It is not just medical authors who use metaphors. It is not just in medical writing that we find them. We—doctors and patients—use them every day. Can you describe the pain? It’s like a knife; it’s as if someone was grinding their fist into my breastbone; it was just like a heavy weight on my […]
Sian Griffiths: Inequality matters
Reducing health inequalities, even in affluent areas, needs to be a priority for government and society, say Sian Griffiths and colleagues […]
David Kerr: Health professionals’ selective mutism about research discrimination
President Donald Trump touched a raw nerve with the executive order to ban, temporarily, visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries. Amid the wide global outcry, there were also calls from international clinicians and academics, including Nobel laureates, to boycott medical meetings in America. Yet at the same time, health professionals here in the US and elsewhere appear […]
Richard Smith: Dumfries and Galloway NHS 9: Information technology—from black hole to the best in Scotland
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature article provides a summary. When I visited Dumfries and Galloway in 1999, information technology was described as “a black hole.” The hospital didn’t have electronic […]
Richard Lehman: Advance decisions—unthinkable thoughts and evidence
Doctors see people die, often in circumstances that they would wish to avoid for themselves. Dying is a part of daily life on stroke wards, major trauma units, elderly care units, and in general practice. So what happens when a proponent of evidence based patient choice brings together an eminent stroke specialist, a major trauma […]
Matthias Wienold: Counting chronic pain
Months of pain makes it chronic. Anything else is considered acute. That’s about the extent of the definition given in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-10). Trying to pinpoint a definition brings up chronic intractable pain (R52.1), other chronic pain (R52.2), and persistent somatoform pain disorder (F45.4). And this doesn’t include […]
Claire McDaniel and Daniel Marchalik: Life between two worlds
The Doctor’s Book Club Viet Thanh Nguyen The Sympathizer The thought, when written down, becomes less oppressive, but some thoughts are like a cancerous tumor: you express is, you excise it, and it grows back worse than before -Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading In many fictional Anglican accounts of the Vietnam War, the chaos of […]
Richard Smith: Dumfries and Galloway NHS 8—Mental health services
Richard Smith visited and wrote about the NHS in Dumfries and Galloway in 1980, 1990, and 1999, and this series of blogs describes what he found in 2016. A feature article provides a summary. When I first visited Dumfries in 1980 the Crichton Royal, a psychiatric hospital, had extensive grounds and multiple buildings, including a […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—20 February 2017
NEJM 16 Feb 2017 Vol 376 Periviable infant outcomes “Periviable” is a new word to me. I think I shall start using it for pieces of cheese that have been slightly forgotten in the back of the fridge. For neonatologists, it has a more serious meaning: it refers to infants born on the borderline of […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Snakes, snarks, and boojums
Last week I discussed the origins of words to do with snakes, such as serpent and sepsis, derived from the IndoEuropean root SERP, meaning to creep or crawl. However, that wasn’t the only such root; SNEG was another. And while SERP led to Greek and Latin words, SNEG led to Teutonic ones, such as snail, […]