Two weeks ago I sang the “Winkle Song” in the excellent acoustic of the Oxford Union. I’m a terrible singer, and it must have been excruciating for the audience. But I’m confident that it was less excruciating than me delivering my speech against the motion “This house believes the NHS is only safe in government […]
Domhnall MacAuley:Working Epidemi-holiday
Epidemi-holiday is what the students used to call their attachment. A bit unkind, although with hindsight I may have missed an occasional lecture or tutorial as a student myself……times have changed, and epidemiology was centre stage, at the launch of the Centre of Excellence for Public Health in Northern Ireland (June 18th), part of the […]
Siddhartha Yadav: Is it time for a global health service?
“I want to live”, read the caption to the life-size photograph of a young man attached to the dialysis machine. I had seen this photograph at a hospital gate in Nepal almost everyday for three months before I came to London two weeks ago, and it is likely that it is still there. Surprisingly, he […]
Liz Wager: Life in the fast lane
Has anyone ever studied why life speeds up the older you get? John Mortimer (in The Summer of a Dormouse – which should be required reading for any geriatrics rotation) puts it beautifully … “In childhood, the afternoons spread out for years. For the old, the years flicker past like the briefest of afternoons. The […]
Anna Donald: How to behave with chronic, serious disease?
Latest dilemma: how to behave with chronic, serious disease? I’m finding it difficult to know how to present myself. I don’t feel like an invalid, whatever that means these days. Yet I’m too tired and preoccupied to participate in the world in a normal, here-and-now way. […]
Richard Smith’s Miltonic torment – calling the NHS
I ring the Kent and Sussex Hospital to try and find out when my mother can expect to have her hip replaced. I’m worried that the hospital may have sent her a letter and that she may have lost it—as she has become very forgetful. Indeed, she’s dementing. […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Sporting excellence
Sport, medicine and royalty- what an eclectic mix, or maybe not. With some timely encouragement from HRH the Princess Royal, introducing the BMA conference Excellence in Health The Olympic ideal, mainstream medicine is starting to recognise that sport offers some very useful solutions to the growing problems of obesity and associated chronic disease. […]
Fiona Godlee: Where are all the women?
It’s only since taking on this job that I’ve noticed how few women speak at medical conferences. It seems to me that half the time I’m the only woman on the programme and the other half I’m in the audience listening to an all male line up. I don’t believe in tokenism and anyway, given […]
Richard Smith: Get with Web 2.0 or become yesterday’s person
Web 2.0—the social web—has the potential to improve global health greatly and to solve complex problems in health science—as it has already done in particle physics. I heard this message at a conference on global health in Geneva last week, but I also heard that the barriers to these potential achievements are social and cultural, […]
Anne Caley: Patient consent
The first press event I attended as a BMJ Clegg Scholar was the launch of the General Medical Council’s new guidance for doctors ‘Consent: patients and doctors making decisions together,’ at the National Theatre, London, so it was no surprise that a short play (commissioned by the GMC) was performed to reflect the situations influencing the need for new guidance. […]