Which words came first? And whence comes “first?” In his Historiai, Book II, Herodotus tells how an Egyptian king, Psamtik (he calls him Psammetichus), undertook an experiment. He entrusted two […]
Month: February 2015
Julian Sheather: Will the confluence of big data and the genomics revolution lead to a transformation in personalized healthcare?
Will the confluence of big data and the genomics revolution lead to a transformation in personalized healthcare, or are the emperors’ clothes looking a little threadbare? This was the theme […]
The BMJ Today: Start your week by fine tuning your clinical research skills
Most doctors are dedicated clinicians who have worked extremely hard to earn the privilege of practising the art of medicine and caring for their fellow human beings. But there are, […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—9 February 2015
NEJM 5 Feb 2015 Vol 372 519 Refractory angina seems to be common in cardiac clinics but not in primary care. When all the drugs have failed, and revascularization is […]
Khaled El Emam: Is it safe to anonymize data?
Recently an article was published in Science claiming that it is easy to re-identify credit card transaction data that has been anonymized. While this is not health data, the authors […]
Penny Pereira: What does it really take to improve patient safety?
How confident are you that the risk management processes in your organisation enable you to predict and manage all the risks your patients are likely to face? If you have […]
The BMJ Today: Food everywhere
I visited an old friend recently and we realised that we’d spent two hours of the evening watching a television channel devoted to cookery programmes, while eating. Food is everywhere […]
The BMJ Today: The FDA and CDC’s disagreement over Tamiflu, and the spy who isn’t
If you remain uncertain about the benefits or otherwise of oseltamivir (Tamiflu), you may not be much helped by consulting and comparing the pronouncements and statements issued by the two […]
Paul Roblin on Dobson et al’s Lancet Tamiflu re-analysis: an independent review group. Really?
On 30 January 2015 the Lancet published a re-analysis of oseltamivir effects in symptomatic influenza like illness “Oseltamivir treatment for influenza in adults: a meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials.” This was authored […]
The challenges China faces as it stops using organs from executed prisoners
From 1 January 2015, China stopped using organs from executed prisoners for transplants. This was announced by Jiefu Huang, China’s former vice minister of health and current head of the Organ […]