The festive season is behind us and many people’s thoughts are now turning to the new year and New Year’s resolutions, which for many may include an aim to cut back on the amount of alcohol they drink. NICE recently released a draft consultation on liver disease. As a society, we have an awkward relationship […]
Dave deBronkart: Can a compelling graphic lead to better care plans?
This graphic was published last year with little fanfare. Recently it appeared on social media in patient circles, and was immediately met with dozens of shares, comments, tweets, and retweets: • “Smart way to communicate chronic disease burden.” • “One for clinicians to ponder if they think they understand the burden of Type 1 diabetes.” • […]
Desmond O’Neill: Singing in the New Year
Little in human nature escapes the scrutiny of scholarship, and New Year resolutions are no exception. We tap into a tradition that dates back to Babylonian times. Their new year began in March with the sowing of the crops: in ancient Roman times this shifted to January, associated with Janus, the two faced god who […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—3 January 2017

NEJM 22-29 Dec 2016 Vol 375 Co-amoxiclav for OM in under-twos This trial firmly establishes the superiority of a ten day over a five day course of co-amoxiclav for babies and toddlers with acute otitis media. The figures are clear: with only five days treatment, failure of resolution at ten days is 34%, whereas if […]
BMJ in the News 2016: Medical errors, Zika, and Pokémon make global news headlines
Medicine and health regularly dominate news headlines—and this year was no different. The Zika outbreak, NHS crisis, and countless studies on nutrition, diet, and fitness were among those to make top news globally. Here are The BMJ’s top articles that received the most amount of media attention in 2016, illustrating some of these trends. […]
Mary E Black: New Year’s resolution—a smoke-free NHS
My doctor father used to regularly set his trousers on fire. Born in 1924, he started smoking cigarettes as a teenager. He died of a smoking related cancer in 2003. My doctor grandfather served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the first world war and died, when my father was 14, of smoking related […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Powers of ten
It’s appropriate that this blog, my hundredth under the “When I Use a Word” heading, a hundred being ten times ten, should appear in December, which, until the addition of January and February, was counted as the tenth month in the solar calendar. From the IndoEuropean root DEKM, ten, came the Greek word δέκᾰ, the […]
Daniel Sokol: The ethics of the on-call rota
A colleague is sick. Someone is needed to cover him tomorrow. There are no locums and no volunteers. Who should be selected? Few issues generate more passion and cause more heartache to doctors than filling a gap in the rota. Over the Christmas period, it is likely that tears have been shed and friendships lost […]
William Cayley: Measurement or action?
As our measurements and metrics in medicine proliferate and multiply, it is exceedingly tempting to think that our increased ability to measure correlates directly with an increased ability to care or cure . . . but is this really the case? It’s been reasonably well established that just doing a test to “rule out” a […]
Richard Smith: What if all the works of Democritus had survived and those of Aristotle been lost

Richard Feynman, the great physicist, conducted a thought experiment in which he asked what one statement would he save if all of scientific knowledge was lost. His answer: “All things are made of atoms–little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being […]