I am not going to lie. I love planning conferences and meetings although as a serious scientist, I do not think I am supposed to think and feel this way, but I do. Why? As my Hirsch score indicates, I spend a lot of time writing papers that no one reads except for the editors […]
Richard Smith: What is post publication peer review?
I’ve been tramping from stage to stage arguing that pre publication peer is slow, expensive ($1.8 billion a year), ineffective, biased, and anti-innovatory and should be dumped in favour of post-publication peer review. But what do I mean by post publication peer review? Despite my best efforts, which are clearly not good enough, people are […]
Cheryl Rofer: Radiation, radioactivity, and other terms
A commenter requested that I explain the difference between radiation and radioactivity. These two words are often used interchangeably by reporters, but they have different meanings. Confusing them is related to other misunderstandings. Radioactivity is the phenomenon of energy emission by unstable atoms. Radiation is what is emitted. More generally, Wikipedia defines radiation as: “a […]
Martin McShane: Patients as customers
Sometimes you get a sense of cultural change: someone tells you a story and simultaneously you think “that’s a good idea” and “times they are a changin’.” […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 4 April 2011
NEJM 31 Mar 2011 Vol 364 1195 A great deal of what I report to you every week is discouragingly futile, but the conquest of serious viral disease still has about it the excitement of the great era of microbial therapeutics (c.1942-1962). Mind you, the eradication of a slow-burning virus like hepatitis C is more […]
Research highlights – 1 April 2011
“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 an epidural block improve cancer-free survival after major abdominal surgery for cancer? How did a reduction in working hours of […]
David Kerr: Angry bird medicine
“I want this company to be bigger than Sanofi-Aventis in ten years time” was the opening line from a (successful) entrepreneur I met the other day. He might be right given the resources being poured into creating technology for the healthcare market here in Silicon Valley these days. The concept is straightforward – choose a […]
Peter Lapsley: Acne on the web
It is good to be able to report good news from time to time, and this week brought with it some very good news indeed – the launch in London on Tuesday 29 March of The Acne Academy, a web-based resource both for health professionals and for people with acne. That may sound inconsequential to […]
Andrew Burd on conflict of interest
Following on from my blog on professionalism, I want to discuss conflict of interest. The term has been appearing more and more in the world of medicine. A 2009 study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine found that orthopaedic surgeons at a large annual meeting were somewhat reluctant to share details of their financial […]
Sandra Lako: Oxygen for the feeding centre
Last week Monday the final four oxygen concentrators from the “Operation Oxygen” campaign made it to Ola During Children’s Hospital. Thanks to all of you who contributed generously to this campaign. Of course, it was a bit of an epic journey to get the shipment from the airport to the hospital, but after many phone […]