There was one thing we were all agreed on - proposers and opposers alike - at the Great Oxford Debate last week: there’s a big gap in the quality and quantity of information for patients. Where we disagreed - and starkly - was whether the drug industry should be allowed to fill that gap.

Yes said Thomas Lonngren, Scott Gotlieb and Mary Baker. No said I, Des Spence, and Phil Hammond. Proposing the motion - “It’s madness that pharma can’t speak to patients” - Thomas Lonngren, head of the European Medicines Agency, talked of irrational and erroneous prescribing which could only be tackled by providing better patient information from the people who know these drugs best. more…

Who’d be a psychiatrist? The emotional burden of caring for patients presenting in real distress; trying to negotiate a way forward when dealing with someone with a skewed sense of reality; potentially life and death risk assessments on a daily basis; general lampooning from medical colleagues… No wonder psychiatry’s not such a popular choice among UK medical graduates. more…

The bad press heaped on pharmacists this week no doubt raised a few smiles among BMJ readers. But doctors should remember that pharmacists are easy targets for consumer watchdog Which?, whose survey found that more than a third of pharmacies give unsatisfactory advice. more…

South Africa’s newly elected president, Mr Kgalemo Mothlante, acted swiftly to end an era of ugly controversy and extreme incompetence in the health ministry by appointing a highly regarded, new health minister and effectively demoting the previous one, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, who implemented all of former president Thabo Mbeki’s eccentric AIDS beliefs, which has laid the foundations for the increased burden of disease that South Africa now has. more…

Recently I met a student who had been in a Problem Based Learning (PBL) group that I had ‘facilitated’ in 2006. During the PBL we will have spent around six hours together each week for a full trimester (so around 72 hours contact time in all) and I was interested to know if he could remember learning anything specific from his time in the group. Not surprisingly he could not recollect any specific facts but there was a much broader issue, that of tackling conflicting advice, which did come to mind. more…

Baroness Warnock, one of Britain’s leading ethical experts recently talked of the “right to die” of patients with dementia. She called for more research into the illness, in order to establish whether patients with dementia were mentally competent. Thus when they reached a certain point in their illness, they could make a decision of whether they wanted to be “helped to die.” more…

Just back from my first visit to India, which the Lonely Planet guide rightly says is much more of a continent than a country. Three days in Delhi and three in Mumbai barely scratched the surface, but left me resolved to return there for longer.

The day before we left home Delhi was bombed by terrorists, but our hosts reassured us that it would still be safe enough to come. Like many Brits, Indians have had to become sanguine about such risks. more…

It is a long time since I studied art history, but if I remember rightly the invention of photography is said to have contributed to the exhaustion of the realist impulse in the visual arts. It sounds plausible: the documentary impulse, the desire faithfully to record what is actually there, which has always been close to the heart of realism, is just so much more efficiently done by photography. Darkroom trickery excepted, a photograph feels like evidence, something taken from the scene. A drawing or painting, however gifted the artist, puts the human being in the way, with all of a human being’s fallibility. more…

After years of blogging in the cyber-wilderness, the BMJ has welcomed me into its warm embrace by giving me a little blogging corner all of my own. From this virtual soapbox I’m hoping to chart my efforts to navigate the murky waters of GP training as I kick off a year-long stint as a GP registrar in inner-city London. more…

I made my deposit this week in UK Biobank. I was recruited because my age lies between 40-69 and I live within 10 miles of an assessment centre. At least I do now: like a dodgy business, the centre (on the 3rd floor of a gloomy office next door to Zorba’s Snacks) will be here for six months and then move on to another town. I felt like I’d come to get a fake passport. more…