The first week of Donald Trump’s presidency was bookended by two definitive and controversial actions. The first, on 23 January, was the reinstatement and expansion of the “Mexico City policy”—a piece of legislation that prevents NGOs that receive federal funding from providing abortion counselling. There has been a lot of debate, particularly in global health circles, […]
I recently read a BBC article that provided an alternative to the regular press rhetoric on NHS performance this winter; namely, that the fact the NHS has been able to perform as well as it has this winter is a miracle in the face of growing pressures and budgetary cuts. The article stressed that one reason […]
NEJM 9 Feb 2017 Vol 376 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Remember MERS? It was the talk of the town five years ago when it was first identified in Saudi Arabia. There were a number of deaths and some evidence of human to human spread, causing widespread concern. But although it can be a nasty and […]
“Resistance” is an evocative term common to the natural and social sciences where it denotes the act of resisting, opposing, or withstanding. In the so called hard sciences it is easily identified and measured. A physicist, for example, will gauge resistance in ohms; in medicine, the intrarenal arterial resistance index (RI) is used to calculate […]
Donald Trump has only been in office for a few weeks and already the first steps to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have been taken. This pre-emptive strike; a demonstration of Republican machismo, lays the groundwork for more regressive health policies. Trump spent much of his political campaign lambasting what many consider Obama’s highest achievement […]
On 18 January 2017, the issue of the human rights of agricultural workers with no land of their own and other people working in rural areas was placed on the agenda of the European Council Working Party on Human Rights (COHOM) for the first time. As a researcher studying how the human rights regime is […]
Kerala, a state in southern India, has made impressive improvements in its population’s conditions of living. Despite having a low per capita income, its indicators of social development—such as the human development index (0.84), infant mortality rate (12/1000 live births), sex ratio (1084 females to 1000 males), and female literacy rates (92.07%)—are comparable to those […]
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. Annan is the third biggest town in Dumfries and Galloway, in the East of the Region, and so the least remote. […]
A reader of The BMJ has written to the editor to ask for clarification of the terms “sepsis” and “septicaemia”. The answer could be said to be rather creepy. The IndoEuropean root SERP meant to crawl or creep. The Latin verb serpere meant to glide or crawl, to wind along like a snake, to extend […]
On Tuesday of this week I hosted a dinner at the Royal College of Psychiatrists for a group of medical students who are part of our “Pathfinders”—a scheme to give interested students some support and contacts to get them started in a career in psychiatry and especially psychiatry research. Also attending were other psychiatrists interested […]