We arrive in Haiti during the second night after the earthquake, and the scenes of destruction and devastation are overwhelming. We are silent as we went our way through the street rubble and collapsed buildings to set up our emergency surgical facilities. An estimated 200,000 are already dead and a similar number of casualties lie […]
Louise Warburton: It seemed a small request
It seemed a small request; please would I phone a patient who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and had been thinking of breast reconstruction. I had made myself available for such advice because several months ago, I too had to have a mastectomy and breast reconstruction. This would be the first of many […]
Mike Clarke: COMET features on International Clinical Trials Day
May 20 2010 was International Clinical Trials Day, a celebration of the clinical trial as a means of improving health and wellbeing. This was the sixth such day and it seeks to raise awareness of the importance of research to health care, and highlights how partnerships between patients and healthcare practitioners are vital to high-quality, […]
Martin McShane: Shared Care
Over the last year NHS Lincolnshire has instituted a clinical cabinet, a meeting where professionals from across the health and social care system meet to grapple with an important theme and give commissioners (PCT and Clusters) insight, advice, and direction. This month’s theme was shared care. From inception, our professional executive chair insisted that the […]
Birte Twisselmann: Web publishing – less is more
Stanford University’s HighWire Press, webhosts to the BMJ and some 1400 other scholarly journals, convened its spring meeting in Palo Alto, California, on 7-8 June 2010 in warm, sunny weather on the stunning university campus. Some 200 US and UK publishing types attended, and the two days were filled with a real buzz from interesting […]
Julian Sheather: Why am I frightened of doctors?
Reader I am not a shrinking violet, not a wuss or a whimp. When friends seek to describe me, pusillanimous is not the first adjective they choose. For all its many faults I have a mind and I tend to speak it. So why oh why am I still frightened of doctors? […]
Andrew Burd: What is cosmetic surgery?
Following on from the recent local discussion about safety in the cosmetic surgical community in Hong Kong I have been asked to give a talk on “Cosmetic Surgery Trends and Developments” in a meeting organized by our local medical association. […]
Sara Robbins: Bringing health care to those in desperate need on our doorstep
It’s Wednesday afternoon, and I head over to the Project:London (P:L) clinic where I volunteer as a support worker. I begin my first social consultation with Prisca*, a South African woman who has been living in the UK for five years. She begins telling me her story, explaining why she has come to the clinic, when she […]
Joe Knight on health scares and teenagers
Being a teenager and being healthy are two things you hope can go hand in hand. However while your mind is tirelessly trained by the finest educators in the land, your body sits idly by, forever being stuffed full of the sugar and caffeine that keep the ever busy brain working. […]
Joe Collier: Price regulation offsets UK spend on anti-flu drugs
Everybody now knows that while the outbreak of swine flu reached pandemic proportions, the disease itself was less severe than first feared. Illness and death certainly occurred but the original figures never materialised. Despite early estimates suggesting deaths in the UK alone of between 3,100 – 65,000, recent evidence indicates that the figure will be […]