I was working next to a world renowned psychic and spiritual healer in the healing sanctuary of a music festival. This made me nervous: my own training in complementary medicine before medical school gave me no such special powers. Many of the people I treated had the customary battle wounds of a sedentary office bound […]
Stephen Ginn: NHS Summary Care Record
People living in London and four other strategic health authorities are currently receiving information in the post about the rollout of the NHS Summary Care Record (SCR) system. SCR is part of the NHS Care Records System, a large UK government IT project which aims for more effective sharing of patient records between NHS services. […]
Behrooz Astaneh on a scientific embargo
A recent email from a friend of mine triggered me to write a post on the WAME forum about a relatively old scientific embargo issue. Some days ago one of my friends who is an orthodontist asked me to help him to submit one of his articles in the related field to a reputable journal. I suggested […]
Jon Brassey on the TRIP database
Searching for clinical information isn’t easy, I know, I’ve been doing it on an almost daily basis for over ten years. I’d like to think that I’m pretty good at searching across a number of clinical databases, I even helped create one – the free TRIP Database. But search engines can be a real pain. […]
Harvey Marcovitch on publication-to-knowledge time – far too long
Theresa Harding’s long and tedious journey through increasing disability to a diagnosis of a treatable condition is a very moving one. Many readers will be as concerned as the BMJ patient editor Peter Lapsley in his rapid response to the article. […]
Peter Lapsley on hospital gowns and dignity
Among all the media reports of the NHS being destroyed by target-setting and endless reorganisation, and of patients being put last – or nowhere at all – in NHS policy-making, it was good to learn that, from this month, those dreaded hospital gowns are to be consigned to history, with newly designed ones being introduced […]
The COMET initiative
Systematic reviews of randomised trials are hampered by inconsistency in the patient outcomes assessed across the different studies. Many meta-analyses have to leave out key studies because the relevant outcomes were not reported. Much could be gained if each medical condition had an agreed minimum set of core outcomes that were measured and reported in […]
Domhnall MacAuley: goodbye health visiting
Baby clinic was always the happiest and busiest afternoon of the week. After routine medical checks, there was a chance to share the excitement of the new baby and build on a relationship for the future. Our practice has had an open access baby clinic, where mums can see both the doctor and health visitor […]
Joe Collier on: When does “1+1+1 = 1” become “1+1+1 = 3?”
A key component of medicine is the diagnosis. The principle process we use for reaching a diagnosis is to identify the patient’s signs and symptoms and then look for a unifying explanation. Based on the explanation, we then label the disease. So, where an illness has three key features (viz oedema, albuminuria and hypoalbuminemia as […]
What we’re reading 5 March 2010
In the BMJ editorial office, we often come across interesting articles, blogs, and web pages. We thought we would share these with you. Some are medical, some techie, and some just general. […]