The World Health Organization has announced that it has temporarily halted the hydroxychloroquine arm of its Solidarity trial. This followed the publication in The Lancet of an analysis of registry […]
Columnists
Andy Cowper: The public health of politics and the politics of public health
A global pandemic of a potentially fatal respiratory disease is probably the worst time for politics and public health to collide. In the political dance of covid-19, we have seen […]
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 […]
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 […]
Mary Higgins: We must learn from the experiences of people who have had covid-19
Don’t forget that behind every study and statistic is a person […]
Richard Smith: learning from a four-star general on leading in a time of pandemic
No matter what you think about the US, war, or the invasion of Iraq, you can’t help thinking that a four-star general who has led several hundred thousand people in […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . testing hypotheses in testing times
All hypotheses are unequal; some are more unequal than others. I have previously discussed the Indo-European root DHE. The basic root, the so-called e-grade form, DHE, means to set or […]
Richard Smith: Support for health and social care staff
Health and social care staff are under enormous strain. The weekly clap and being given priority in shops is much appreciated, but how can more direct, practical, and evidence-based emotional […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Chains of exponentials
The story so far: I have previously described four different pattern of changes with time that exponential functions generate, depending on what is being measured and whether the exponent is […]