Richard Lehman reviews the latest research in the top medical journals […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—26 February 2018
Anya de Iongh: Are patients and carers healthcare’s untapped workforce?
On Wednesday 31 January, the dark and cold weather was a contrast to the warmth, passion, and dynamism of the contributions to The BMJ’s first Twitter chat of 2018. 800 plus tweets were sent from over 125 people on the topic of patients as partners in the workforce. The chat was stimulated by Tessa Richards’s BMJ […]
Nick Hopkinson: Making sense of e-cigarettes—Public Health England’s review of the evidence
“I switched over to vaping but someone told me they were just as bad as cigarettes so I went back to smoking again.” A depressing thing to hear in a COPD clinic, but unfortunately not that uncommon. Worryingly, the proportion of the population with the erroneous belief that vaping is as hazardous as, or more […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: The whole spectrum
Spectrum originally meant the same as spectre: a ghost. It was appropriated by Newton in 1671 to describe how sunlight passing through a prism “exhibited… a Spectrum of divers colours” (OED). The modern definition is “The entire range of wavelengths (or frequencies) of electromagnetic radiation [or] any one part of this larger range” (OED). Among […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Medical catachresis—ambiguity
Catachresis, the mistaken use of one term for another, can arise through confusibility, which I discussed last week, or through ambiguity. Ambiguity (Latin amb-, implying both ways, + agere to drive) is the capacity of a single term to be understood in two or more ways. It can be lexical (i.e. affecting a word), grammatical, […]
Compassionate leadership has a pivotal role in tackling bullying in healthcare
Bullying is a patient safety issue and often a signal of wider cultural issues within an organisation. Compassionate leadership can change culture, empower staff to speak up, and address bullying and undermining behaviours in an organisation, say Iona Thorne and Zoe Oliphant […]
Giles Maskell: Impossible errors
Hindsight bias is a real and very powerful phenomenon, and not just in radiology […]
Fiona Sim: The Winter Olympics and junk food—who cares about the health legacy?
It would be sad and ironic if the main legacy of this year’s Winter Olympics is to advance unhealthy eating and obesity […]
Tom Jefferson and Peter Doshi: RIP PubMed commons
Four years ago, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a pilot project to “leverage the social power of the internet to encourage constructive criticism and high quality discussions.” The service allowed readers to post signed comments below any of the 28 million citations indexed in PubMed and was democratically dubbed “Commons”. But earlier this month, […]
Chaitanya Haldipur: Do we need to test the competency of older doctors?
We tend to revere our older colleagues for their clinical wisdom, but this should not compromise patient care […]