13 million health professionals from 90 countries have written this week to the leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies, calling for an economic recovery from covid-19 that prioritises human […]
Year: 2020
A parallel pandemic: the crush of covid-19 publications tests the capacity of scientific publishing
The massive consequences of the covid-19 pandemic are apparent in many regions with overburdened healthcare systems, including substantial increases in all-cause mortality, psychosocial, and economic consequences. [1] In the same way […]
Elaine Maxwell and Alison Leary: In praise of professional judgment
Elaine Maxwell and Alison Leary explore the pitfalls of an increasingly competency based approach to healthcare, where there is less and less value attached to professional expertise […]
Richard Smith: Healthcare not only fails to respond to suffering but often makes it worse
“The test of a system of medicine should be its adequacy in the face of suffering,” writes the physician Eric J Cassell in his book The Nature of Suffering and […]
Martin McKee: Trust is essential in a pandemic, but the British prime minister is squandering it
Once squandered, trust is extremely difficult to recover […]
Beneficence and equity: how the covid-19 pandemic exposed our weaknesses in Italy
For years we have been teaching our students how proud they should be to become doctors in our country—Italy—where equity is a constitutive value, and where health is guaranteed by […]
A tale of two testing strategies in Italy for covid-19
The first patient believed to be infected with covid-19 through community transmission in Italy was diagnosed at a hospital in Codogno, a village near Milan in the Lombardy region on […]
Is this social isolation?—we need to think broadly about the impact of social experiences during covid-19
The lockdown and stay-at-home orders that have been implemented in many countries to manage the covid-19 pandemic have led to a wave of commentaries and editorials on the likely adverse […]
Covid-19: We are not “all in it together”—less privileged in society are suffering the brunt of the damage
Just because the the UK’s prime minister Boris Johnson and the Prince of Wales have had covid-19 doesn’t mean the disease strikes all people equally. As with previous disasters throughout […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Hypotheses—weak and strong
Evidently, we have a problem. The introduction of evidence based medicine in the early 1990s brought rigour to the use of evidence in guiding therapeutic practices. Its principles have become […]