When I was a medical student, a professor lowered his glasses and bellowed at me: “if you want to be popular then get a dog.” His point, presumably, was that […]
Month: June 2019
Hilda Bastian: Should we trust meta-analyses with meta conflicts of interest?
Authors evaluating their own studies in meta-analyses is common, but is it problematic? […]
Alex Armitage: We must act now to prevent air pollution deaths in the UK
Last week I received an email from Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Foundation Trust providing notification of travel disruption on Friday 14th June: “Our security lead… has been notified by the […]
Drugs are decriminalised in the UK—if you are a white, privileged MP
It is time to end this hypocrisy, says Niamh Eastwood […]
The harms to health caused by aviation noise require urgent action
In 1905, the Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist Robert Koch wrote “The day will come when man will have to fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague.” Koch was before […]
Kunal Sindhu: How prior authorisation is harming patients in the US
The process to obtain prior authorisation is cumbersome, frustrating, and diverts doctors’ time away from their patients, says Kunal Sindhu […]
Expanding neverland—applying never events management to hospital infrastructure
It had been a tough weekend for our colleagues. They had to deal with a complex patient in cardiac arrest. Yet the response team took days to get to them. […]
Richard Smith: Flying a Jumbo jet and doing a kidney transplant for the first time: a parable
Recently a young friend flew a Jumbo jet across the Atlantic for the first time, reminding me of a contrasting story of another friend doing his first kidney transplant. The […]
In light of the wider attacks on reproductive rights worldwide, Hunt’s views cannot be ignored
Abortion care is healthcare. It is central to women’s health and bodily autonomy and restricting access to it harms women. This shouldn’t need stating. We thought that progress had been […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Biomarkers—advantages and disadvantages
Last week I suggested that many terms, such as “biological markers”, “surrogate markers”, “intermediate markers”, “surrogate response variables”, “surrogate endpoints”, “intermediate endpoints”, “biomarker endpoints”, and “intermediate marker endpoints”, could be […]