I can’t remember when the New England Journal last published a paper from a team of British gynaecologists, so the REST group from Scotland will have had something to celebrate this Burns’ Night. They have shown that uterine artery embolisation can be an effective alternative to open surgery for uterine fibroids, and appears to be safe, even though it disrupts the blood supply of the entire uterus and vagina.
Raise drams, ye Scottish surgeons all
Devote to Gynaecologie!
Your Art can stall the Fibroid ball:
I hae a mind to follow ye!
But when in wombs of bonnie lassies
Ye stop the blood tae flowit –
Wrang-headed surgeons! Wraitchit assies!
Sich is nae work for man nor poet.
R. Burns op posth.
Multiple sclerosis remains a slippery eel: many people have a suspicious episode, a magnetic resonance scan showing a couple of spots, and then nothing. Can we use antimyelin antibodies to predict which ones will get progressive disease? The answer from this multinational European study is a firm no.
All you need to know about in vitro fertilisation in five pages and a big picture.
If you teach medical students, even occasionally, it’s well worth taking some time to read through this very useful summary of what we know about assessment methods in medical education. It’s the same over there as it is over here: MCQs to show what they know, OSCEs to show what they can do, and portfolios to pass the time of day.