A useful short reminder piece about new treatments for age-related macular degeneration. The story is much as was told in the New England Journal last October, under the apt heading “The Price of Sight”: more…

When penicillin was a new drug in short supply, its use in gonorrhea became the subject of heated debate; after that, decades passed before the first penicillin-resistant gonococci emerged and led to the abandonment of penicillin in favour of fluoroquinolone antibiotics. more…

Man’s one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality.

R Louis Stevenson

Because it is often difficult to conduct randomised trials in children, paediatrics can sometimes remain a bastion of untested dogma, as with the vexed question of recurrent urinary tract infections in children. more…

Carriers of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations are of course much more likely to get breast cancer, but is it also true, as sometimes stated, that their cancers are more aggressive? more…

Reading research papers is for most doctors an effort of duty rather than love, and although I have tried for nearly ten years to make it sound like fun, even for me the same usually applies. more…

The purpose of palliative chemotherapy is to provide the longest period of good quality life to a patient who is likely to die from the disease – in this case colorectal cancer. Is this best done by hammering the cancer as hard as possible with combination chemotherapy from the start, or by using the chemo sequentially? more…

The richest woman in Elizabethan England, Bess of Hardwick, conceived the idea that unless she kept building houses, she would die. Hence the two Hardwick Halls on a hilltop in Derbyshire, one left uncompleted while she ordered work to begin on the other. more…

As we English GPs drive down dreary town streets on warm afternoons, our hearts are suddenly lifted by the sight of tall waving mallow flowers in a wonderful variety of soft and dark colours: hollyhocks. more…

The Department of Health has announced the figures showing how many junior doctor posts in England have been filled following the first round of MTAS. But it fails to spell out how many doctors may still be facing unemployment. more…