In September 2015, on the UN International Day for Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, a medical appeal for nuclear disarmament was presented in Amsterdam (see below). This declaration, signed with […]
Month: February 2016
Steve Ruffenach: Tech never forgets—does this make patients less keen to share?
The poet Thomas Moore wrote, “The heart that has truly loved never forgets.” Rocker Bob Seeger crooned, “Rock and Roll never forgets.” And indeed it was well over five years […]
Richard Smith: Systems thinking is essential for responding to obesity (and much else)
The recent discovery of gravitational waves allows a whole new way of seeing the Universe. With some similarities the recognition that the world is much more complicated and unpredictable than […]
Jamie Hartmann-Boyce: Nicotine replacement therapy—the evolution of an evidence base
What is “an evidence base?” And when does it become solid? Though it’s reassuring to think of an evidence base as fixed, in reality it’s a shape shifter—changing as new […]
Huw Green: Schizophrenia—what doesn’t exist?
Jim van Os provides an excellent summary of why many clinicians and researchers (especially the latter) have become frustrated with the imprecision of the term schizophrenia. Among scientists, calls to abandon […]
Oommen C Kurian: Should India lift its ban on prenatal sex testing?
Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP), the flagship scheme of India’s ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD), is trying to address a declining child sex ratio—919 females per thousand males in 2011—by […]
Richard Smith: How might the NHS die?
“The NHS is under tremendous pressure,” I tell a novelist friend. “Could it die?” he asks. “I suppose it could.” “How would that happen?” How would it happen? That’s a […]
Paul Glasziou: Still no evidence for homeopathy
When the National Health and Medical Research Council report on homeopathy concluded that “There was no reliable evidence from research in humans that homeopathy was effective for treating the range […]
Billy Boland: Lessons from a Quality Improvement geek
I’ve become somewhat of a Quality Improvement #QI geek in the last year or so. Since first getting my head around the concept, I’m now an enthusiast and have witnessed […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—15 February 2016
NEJM 11 Feb 2016 Vol 374 The decline of Alzheimer’s 523 Let’s start off on a happy note, and think about dementia. On Saturday morning the BBC News website ran […]