I recently attended a symposium at the Tavistock Clinic entitled Cultures of Care: Cruelty and Kindness. As the Tavistock is a psychoanalytic institution, there was a lot of focus on […]
Columnists
Desmond O’Neill: Bicycle helmets and the medical humanities
Emerson may have been right when he wrote that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind, but it always sets my teeth on edge when I see […]
Pritpal S Tamber: To inform, we need to enable
Last week I witnessed how information can scare the living daylights out of doctors and managers, and made me wonder whether England’s policymakers have any clue about the real world […]
Liz Wager: An ORCID by any other name would smell as sweet
The BMJ recently had to apologise for having published a picture of a Japanese doctor called Dr Yoshitaka Fujii which turned out not to show the Dr Yoshitaka Fujii who […]
Edzard Ernst: Research into implausible assumptions is likely to result in implausible conclusions
Evidence-based medicine is rarely concerned with the biological plausibility of medical interventions. This, I argue, may be a weakness, particularly when assessing the value of alternative medicine (AM). Many basic […]
Richard Smith: An ex-editor on the receiving end
After 25 years as an editor, I’ve learnt in my eight years as an ex-editor that it’s mostly miserable being at the author end of a very unequal power relationship. […]
Richard Smith: You might have had a heart attack or you might not; we forgot to tell you
Complaints against doctors feature communication more than anything else, which is one reason why communication skills have become universal in medical education. Unfortunately we still have some way to go—as […]
Penny Campling: Thoughts on healthcare culture
How many of us feel the culture in the NHS brings out the best in us? Judging from the majority of staff surveys, not many. I happen to think this […]
Liz Wager: Deworming the literature
A recent Cochrane systematic review caught my eye, not so much for its conclusions but for what it shows about the state of the medical literature. According to Paul Garner, […]
David Kerr: Welcoming the world
Over the next few weeks more than 14 000 athletes from 205 Olympic teams and 170 paralympic teams, and 4 million spectators are expected to attend the London 2012 Olympic […]