Meteorological metaphors are common in everyday speech: he was lightning fast; you are my sunshine; it’s clear skies from now on. That doesn’t make them common in medical writing, and […]
Year: 2018
Daniel Sokol: A database of medical, ethical, or legal cases with valuable lessons for clinicians
When I visited the clinical ethics department at Washington Hospital Center some years back, I was impressed by how acute ethical dilemmas, once resolved, led to presentations in the affected […]
Rebecca Rosen: What value should be attributed to professional judgement when it is pitted against customer expectations?
We need to find a way to deal with the touch-point between professional judgement and consumer sovereignty […]
Samar Betmouni: Time for a new digital pathology strategy and re-imagined diagnostic service in the UK
An evaluation of the UK’s pathology capacity by Cancer Research UK (CRUK) has identified that over the next 5-10 years “there is likely to be a severe crisis.” The report […]
Rediscovering humanitarianism in the wake of the aid agencies scandal
As the reverberations of the recent scandal regarding sexual exploitation in the aid sector continue to ricochet around the world, hogging headlines, and eliciting the inevitable (belated) response of “never […]
Treatment or surveillance for CIN2: when less is more
Over the course of a day, a gynaecologist will care for patients with a wide range of presentations—from a premature baby who doesn’t survive beyond the first nights whose young […]
Sharon Roman: My doctors, my placebo effect
An excellent patient-doctor relationship is capable of doing much good, even when medicine no longer can […]
Jay Berry: Unsung heroes of peer review
Think for a moment about all the scientific articles you’ve peer reviewed throughout your career. Do you ever find it challenging to make time to perform the review? Do you […]
Derek Summerfield: NHS antidepressant prescribing—what do we get for £266 million per year?
The Royal College of Psychiatrists and the media routinely state that there is an “epidemic” of mental disorder—1 in 4 people in the UK, with 3 in 4 said not […]
Richard Smith: Spreading innovation in the NHS through social franchising
It is comparatively easy to find funding for the randomised trials that may or may not show the effectiveness of innovations, but much harder to fund scale-up […]