I see that Edzard Ernst, the first Professor of Complementary Medicine in the UK has branded Prince Charles as a “snake oil salesman.” Snake oil is an interesting term and the derivation illustrates a broad spectrum of human nature ranging from human ingenuity, observation, and tradition, to greed and entrepreneurship. How so? Snake oil is a traditional […]
David Kerr: Healthcare apps
The latest world record for the most number of tweets being sent on a single topic is now held by the Women’s World Cup football final earlier in July this year. Apparently this particular match generated 7196 tweets per second (TPS) with even Barack Obama joining in. Other recent notable world events on Twitter include the […]
James Raftery: The government response to the value based pricing consultation
The publication of the Government response to the value based pricing consultation provides some further insight into current thinking. 188 responses are summarised to the 20 questions posed in the consultation, along with the Department of Health response to each. Of the 20 questions, seven asked yes/no questions along the lines of do you agree that X […]
Richard Smith: Scientific communication is returning to its roots
A compelling piece in the Economist argues that social media are returning news to the “more vibrant, freewheeling, and discursive ways of the pre-industrial era” and that newspapers will prove to have been a historical aberration. The same, I think, will be true of scientific journals. […]
Deborah Cohen: Amy Winehouse’s battle with addiction
When celebrity ill-health and death play out across the media, the chattering classes inevitably all have their say. With Jade Goody attention turned to cervical cancer (and created mass hysteria about the age screening should begin); and Kylie’s breast cancer, which she survived, raised its profile. With Amy Winehouse, who died this weekend, the attention […]
Martin McShane: Nietzsche and commissioning
As part of the development of our Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) the seven GP CCG chairs now have a place at the NHS Lincolnshire Board meetings. The agenda was not particularly unusual. We were required to approve the Equality and Diversity Strategy. We had a couple of papers dealing with our legacy document and the […]
Polly Stoker on Threads and Yarns – personal accounts of health and wellbeing
Senior citizens and first year textile undergraduates getting together to make material flowers is not something that you would associate with the BMJ. Much more Craft magazine, surely? This was certainly my first thought when told to cover the V&A’s one day, “Threads and Yarns” exhibition. But after looking at the brief, (and being a […]
Tracey Koehlmoss on being policy makers in our own lives
I am writing to you not from Bangladesh but rather from the Institute of Medicine’s workshop on country-level decision making for control of chronic diseases being held from 19-21 July at the House of Sweden in Washington, DC. On Wednesday I presented on “data availability and gaps in Bangladesh,” which I worked very hard to make […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 25 July 2011
JAMA 20 July 2011 Vol 306 277 As I try to write, much of America lies torpid in a heat wave approaching 40 degrees centigrade. This issue of JAMA, like last week’s, seems to suffer from a sort of anticipatory heat stroke – not one of the research papers belongs in a generalist journal, and […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Waste, uncertainty, post publication peer review and the unintended consequences of asking a question
Irrelevant, misdirected, inappropriate, or unnecessary. Reading the list of contents in some lesser known journals or abstracts at a conference, you wonder what some studies really add. Sir Iain Chalmers (The Lind Initiative), who opened the Society of Primary Care conference in Bristol, called it waste. He said that we need to focus on uncertainty […]