One of the rare pleasures of life is to encounter a movie without the encrustation of prior critical approval, hype, or derision. One of my stand-out cinematic experiences occurred at […]
Month: September 2015
Kamal R Mahtani: General practice clinical pharmacists: an opportunity to be innovative or cynical?
Declining resources, an ageing population, multi-morbidity and rising demands are just some of the reasons adding to an unsustainable workload in general practice. As the RCGP point out in their […]
Richard Smith: Promoting compassion
Edinburgh University’s Global Health Academy has together with Stanford University created a Global Compassion Initiative, and, as I walked last week towards the launch of the initiative in one of […]
The BMJ Today: A weekend of tweets
Last week Andrew Brown, obituaries editor at UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, gave a great talk to me and other colleagues at The BMJ about the Telegraph‘s approach to chronicling […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—14 September 2015
NEJM 10 Sep 2015 Vol 373 997 Are any readers looking for a nice short term research project in evidence based medicine? Here you have it. On 1 September, the […]
Chris Simms: Global health and altruism—the case of Canada and its treatment of refugees
Last year, government cuts to basic health services for refugees—especially those meant for women and children—outraged Canadian physicians to the point of petitioning the courts to intervene. The Federal Court […]
Anu Sharma: Would India be prepared if there was another swine flu outbreak?
The swine flu epidemic caused by a new strain of the influenza A (H1N1) virus became a public health problem in India in 2014 for the second time in the […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Gargantuan gargoyles
Although I found only one onomatopoeic word (iesca, a sob, hiccup, or belch), among early medical words in the Old English dictionary called the Epinal glossary, another, throtbolla (throat-boll, the […]
The BMJ Today: Europe’s refugee crisis
The BMJ covers the refugee crisis with four recent articles. • Kamran Abbasi, Kiran Patel, and Fiona Godlee state that offering asylum is a minimum standard of civilised society. They say […]
Edward Ng: Quality assessments in general practice—have we gone too far?
UK general practice receives an unprecedented level of scrutiny to verify that quality is maintained. We have the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) to incentivise GPs to provide better quality […]