What makes a good definition? There are five guidelines: • A good definition describes all the essential attributes of the definiendum, the thing being defined. To define something (Latin definire) […]
Columnists
Giles Maskell: Scanxiety
We are all going to be feeling more of it in the future […]
Richard Lehman and Magdalena Skrybant: A day at the PROMs
PROs are vital and flexible tools for designing clinical care to suit the needs and priorities of individual patients […]
Richard Smith: A baby dies of measles
I had measles as a child. My brothers had measles. Everybody, as I remember, had measles as a child in Rotherhithe in the 1950s. But I don’t remember anybody dying, […]
Richard Lehman’s sunshine act
Alison Tonks speaks to Richard Lehman about writing research reviews and what he’ll be doing next […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Corticosteroids
Last week I discussed the many different compounds that have a steroid skeleton at their core. However, in clinical parlance we use the term “steroids” to refer almost exclusively to […]
Peter Brindley: Trust me with your death?
It’s a favorite quip of mine, but usually elicits little more than eye rolls. I ask medical trainees if they enjoy reading fiction, and if they reply “yes” then I […]
Matt Morgan: Time to stop serving the “shit sandwich”
If you have attended an Advanced Life Support course, you will be familiar with the so-called “shit sandwich.” Despite electrocuting yourself with the defibrillator, tripping over the ECG cables and […]
Richard Smith: Modern doctors should pay more attention to lovesickness
In this book The Incurable Romantic: and Other Unsettling Revelations Frank Tallis, a psychotherapist proposes that modern psychotherapists and doctors can learn from the ancients about the disabling conditions of […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . A spectrum of steroids
Last week I discussed the origins of the words “sterol” and “steroid”. Today we use the term “steroids” to refer almost exclusively to endogenous compounds that are secreted in the […]