I have met clinicians and patients in many parts of England in the last five years and here is a list of the type of questions that cannot be answered. 1. Is the service for people with seizures and epilepsy in Manchester better than the service in Liverpool? 2. Who is responsible for the headache […]
Richard Smith and Melanie Lovell: Should doctors respect patients’ requests not to know?
What follows is an email debate between Melanie Lovell, a palliative care physician in Sydney, and Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and chair of Patients Know Best. The debate began when Richard asked if Melanie had seen the editorial that he had written with two colleagues arguing that we need to take a […]
Peter Bailey: The King’s Shilling
David Cameron and Andrew Lansley assert that a large majority of GPs support their bill. Is it true? Where is the evidence? Is the profession lined up in willing support, eager to take on responsibility for managing the NHS through its greatest crisis? Perhaps we all took the King’s Shilling while in our cups in […]
Peter Lapsley: Eat your heart out, Hippocrates
Hippocrates (c.460 BC–370 BC) is often described as “the father of modern medicine.” Wise and knowledgeable though he was, he was, in truth, a late-comer. The medicine of the ancient Egyptians dates from the beginnings of the civilization in about the 3rd century BC to the Persian invasion of 525 BC and was remarkably sophisticated […]
Kaz de Jong: What is a traumatic experience if you live in Mogadishu?
The woman in front of me in the clinic looked worried. Her child, a small creature, was struggling to resist efforts to measure his weight. She was worried about him and his safety in their war-torn home city of Mogadishu, Somalia. While waiting, we talked about her conflict related experiences of the past 25 years. […]
Nicola While on the free movement of doctors in the EU
Revising the rules on the free movement of professionals throughout Europe is one of the cornerstones of the European Commission’s strategy to make the EU more competitive and less bureaucratic. In its “Europe 2020 strategy,” the Commission aims to promote smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth, and has highlighted the need to promote intra-EU mobility to […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 5 March 2012
NEJM 1 Mar 2012 Vol 366 777 There is no JAMA this week, and the best things in the New England Journal come right at the start. Whether you are a British GP contemplating another set of humiliating idiotic directives and the imminent destruction of the NHS, or an American physician wondering how your crazy […]
Trish Groves: TED 2012 Full spectrum
Chris Anderson, TED’s curator, told us on day 1 that this would be the most ambitious TED conference yet and, for its organisers, the most terrifying because speakers had been invited to find new, powerful ways of extracting the most out of their talks. Each had been urged, said Anderson, to “find the prism that […]
Trish Groves: TED 2012 Only connect
“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” (EM Forster Howards End) Here at TEDActive—the younger, funkier sister of California’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) annual conference—Forster’s 1921 theme […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Northern Ireland happiness
People in our wee country are the happiest. Unexpected, perhaps, given the long history of violence and social unrest. But, people can be happy in the most difficult circumstances and happiness isn’t always related to the social or material environment. Almost impossible to define, we often only recognise true happiness when its gone. So, it’s […]