Guest post by Kirsty Keywood (University of Manchester) On 11th March Nadine Montgomery won her case before the UK Supreme Court to gain compensation for the failure of her obstetrician to warn her of risks associated with the vaginal delivery of a large infant – a risk which she would have averted by requesting a […]
Category: The Art of Medicine
Flogging and the Medic
You must, by now, have heard of the Saudi Arabian blogger Raif Badawi. Just in case you haven’t (really?), here’s a potted biography: having set up the secularist forum Free Saudi Liberals, he was arrested for insulting Islam and showing disobedience. Among the formal charges he faced was one for apostasy, which carries the death penalty in Saudi. […]
Adrenaline, Information Provision and the Benefits of a Non-Randomised Methodology
Guest Post by Ruth Stirton and Lindsay Stirton, University of Sheffield One of us – Ruth – was on Newsnight on Wednesday the 13th August talking about the PARAMEDIC2 trial. The trial is a double blind, individually randomised, placebo controlled trial of adrenaline v. normal saline injections in cardiac arrest patients treated outside hospital. In simpler terms, if […]
Paternalism up a Mountain
“Paternalism” is one of those words that has a hell of a lot of power. On several occasions, I’ve seen it used as a trump to shut down an argument: saying “But that’s paternalism” is, at least sometimes, treated as a way of showing that anyone arguing in favour of the allegedly paternalistic action is […]
Athletic Sex
There was an interesting article published in the BMJ a few days ago on the subject of athletes and their sex. Here’s the opening gambit: The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and international sports federations have recently introduced policies requiring medical investigation of women athletes known or suspected to have hyperandrogenism. Women who are found to have […]
Resurrectionism at Easter
There’s a provocative piece in a recent New Scientist about what happens to unclaimed bodies after death – about, specifically, the practice of coopting them for research purposes. Gareth Jones, who wrote it, points out that the practice has been going on for centuries – but that a consequence of the way it’s done is that it tends […]
Who’s the SilLIer?
It’s funny how things come together sometimes. A few months ago, I mentioned a slightly strange JAMA paper that suggested that non-compliance with treatment regimes should be treated as a treatable condition in its own right. The subtext there was fairly clear: that there’s potential scope for what we might term “psychiatric mission-creep”, whereby behaviour gets […]
Under-Treatment, Treated.
Right: file this paper from the JAMA under “Properly Odd”. It’s a proposal that nonadherence to a treatment regime be classed as a treatable medical condition in its own right. No, really. Look at the title: “Medication Nonadherence: A Diagnosable and Treatable Medical Condition”. Starting from the fairly straightforward premise that non-adherence to treatment regimes is “a […]
Winston Churchill and the Spirochaetes
Did you hear the programme about syphilis on Radio 3 on Sunday? If not, you can catch up on it here – and I’d thoroughly recommend doing so: it was superb. One bit in particular caught my attention; it had to do with the use of penicillin to treat the illness during World War II. […]
Is the NIMH Turning its Back on DSM-V?
Thanks to Brian Earp for bringing this release from the US’ National Institute of Mental Health to my attention; it concerns the Institute’s decision to move away from DSM as its diagnostic tool. DSM has been enormously successful – in terms of having established itself at the centre of psychiatry – but it has been […]