Medicine used to be fun. I could spend time chatting to patients and listening to their ideas, concerns, and expectations. Hopefully, despite their predicament I could bring them hope that we, the “medical profession,” could make a real difference. Has the digital age shattered this ethos? William Olser taught us that the key to a diagnosis […]
Choosing Wisely around the world: Professionalism as a force to reduce unnecessary care
The Choosing Wisely campaign emerged in the United States with the intention of galvanizing physicians to reduce unnecessary care. While excess care is costly, physician leadership on this problem through Choosing Wisely is not focused on dollars and cents. Rather, the campaign is focused on providing quality care and avoiding any harms associated with overdiagnosis and overtreatment. […]
Is India’s national health policy geared towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals?
The adoption of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) in 2015 marked a shift in the global development agenda from the earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) era. SDGs are particularly important for the health sector, since they reaffirm the premise of the Alma Ata declaration that health cannot exist in isolation. SDG’s intrinsically link health with actions […]
Liz Salmi: Tomorrow’s patients will demand greater transparency and openness
I began blogging about my experience as a person living with brain cancer after I had my first symptom—a grand mal seizure—after my 29th birthday in July 2008. Unlike a traditional journal, my blog has no privacy settings. People from around the world can read and learn, through my experience, about what it is like […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Translational research—a further model
In the past two weeks I have used the metaphor of crossing bridges in discussing translational research, and have derived a model of it from definitions in the Cooksey report, while pointing out problems with the model. Firstly, it assumed a strict dichotomy between basic and applied research, whereas the idea of translation implies no […]
Tessa Richards: Words that annoy, phrases that grate
What is acceptable or unacceptable medical terminology in today’s world, asks Tessa Richards. […]
Richard Smith: A call for action to treat the untreated million children a year with heart disease
The Indian state of Kerala is aiming to reduce infant mortality from 12 for every 1000 live births to 8 by 2020 and 6 by 2030, and in order to achieve the target it will have to develop services to diagnose and manage children with heart disease. That is because infant deaths from infection and […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Elephants, skeletons, and spectres
There are a lot of elephants in a lot of rooms these days. The popularity of an elephant in the room in general English has increased ten-fold since the early 1980s. It is a forceful metaphor for something everyone knows about but no one wants to talk about. It makes a good, eye-catching, title for […]
Jane Fisher: Decriminalisation would have to work for all women seeking abortion care
The Abortion Act prompts doctors to discuss abortion with women who have fetal anomaly, writes Jane Fisher. […]
Daoxin Yin: Can high-tech shared bikes put China back on two wheels?
China used to be “a kingdom of bicycles,” but their popularity has waned in recent years. Daoxin Yin looks at what it would take to bring bikes back […]