As civilians in both Gaza and Israel spend another day living and dying in fear and surrounded by hate, Ali Abbas, a young man who as a child lost 16 members of his family and both his arms in the Iraq conflict,  tells reporter Hugh Sykes his story. Ali’s story reminds us of the human beings who make up the statistics. His dignity, fortitude, and good-humoured resilience are both humbling and hopeful.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00g4g9j

Meanwhile, on Start the Week, Andrew Marr and guests explore human identity in the age of bio-science. A perfect medical humanities end to the year. Follow this link and click on ‘this week’s programme’ to listen in.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/starttheweek_20081215.shtml

The next issue of MH, to be published in December, will be the first for the new editorial team and so represents a milestone of sorts in the history of the journal. Some of the planned developments will already be evident in this issue, including for instance both an art review and a music review. Others, such as film reviews, will feature for the first time in 2009. Book reviews are always popular and this issue features two that will be of interest to both medical educators and clinicians.

Regular readers may notice that educational research papers are no longer distinguished from other research papers but instead take equal place amongst the wide range of scholarly work featured in the journal. This represents a recognition by the team of the scholarly nature of educational research. It also reflects a desire to end the sometimes inconsistent way in which, in the past, educational papers were variously designated in the journal. more…

This week there was good news for patients in England with an age-related eye condition that leads to blindness. This week, long after a new and effective drug treatment for a relatively common condition called wet macular degeneration became commercially available, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) ruled that it should be made available to NHS patients in England.

It’s easy to have the impression that most recent rulings from NICE have been negative, in the sense of declaring a new treatment insufficiently cost-effective to merit provision by the tax-funded National Health Service. So this positive ruling- allowing access to effective drugs- is to be welcomed. Nevertheless I found something rather disturbing in the tone of the media coverage of this news story and therein lies a medical humanities perspective. more…