across the dusty concrete floor, the young boy was alive and screaming. As he drew his knees up to his chest I watched his right foot flop and flap from the end of a mangled segment of shattered bone, shredded muscle, and tattered skin. […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Cycling spo(o)ked
At the Commonwealth Games I met the cyclists. At the end of each day we grouped together in the television room to watch the edited highlights of the Tour de France. Towards the end of the Games, I went to watch the road race and was hooked. As the sun went down on my first […]
Tessa Richards: Who is defining patient-centred care?
If the reality of patient care matched the rhetoric of the average “patient-centred” NHS provider it wouldn’t have been necessary for NICE to produce formal guidance on how to improve the patient’s experience of care, a recent BMJ editorial suggests. Nor would an international literature review of the indicators used to measure patient-centred care have […]
Martin McShane: Large scale change
Over the last few weeks my reading and listening has made me consider whether we are at a crossroads in understanding and agreeing the purpose and nature of healthcare. Let me start with this quote from the evaluation of the 16 integrated care pilots that were supported by the Department of Health: “Over the past […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 10 April 2012
JAMA 4 Apr 2012 Vol 307 1394 A special dread settles on me this week as I know I am going to have to write about breast cancer screening. But let’s leave the dread question of whole-population mammography for later, and consider the add-on benefit of annual ultrasound or single-screening MRI in selected high-risk women. […]
Richard Smith: Time for medicine to move from “why questions” to “how questions”
A famous paper published in 1993 by Alan Berg of the World Bank asked why the world had done poorly at feeding everybody. Berg had two answers: nutritionists do the wrong kind of research and train people in the wrong way. I heard of Berg’s paper from Maria Isabel Ortega Velez, a Mexican nutritionist, at […]