Bruno Rushforth: The jailer

Who’d be a psychiatrist? The emotional burden of caring for patients presenting in real distress; trying to negotiate a way forward when dealing with someone with a skewed sense of reality; potentially life and death risk assessments on a daily basis; general lampooning from medical colleagues… No wonder psychiatry’s not such a popular choice among […]

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Pat Sidley on South Africa after Mbeki

South Africa’s newly elected president, Mr Kgalemo Mothlante, acted swiftly to end an era of ugly controversy and extreme incompetence in the health ministry by appointing a highly regarded, new health minister and effectively demoting the previous one, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who implemented all of former president Thabo Mbeki’s eccentric AIDS beliefs, which has laid […]

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Joe Collier: Coping with conflicts and uncertainty

Recently I met a student who had been in a Problem Based Learning (PBL) group that I had ‘facilitated’ in 2006. During the PBL we will have spent around six hours together each week for a full trimester (so around 72 hours contact time in all) and I was interested to know if he could […]

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Aliya Razaaq on learning about dementia

Baroness Warnock, one of Britain’s leading ethical experts recently talked of the “right to die” of patients with dementia. She called for more research into the illness, in order to establish whether patients with dementia were mentally competent. Thus when they reached a certain point in their illness, they could make a decision of whether […]

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Julian Sheather on paying attention to art, science and nature

It is a long time since I studied art history, but if I remember rightly the invention of photography is said to have contributed to the exhaustion of the realist impulse in the visual arts. It sounds plausible: the documentary impulse, the desire faithfully to record what is actually there, which has always been close […]

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Tauseef Mehrali on the frontline as a GP registrar

After years of blogging in the cyber-wilderness, the BMJ has welcomed me into its warm embrace by giving me a little blogging corner all of my own. From this virtual soapbox I’m hoping to chart my efforts to navigate the murky waters of GP training as I kick off a year-long stint as a GP […]

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Birte Twisselmann at the annual meeting of the AGMS

Some months ago I was invited to the Anglo-German Medical Society’s 49th annual meeting, to be held in Cologne on 11-14 September 2008. As a German national who trained as a technical editor with the BMJ and who translates medical papers from German into English in her spare time I accepted. […]

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