“In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake . . . that is why academic politics are so bitter.” Wallace Stanley Sayre Although I am just starting out, I have gained some experience in the world of academia. I was always drawn towards understanding why […]
Richard Lehman: Pre-diabetes: can prevention come too soon?
In the last fifty years, most people across the world have had more food to eat and less physical work to do. On the plus side, we are living longer—often much longer—than our immediate ancestors. On the minus side we are running higher levels of blood glucose. Overall, there is much to rejoice about. But […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: leave cocktails to the bar staff
Cocktail isn’t a common word in PubMed®, but its prevalence increased eight-fold between 1975 and 2015. Cirrhosis is six times more common but increased only 1.3-fold, which is probably not importantly different from unity. We could conclude that a cocktail won’t give you cirrhosis, but these cocktails are not funny coloured drinks that taste dangerously […]
Indermeet Sawhney: Incapacitated patients and rights to liberty
Article 5 (4) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) underpins everyone’s right to liberty. This fundamental principle dictates the rights of patients under the statute of the UK Mental Health Act and the Mental Capacity Act Deprivation of Liberty. There are safeguards in both pieces of legislation to ensure patients are able to […]
The Affordable Care Act: Lessons learnt and unintended consequences
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), colloquially called “Obamacare,” has drastically changed the American healthcare landscape: providing a safety net to millions of uninsured people, creating more robust mechanisms for improving the quality of healthcare delivery, and essentially changing the way that hospitals operate. Although the effect of the ACA upon the number of uninsured people […]
What next for refugees after the demolition of the Calais camp?
By Frédérique Drogoul and Samuel Hanryon For most of 2016, whenever one of us visited the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) project in the refugee settlement in Calais, France, we would find new fences, new walls, and new areas where trees were cut down to allow police surveillance of residents. Surrounded by barriers on all sides, […]
Tiago Villanueva: What is it like working as an “Uber-style” doctor?
The steady “Uberification” of modern life continues, and with it have come companies that provide “Uber style” medical home visits for patients. KNOK began operating in Portugal in December 2015. A patient can call a GP and a number of other specialists through an app. This lets you see a map which shows which doctors are […]
Leo Kroll: My “lived” experience of cancer and psychosis
Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor challenges the notion that we hold responsibility for the illnesses that afflict us. She states: “Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease.” My own two episodes of serious illness forced me […]
Isabella Laws: Are GP consultations becoming tick-box exercises?
Everything we learn at medical school hones our ability to effectively conduct a consultation within 10 minutes. We are taught first to examine the body’s systems fully and methodically, then we learn how to focus them in order to save time. We are instructed to ask open questions and invite the patient to speak, then […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—14 November 2016
NEJM 10 Nov 2016 Vol 375 Reinventing connected medicine A 1300 word Viewpoint article can hardly do justice to a theme as grand as “Meaning and the Nature of Physicians’ Work”, and a lot of this piece is taken up with describing the current realities of American hospital medicine for those at its coalface. But […]