With considerable media fanfare the BMA has declared its opposition to the NHS providing homeopathic remedies. Not entirely a surprise, given the BMA’s explicit support for evidence-based medicine. The consensus seems to be that in so far as homeopathy works it works because of the placebo effect. In brief, patients who anticipate benefits from a […]
Are you brave enough to feed back when you see poor behaviour? I wish I was—because feedback can lead to improvement, whereas silence allows the poor behaviour to continue. I’ve been thinking about feedback after talking to some medical students, but let me begin with my own failures. I go regularly with my mother on […]
Death and the quest for new life seem unlikely companions. Last week’s headline read “Inquest told woman who died in car fire was ‘devastated’ over failed IVF.” The other side of the bonny baby glossy media success story is the suffering of fate. Infertility pushes couples to extremes. It can become an obsession, a single […]
NEJM 1 Jul 2010 Vol 363 11 So far, the trials of carotid stenting versus endarterectomy have sent out mixed messages, but the CREST study sends out a message of equipoise. The triallists decided to recruit asymptomatic patients mid way through, to bump numbers up to 2502, but the main population was fairly homogeneous and […]
If I were to ask you what the primary care trusts of Gateshead, Lambeth, Rotherham, Liverpool and Tower Hamlets had in common, what would you say? […]
Why has the NHS been so much slower to use information technology than other sectors and what might be done to encourage it to speed up? These were questions addressed yesterday at an NHS Confederation seminar, but we were urged to talk opportunity not barriers and to avoid answers like change the culture and the […]
Sand Cliffs (Faleze de nisip) Director: Dan Pita Showing at the Curzon Mayfair cinema, London, on 3 July 2010 as part of the Romanian Film Festival in London, 2-4 July 2010 Rating: *** Links between doctors and corrupt government members have been previously explored in films such as The Last King of Scotland (Review BMJ […]
One of the great pleasures of living in London is that a friend can email you (in this case from Salamanca) and say: “Hey, did you know Clay Shirky, a world famous internet guru, is speaking at LSE in 60 minutes?—and you can drop everything, go, and be thrilled. I knew about Shirky from having […]
Today is my last day in Freetown. I’m heading back to London tonight. It seems hard to believe that the UK is a mere six hour flight away. Perhaps more so given our unusual method of getting to Freetown last August; my boyfriend and I travelled overland for six weeks in an old Landrover through […]
It’s easy to say that the NHS should do better, not more – but what does that actually mean? Well, it means investing resources (money, people, buildings…) in healthcare which delivers outcomes that people both want and need. Unlike many private organisations whose objectives may be a little simpler (e.g. maximising shareholder value, obeying the […]