“Poisonous hip implants ‘putting thousands of British patients at risk’ as medical watchdog launches investigation,” a Daily Mail headline announced today. It followed on from a front page splash in the Sunday Telegraph which claimed that “metal-on-metal” hip devices are “even more dangerous than previously thought.” This isn’t a new story—but finally people are waking up […]
Richard Smith: Death festival: day two
The second day of the festival began with Jude Kelly, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre, explaining that the festival is about “reshaping our ability to look death in the eye, and to have a relaxed way of talking about death.” In a secular age, she says, we don’t have ways of congregating to […]
Richard Smith: Death festival: day one
The Southbank Centre, London’s art centre on the South Bank of the Thames, is holding a festival of death. The aim is “to look death in the eye…to confront mortality head-on through music, theatre, literature, and debate.” […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 30 January 2012
JAMA 25 Jan 2012 Vol 307 373 Here’s the kind of study that’s all too rare in the medical literature: an important interventional trial that is not funded by pharma. The question is whether giving a proton pump inhibitor can improve outcomes in poorly controlled childhood asthma: a reasonable hypothesis to test, since a high […]
Research highlights – 27 January 2012
“Research highlights” is a weekly round-up of research papers appearing in the print BMJ. We start off with this week’s research questions, before providing more detail on some individual research papers and accompanying articles. Does treatment with GLP-1R agonists lead to weight loss in patients who are overweight or obese? Can vitamin A supplementation lower […]
Deborah Cohen: Roche responds
It’s worrying that the quest to evaluate the evidence underpinning major public health decisions feels like a game of chess—how do you try to anticipate the next move of your opponent and how might they bide their time to stay in the game. And so the next instalment of what can only be dubbed the […]
Richard Smith: What has feminism done for global health?
The Lancet, the leading journal for global health, has mentioned feminism only twice in its 189 years . The BMJ hasn’t mentioned it at all. So that looks like some evidence that feminism has had no impact on global health, but all three speakers at a meeting at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical […]
Anne Gulland: No news is bad news: how the papers filled their health pages over Christmas
The period between Christmas and 1 January is a quiet one for UK news outlets. The government and most major organisations hold back big announcements until the new year; and if there are no breaking stories about murders, natural disasters, or wars, filling those (albeit diminished) news pages and television and radio bulletins can be […]
Andrew Burd on hot potatoes in Hong Kong
There is no doubt that Hong Kong is going through an identity crisis. Those who have had teenage children will appreciate the mood swings and the irrational emotionality of the conflicted child; anxious to grow up but reluctant to face the reality of adulthood. I came to Hong Kong two years after the handover/return of […]
Edward Davies: Hysteria. There, I said it.
Oh, behave. I got some grief for saying on a previous blog that some of the criticism of health reform was a bit “hysterical.” I felt a little chastened. I now feel utterly justified. I just did a Google search for “NHS Arab Spring” which gave me almost 1,000,000 results. I saw the phrase used […]