This study of alcohol intake and total mortality in men and women is written by a team of Italians, and rightly so, because the Italians know how to drink. Tempting […]
Month: December 2006
Plant of the Week: Viburnum farreri
Just a collection of straggling bare branches carrying pom-poms of pink flowers: but what a fragrance! In fact dear Reg Farrer, its discoverer, named it Viburnum fragrans, and the name […]
JAMA 6 Dec 2006
A few years ago, our local community mental health team decided on a strategy called “aggressive outreach […]
NEJM 7 Dec 2006
If you haven’t managed to open up an occluded coronary artery within 3 days of a myocardial infarction, should you go ahead and stent it anyway? Don’t bother, is the […]
BMJ 9 Dec 2006
‘Tis the season to be sending in patients with chest infections, known as community acquired pneumonia in today’s parlance. Unless the patient is worryingly ill, we’ve usually tried oral antibiotics […]
Lancet 9 Dec 2006
There is still plenty of room for debate about the usefulness of screening mammography over the age of 50, but after this study, I hope we will hear no more […]
Ann Intern Med 5 Dec 2006
We have a lethal virus carried by 0.2% of the community. It is sexually transmissible and the only preventive measures are behavioural; it is treatable but not curable. Should we […]
Plant of the Week: Daphne bholua
It’s time again to sing the praises of this most wonderful of winter plants, an evergreen shrub which various plant hunters have rushed to our gardens from below the snow […]
NEJM 30 Nov 2006
When I was ten, I got the fattest book I could out of the city library, Mellor’s Modern Inorganic Chemistry. To my surprise I found that I could follow most […]
BMJ 2 Dec 2006
I guess I have done an above-average amount of literature searching in my time, and I have even taught it to a few hapless students and trainees. The golden rule? […]