Matt Morgan and Peter Brindley have been studying human doctors in their native conference environment […]
Year: 2018
Richard Lehman’s journal review—26 February 2018
Richard Lehman reviews the latest research in the top medical journals […]
Anya de Iongh: Are patients and carers healthcare’s untapped workforce?
On Wednesday 31 January, the dark and cold weather was a contrast to the warmth, passion, and dynamism of the contributions to The BMJ’s first Twitter chat of 2018. 800 plus […]
Nick Hopkinson: Making sense of e-cigarettes—Public Health England’s review of the evidence
“I switched over to vaping but someone told me they were just as bad as cigarettes so I went back to smoking again.” A depressing thing to hear in a […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: The whole spectrum
Spectrum originally meant the same as spectre: a ghost. It was appropriated by Newton in 1671 to describe how sunlight passing through a prism “exhibited… a Spectrum of divers colours” […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Medical catachresis—ambiguity
Catachresis, the mistaken use of one term for another, can arise through confusibility, which I discussed last week, or through ambiguity. Ambiguity (Latin amb-, implying both ways, + agere to […]
Compassionate leadership has a pivotal role in tackling bullying in healthcare
Bullying is a patient safety issue and often a signal of wider cultural issues within an organisation. Compassionate leadership can change culture, empower staff to speak up, and address bullying […]
Giles Maskell: Impossible errors
Hindsight bias is a real and very powerful phenomenon, and not just in radiology […]
Fiona Sim: The Winter Olympics and junk food—who cares about the health legacy?
It would be sad and ironic if the main legacy of this year’s Winter Olympics is to advance unhealthy eating and obesity […]
Tom Jefferson and Peter Doshi: RIP PubMed commons
Four years ago, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a pilot project to “leverage the social power of the internet to encourage constructive criticism and high quality discussions.” The service […]