Good housing is a prerequisite for good health. When he was constructing the welfare state, William Beveridge named squalor—which he said resulted from a shortage of good houses—as one of the five giants standing in the way of social progress. There is a growing body of evidence which shows a correlation between poor housing and […]
Tsenduren lives a nomadic life in Mongolia. He thought he was in his 70s and arrived at the Orbis Flying Eye hospital in his traditional clothes, having never visited the city before and having never seen an aircraft before. His failing vision had meant he felt a burden to his family and his greatest wish […]
NEJM 8-15 Dec 2016 Vol 375 Geographical variation in trials This review article on geographical subgroup variation is a master class in how to think about and analyze randomised controlled trials. Salim Yusuf and Janet Wittes have been leading figures in the design and interpretation of RCTs for the last thirty years, and that shines through […]
When the US Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) recently announced it will require all public housing developments in the US to go smoke free, federal officials were correct to attack a significant and pervasive problem—smoking exposure among low income Americans. However, it’s less clear if their attempted solution is the best and most effective […]
For your average Joe Blow it must be hard to work out why, every winter, there is such a commotion about pressures in the health service and particularly in A&E. Surely, after so many years, it could be sorted out? I think that puzzlement is also widespread amongst those of us working in or alongside […]
Drug names are difficult to remember, pronounce, and spell. For example, which of the following, if any, is the correct spelling? • amitriptylin • amitryptiline • amitriptylline • amytriptyline • amitriptiline One way to find out is to enter the name into PubMed. Here’s what I got when I searched for “amitriptylin”: […]
The Doctor’s Book Club Emma Donoghue’s Room And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. —Sylvia Plath “Lady Lazarus’ In 2008, a mysterious emergency room appearance of a young girl with kidney failure led to a gruesome discovery. As the Austrian investigators learned, […]
Teaching in medical school has thankfully and quite rightly changed. Gone are the days when a consultant in a three piece suit, bow tie, and braces would float from bed to bed, without any discussion or consent, pointing out painful and disfiguring pathologies on traumatised patients, and only revealing the eponymous syndrome after 17 anxious, […]
“More life with your kids, more life with your friends, more life spent on earth—but only if you pay” was the message of AA Gill’s posthumous essay published in the Sunday Times this week. His death from lung cancer, at 62, saddened and shocked readers of his column, where he had announced less than a […]
The juxtaposition of an article by a dying (indeed, dead) journalist bemoaning the NHS denying him an expensive cancer drug and a spate of articles illustrating the “crisis in social care” shows well the conundrum facing the British people. I may be the only member of Britain’s “elite” who hadn’t heard of A A Gill, […]