This morning we left the peaceful lutheran guesthouse in the grounds of the Augusta Victoria Hospital (AVH) to start set-up for the first day of the basic surgical skills course […]
Month: June 2012
Richard Smith: It’s hard, perhaps impossibly hard, to be a good doctor
How would you feel if your patient said to you: “I want you to be my Virgil, leading me through my purgatory or inferno, pointing out the sights as we […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 11 June 2012
JAMA 6 June 2012 Vol 307 2269 As I near my fifteenth year of writing comments on the medical journals every weekend, I sometimes envy columnists who can write their […]
Stephen Whitehead: Transparency in pharma and healthcare
Recently, at a joint ABPI/BMJ conference, the Ethical Standards in Health and Life Sciences Group (ESHLSG) published the latest in a series of collaborative documents: Clinical Trials Transparency-Principles and Facts. […]
Magdalena Kincaid: surgical teaching on the Mount of Olives – part 1
The car journey from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem lasts about an hour. There is an enveloping warmth in the air even at 2 am and it is eerily quiet. The […]
Tiago Villanueva: Mass gathering medicine
I won’t have the privilege of attending the Olympic and Paralympic Games, but I recently had the opportunity to attend a meeting with mass gathering medicine experts chaired by David […]
Matthew Billingsley: How would you use social media during a public health crisis?
At the height of the 2009 pandemic, there were 10 000 swine flu related tweets an hour. These ranged from the helpful (“Swine-flu symptoms: checklist to see if you may […]
Peter Bailey: Striking for a duck island
A few days ago I was asked by a local radio station to give an opinion about the strike action being planned by the medical profession over pensions. I told […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review – 6 June 2012
NEJM 31 May 2012 Vol 366 2065 “Hey postman, I just saw that parcel move!” “Don’t worry buddy, that one’s fulla chicks.” Such exchanges cannot be uncommon in a country […]
Angela Coulter: Please stop muddling shared decision-making and provider choice
Government departments are barred from making policy announcements during elections, so there’s always a flurry of them after the purdah period has ended. The aftermath of the recent local government […]