JAMA 8 May 2013 Vol 309 1903 When an implanted cardioverter defibrillator goes off inside you, you are sure to feel deeply shocked: whereas, for others, watching you drop dead […]
Month: May 2013
Penny Campling: The last thing the NHS needs is a compassion “pill”
Reading the Francis Report for many of us is like looking in a mirror. The mirror is at an angle, magnifying the perversities in the picture, but it is all […]
Suchita Shah: A lesser known history of medical education: The Soap Lady and other oddities at the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia
The smell of formaldehyde will never leave me. On my first day as a medical student, in anatomy class, six of us crowded around a dead body, scalpels in hands, […]
Tony Waterston: Why can’t we stop nuclear weapons?
Doctors first started to speak out about the health impact of nuclear weapons way back in 1980; the BMA published The Medical Effects of Nuclear weapons in 1983 and it was […]
Domhnall MacAuley: Pot plants and care homes
I cannot have pot plants in the house. The overwhelming smell of pot plants and stale urine is my lasting memory of visiting residential and nursing homes many years ago […]
Tiago Villanueva: Is there going to be a brain drain of doctors in Portugal?
I have already been invited twice this year to give a talk about emigration of doctors out of Portugal. I find this a sign of the difficult times we’re going […]
Edward Davies: Patient charges would fundamentally undermine the NHS
Patient charges have featured in the British press in recent weeks after Malcolm Grant, the head of NHS England, raised their spectre last month. Until recently I was undecided about […]
Kailash Chand on NHS 111
It is now more than a month since the BMA first blew the whistle on the gathering failures bedevilling the government’s flagship NHS 111 service—and regrettably the problems show no […]
David Kerr: Signals from the crowd—making a diagnosis
For very many years making a medical diagnosis was based loosely on the application of the principle of Occam’s Razor otherwise known as diagnostic parsimony—look for the fewest possible causes […]
Trish Groves: Data sharing: where are we?
The movement towards open science is gathering pace, driven by scientific and ethical imperatives—not simply by the technological possibilities. In medicine such openness has real potential to benefit patients and […]