Fans of The Rational Clinical Examination, once the best series in any medical journal, are having their patience tested a bit of late. Does This Patient Have Erythema Migrans? is a question of prior probability and pattern recognition, with no gold standard that allows us to answer with a tick. (more…)
Dracunculiasis is a most ornamental word, but the little dragon to which it refers – the guinea worm – is a horrible parasite which, thanks to a lot of humble effort in remote communities, is on the verge of extinction. (more…)
Sciatica is a clinical diagnosis which is usually easy to make but hard to manage. This worthy Dutch review can find no evidence that any form of analgesia works, and claims that CT is as good as MRI at detecting disc herniation (more…)
Diastolic dysfunction is a diabolically dysfunctional subject: scarcely any two accounts agree, and the very mention of it can cause British cardiologists to foam at the mouth. (more…)
Even before the virtual demise of hormone replacement therapy, soy was promoted as a “natural” alternative on the basis that Japanese women eat a lot of it and allegedly don’t get menopausal symptoms. (more…)
I am not sure why the great tribe of mock orange shrubs is named after brotherly love: the charms of this one suggest another sort of love altogether, and very much the feminine form of it. (more…)
Preliminary results of a survey conducted by the Royal College of Psychiatrists indicate that as many as one in five junior doctors applying for posts through MTAS have considered suicide over the ‘deeply flawed’ process, The Daily Telegraph reports today.
Academics from Cambridge University have joined forces to highlight the plight of some of the most academically gifted doctors who they say are losing out under the MTAS interview process.
Do you pay attention to the haematocrit? In case you’d forgotten, it should lie between 39% and 54%, and in case you thought it’s a waste of time, here is a study to prove otherwise. (more…)
This meta-analysis of rosiglitazone and cardiovascular events appeared on the NEJM website some weeks ago, and few readers with an interest in diabetes can have failed to read something or other about it, or even the paper itself. I think most people will find it extraordinarily difficult to analyze. (more…)
