“In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake . . . that is why academic politics are so bitter.” Wallace […]
Month: November 2016
Richard Lehman: Pre-diabetes: can prevention come too soon?
In the last fifty years, most people across the world have had more food to eat and less physical work to do. On the plus side, we are living longer—often […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: leave cocktails to the bar staff
Cocktail isn’t a common word in PubMed®, but its prevalence increased eight-fold between 1975 and 2015. Cirrhosis is six times more common but increased only 1.3-fold, which is probably not […]
Indermeet Sawhney: Incapacitated patients and rights to liberty
Article 5 (4) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) underpins everyone’s right to liberty. This fundamental principle dictates the rights of patients under the statute of the UK […]
The Affordable Care Act: Lessons learnt and unintended consequences
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), colloquially called “Obamacare,” has drastically changed the American healthcare landscape: providing a safety net to millions of uninsured people, creating more robust mechanisms for improving […]
What next for refugees after the demolition of the Calais camp?
By Frédérique Drogoul and Samuel Hanryon For most of 2016, whenever one of us visited the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) project in the refugee settlement in Calais, France, we would […]
Tiago Villanueva: What is it like working as an “Uber-style” doctor?
The steady “Uberification” of modern life continues, and with it have come companies that provide “Uber style” medical home visits for patients. KNOK began operating in Portugal in December 2015. A […]
Leo Kroll: My “lived” experience of cancer and psychosis
Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor challenges the notion that we hold responsibility for the illnesses that afflict us. She states: “Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured […]
Isabella Laws: Are GP consultations becoming tick-box exercises?
Everything we learn at medical school hones our ability to effectively conduct a consultation within 10 minutes. We are taught first to examine the body’s systems fully and methodically, then […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—14 November 2016
NEJM 10 Nov 2016 Vol 375 Reinventing connected medicine A 1300 word Viewpoint article can hardly do justice to a theme as grand as “Meaning and the Nature of Physicians’ […]