Keith Taylor Tayler (sorry!), in a reply to the Purdy post below, raises the question of why journals are so expensive and inaccessible to those who don’t have institutional access.  It’s a very good question - and one that Brian Leiter’s recently been mulling, too.  (UPDATE: This is a point that applies equally well to those who the non-academic and the would-be academic.  There’re plenty of members of the public who would like access to journals… and there’s no shortage of people like me, either.  Five years ago, I was on the dole with a PhD that wasn’t going to generate any papers; I really could have done with online access to journals to keep up with the field and to be able to do some research in my ample spare time.  No job, no access; no access, no new papers; no new papers, no job; no job, no access…  I got lucky enough to be able to break the cycle, but I didn’t like having to rely on luck.  Nor did the person in the dole office understand my predicament.)

Not that I’m complaining about anything published by the gods of the BMJ.  Oh, no.  They’re all beyond reproach, obviously.

Daniel Sokal has been busy again Success from surgical checklists breeds idea for ethical checks suggesting that clinicians ought to consider adopting an ethics checklist to use on their rounds.

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The BMJ is having it’s once yearly wrangle about the regulation of research in the UK: It’s time to change how Europe regulates research

Many of the suggestions made and complaints are to some degree valid, the present system is cumbersome (though I think moving in the right direction in many ways such as the introduction the Intergrated Research Application System (IRAS)). Efficiency could be increased without a significant loss to the quality of scrutiny.

However two counter points deserve to be made:

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An area of research with which I’ve been toying for quite a long time now is to try to provide an answer to the question “What are doctors for?”.  (Admittedly, the possibility of a cheap’n'nasty Heidegger pun in the title, Wozu Doktor?, has a reasonably high place in the list of the project’s attractions…  Ho-hum.  It’s probably been done already, of course…)  Are they there to provide health, or function, or to make us feel good, or what?  All these things may imply, entail or relate to each other, of course, but they’re separable, and may be put into any order of importance.

As is the way with these things, the project has been on the back burner - or forgotten about completely - for a while; but it was brought to mind again by reading this piece in the BMJ concerning cosmetic surgery (and labioplasty in particular).

Lest Daniel Sokol, the author, think that I’m tracking and attacking everything he writes here as it appears - I’m not: I think that there’s a lot to admire about his line of thought.  Nevertheless, I’m not sure I agree with every aspect of his argument, or his claim that, in the light of requests from women who “are requesting surgery to alter their intimate appearance[...] medical professionals, whether working in the private or public sector, should not succumb to these requests.” more…