I headed to the Hunterian Museum in London to see the UK premiere of a film about donating bodies to medical science. It was raining, no red carpets were to be seen, and rather than thin people in high fashion, the only skeletal creatures on show really were skeletons. I wasn’t expecting a great evening, […]
Martin McShane: Where has all the money gone?
I am lucky because I work with a Director of Finance who likes to make things clear and easy to understand. Last week he went through what is happening to the money for 2011/12. He wanted to help my team, well all of us really, understand where the money has gone. […]
Alison Donnelly on the aftermath of the floods in Pakistan
Whenever I drive through the province of Sindh in southern Pakistan, I’m struck by the vast expanse of once-thriving farmland that now lies barren. Standing water from last year’s catastrophic floods has ensured there will be no harvest here – in Pakistan’s agricultural heartland – for some time to come. Six months after the flooding […]
Richard Smith: What is “implementation research” and whatever happened to GRIP?
I’m trying to organise a workshop on “implementation research,” and I find that the concept is as hard to pin down as poetry. Might you be able to help me? The overall idea behind implementation research is not hard to identify. It’s about trying to make sure that the results of research are applied in […]
Julian Sheather: Oh for a beaker of mirth
Being a self-sacrificing soul I recently enrolled myself in a critical piece of public health research: I gave up alcohol for January. If appetite is the new front-line in health, if our desires are becoming the death of us, then self-restraint must be the new penicillin, and, to squeeze the analogy a little, the Petri-dish […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 31 January 2011
JAMA 26 Jan 2011 Vol 305 391 Stroke medicine grew up in the 1990s: like heart failure medicine, it shone welcome light on a large and neglected group of patients with organ damage who had been written off as unsalvageable. This was a Very Good Thing in itself, but its proponents then went on to […]
Peter Lapsley: I can see clearly now…
Never one to shirk my fieldwork as patient editor of this esteemed journal, I pottered along to the Moorfields Eye Hospital outreach clinic in Ealing yesterday morning to have the cataract removed from my right eye – a short, un-traumatic, and near-miraculous Patient Journey. […]
Rachel Wake: A glimpse into “Choleraville,” Haiti
There is a Haitian proverb which goes “deye mon, gen mon” – beyond the mountains there are mountains. Consider Haiti’s history for a moment – tainted by slavery, witchcraft, civil unrest, disease, and natural disaster – and its meaning begins to be realised. I arrived in the capital, Port-au-Prince as a medical volunteer two weeks […]
Research highlights – 28 January 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 vitamin D supplementation improve bone mineral density in healthy children? What are the perspectives of people living and dying with […]
Vidhya Alakeson on US healthcare reform
The theatre of politics has been on full display in Washington of late. Last week, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed in March last year that, among many other things, will ensure that more Americans have health insurance coverage. The vote was largely symbolic for the […]