I’d always hoped that one day I’d finally get to grips with the contents of Gray’s Anatomy. Perhaps then I’d be able to write the sort of blog my friend Babette- a sport’s physician- would like me to write. To quote Babette, she’d like me to write something “simple, like sports, or the athlete’s heart, or sudden cardiac death, something simple.” So for you, Babette, here’s hoping that a heart stopping picture of Patrick Dempsey and some thoughts on TV’s Grey’s Anatomy will hit the mark. more…

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Back in the mid-80s when, as a junior doctor, I went to work in the US, I caused a mini-panic amongst the nurses by refusing, at least for a short while, to sign “MD” after my orders. An order in this context being a written order to the nurses to do the myriad of small and big things that comprising the nurse-delivered medical care of a patient. The reason for my reluctance to sign myself MD was that, in England, an MD was a person who had undertaken clinical research, written a thesis, and had subsequently been awarded a medical doctorate. By contrast, MD written after a person’s name in the US simply means that that the person is medically qualified. more…