Anyone writing a piece on either Israel or the occupied Palestinian territories (the official UN title) will be exposed to a wealth comments from each side with often, little appearance of understanding the other’s perspective. This was my experience following a previous BMJ blog on 5th January. […]
Juliet Walker: BMJ in the news
The social networking site Mumsnet is running a lively debate about how breast feeding rates could be increased. It was triggered by two recent BMJ research articles. You can follow the debate at this link. Meanwhile, 23 signatories have writen a letter to The Times critising the UK Government’s failure to provide women with enough information […]
James Raftery: End of life drugs – what premium? Pt 2
Having recommended NHS use of sunitinib for renal cancer, the appraisal committee of the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued separate draft guidance for consultation, recommending against the use of bevacizumab, sorafenib, and temsirolimus, which – along with sunitinib – had been rejected for renal cancer in 2008. […]
James Raftery: End of life drugs—what premium? Pt 1
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the UK drugs watchdog, is currently appraising the use of four drugs—bevacizumab, sorafenib, sunitinib, and temsirolimus—for the treatment of advanced or metastatic renal cell cancer. NICE has decided to split this appraisal in two, in order to get guidance out to the NHS as quickly as […]
Sara McCafferty on priority setting
In October last year we announced the UK Forum on Health Care Priority Setting at the 7th meeting of the International Society on Priorities in Health Care. The forum is funded by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement and is organised by the Institute of Health and Society at Newcastle University. […]
Ask not what your organisation can do for you…
As the NHS becomes more savvy about its responsibilities to the future (after all, do we really want to behave in a way that risks making us ALL patients tomorrow) we might want to consider the questions we should be asking of ourselves, or at least our own NHS organisation – be it a general […]
Juliet Walker: BMJ in the news
The BMJ received some praise this week in a blog by Revere, on the Science Blogs forum. Here is an extract: “Science journals are not just about science. They compete with each other for readership, public recognition and prestige. It used to be that in the UK publishing world The British Medical Journal (BMJ) was […]
Demand online access to your medical records, says Richard Smith
I’ve just emailed my GP asking her to give me online access to my medical records. It was quite a palaver as I couldn’t find her email address, or the email address of the practice after searching on Google, and the practice doesn’t seem to have a website. Eventually I had to ring. […]
Richard Smith on barriers to writing and getting published for authors from low income countries
While teaching two courses on “getting published” in Dhaka I had a marvellous opportunity to gather insights into why researchers from a low income country have problems writing and getting published. Most of the researchers were juniors from ICDDR, B (formerly the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh), a well established and highly successful […]
Liz Wager on the definite article
I’ve been editing papers written by speakers of languages, such as Russian and Chinese, that don’t use definite and indefinite articles (“the” or “an”) in the same way as English and mulling over the somewhat mysterious use of articles in medical terms. Some colloquial expressions award illnesses a definite article, so you might hear “He’s […]