Recently I saw a patient who has problems with use of multiple recreational drugs and alcohol. The patient had never seen a psychiatrist before, but has been taking an antidepressant for the past few years. This is […]
Month: June 2009
Richard Smith’s HealthCamp for innovators
I associate camps with wood smoke, burnt sausages, and filled latrines marked with crosses, but HealthCamp is different. It’s about innovation, and I attended my first one last week—at the […]
Richard Lehman’s journal blog, 23 June 2009
Richard fancied a change, so is currently blogging on BMJ Group’s new professional networking site for doctors, doc2doc. You can read his weekly journal watch blog there. This week he turns his attention […]
Richard Smith’s first days as a doctor
The Student BMJ is asking, via Twitter, for accounts of people’s first days as a doctor, and their request has for me brought back painful and partially suppressed memories. I […]
Joe Collier on coming to one’s senses
Training to be a clinician is so much more than simply accumulating facts. It is easy to forget, for example, just how much time and energy we spend on learning […]
Annabel Ferriman on questions for Margaret Chan
The spread of A/H1N1 flu has propelled Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization, into the limelight. On 11 June she was on television and radio programmes across […]
Domhnall MacAuley on shared decision making
Democracy means involvement in decision making but it may not always lead to the best outcomes. With this simple analogy, Gerd Gigerenzer (Berlin), captured the potential hazards of clinical shared […]
Richard Smith on how to improve your interaction with patients by 50%
If there was a pill that would improve your interaction with patients by 50% would you take it? I imagine you would. Well, I don’t know of such pill […]
Richard Lehman’s journal blog, 17 June 2009
Richard is in Prufrockian mood as he picks out items of interest in the latest major medical journals. As well as quoting T S Eliot, he also pens his own […]
Harvey Marcovitch on censorship, squeamishness, and same sex desire
Older readers will remember when the Medical Defence Union had a telegraphic address – Damocles. Younger readers may not know that he was another of those Greek mythological characters to […]