The number of road traffic deaths is high and getting higher. How can we change this? […]
Columnists
Kieran Walsh: One health, one love, one curriculum
One health is “the collaborative effort of multiple disciplines—working locally, nationally, and globally—to attain optimal health for people, animals, and the environment.” The One Health Congress is a place for experts and […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Circle squarers and St Vitus
As I discussed last week, pi (π) is a transcendental number, 3.1415926535…, whose decimal expansion never ends. It is therefore impossible to do what ancient mathematicians were keen to do, […]
Richard Smith: Revisiting “Stalinism in the NHS”
The appalling story of some 600 patients in Gosport Hospital being casually killed and the failure of every authority to take action makes me remember something that I wrote in […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . The Days of Pi
Earlier this year, my statistician colleagues invited me to join them for lunch on Pi Day. As resolved by the US Congress in 2009, after informal celebrations since 1988, Pi […]
Hilda Bastian: A Mediterranean diet trial’s retraction and republication leaves a trail of questions
It started with a paper by John Carlisle in 2017. [1] He analysed baseline data for participants in over 5,000 randomised trials, looking for differences in trial arms that would […]
Kieran Walsh: Learning on the ward
The ward round is an excellent opportunity for medical education. It is an opportunity to learn about taking a history, examining patients, ordering tests, and making decisions about management. If […]
Richard Smith: Why We Sleep—one of those rare books that changes your worldview and should change society and medicine
One of the professors at Edinburgh Medical School, where I was taught from 1970-76, was a world expert on sleep, but I remember hearing little about sleep at medical school. […]
Nick Hopkinson: 120 beats per minute—living and dying and making a difference
“What is a good life? For a start, a good life is one that goes on long enough. A short life may be good while it lasts, may be a […]
Matt Morgan and Peter Brindley: Doctor does not always know best
For centuries, old white men have argued about whether medicine is more of a science or an art. That is until, belatedly, some smart Alec—or some smart Alexa—realised that patient […]