I’m worried that in the highly charged atmosphere created by the extraordinary US debate on health care my published anxieties about the NHS might brand me as unpatriotic. Perhaps Fox […]
Month: August 2009
Helen Macdonald on figures, jabs, scaling back, and sewage
The number of swine flu cases fell across the UK again, according to the weekly figures from the Health Protection Agency, although they caution their interpretation. Sir Liam Donaldson, England’s […]
Carl Heneghan and Matthew Thompson on Tamiflu in children: what’s all the fuss?
Carl Heneghan The last few days has been hectic since the publication of our systematic review in the BMJ on the use of antivirals in children. By now, you are […]
Mark Cobain on understanding cardiovascular risk
Amidst all the debate regarding CVD risk scores, Rod Jackson’s recent editorial ‘QRISK or Framingham for predicting cardiovascular risk?’ evaluated the usefulness of two risk scores: QRISK and Framingham. It […]
Time to ignore all surveys, says Richard Smith
Recently in Bangladesh I had breakfast with a Harvard professor of economics who told me: “Economists pay no attention to what people say, only to what they do.” Now I […]
Tom Nolan: Is Tamiflu useful in children or not?
Why did the operator at the National Pandemic Flu Service give the child Tamiflu? The cynics will say because the algorithm told him to, but the real answer, according to […]
Richard Smith asks “Am I going to hell?”
The other night, as is my wont, I imagined myself dying, and I wondered as I came near the end whether I would suddenly fear that I might be going […]
Joe Collier on tackling breaches in the personal professional divide
How best to set the ways we communicate with each other, and so to establish our “rules of engagement”, can be difficult’. Moreover, any “rules” we establish may vary over […]
Helen Macdonald on the calm, waves of flu, vaccines, and other stories
Calm settled over swine flu coverage this week as the northern hemisphere headed into the summer holidays; but much remains uncertain. Stories tracking the Health Protection Agency’s weekly flu figures […]
Grace Tan asks: “Are medical students being discouraged from attending scientific conferences?”
One of the top five reasons given by medical students for not regularly attending meetings is “discouraged to attend by department and university,” a survey by the American Association of […]