This study of alcohol intake and total mortality in men and women is written by a team of Italians, and rightly so, because the Italians know how to drink. Tempting sorts of alcohol are cheaply available everywhere and all day long in Italy, but you rarely see a drunk Italian. more…

Just a collection of straggling bare branches carrying pom-poms of pink flowers: but what a fragrance! In fact dear Reg Farrer, its discoverer, named it Viburnum fragrans, and the name was only changed to his after he had died. more…

A few years ago, our local community mental health team decided on a strategy called “aggressive outreach

If you haven’t managed to open up an occluded coronary artery within 3 days of a myocardial infarction, should you go ahead and stent it anyway? Don’t bother, is the message of this multinational study: you may even harm the patient by trying. more…

‘Tis the season to be sending in patients with chest infections, known as community acquired pneumonia in today’s parlance. Unless the patient is worryingly ill, we’ve usually tried oral antibiotics for some time before we send them to hospital, but it isn’t clear that whether this was the case in this Dutch trial comparing short and long courses of in-hospital intravenous antibiotics. more…

There is still plenty of room for debate about the usefulness of screening mammography over the age of 50, but after this study, I hope we will hear no more about lowering the starting age to 40. In 55,000 British women aged 39-41 who were randomised to receive it, it failed to show a significant effect on breast cancer mortality after ten years. more…

We have a lethal virus carried by 0.2% of the community. It is sexually transmissible and the only preventive measures are behavioural; it is treatable but not curable. Should we screen for it, and if so, how often? No prizes for guessing that this a real question about HIV in the UK. more…

It’s time again to sing the praises of this most wonderful of winter plants, an evergreen shrub which various plant hunters have rushed to our gardens from below the snow line of the Nepal Himalaya. It is gradually becoming more affordable and more popular, though not nearly as much as it deserves. more…

When I was ten, I got the fattest book I could out of the city library, Mellor’s Modern Inorganic Chemistry. To my surprise I found that I could follow most of it and that it explained everything about how stuff came to be the way it is. more…

I guess I have done an above-average amount of literature searching in my time, and I have even taught it to a few hapless students and trainees. The golden rule? If all else fails, look it up on Google. more…