The technique called optogenetics has been in the news this week, having been used to restore, or at least partially restore, the sight of a man with retinitis pigmentosa, a […]
Columnists
Mary Higgins: What it is like to be a covid-19 vaccinator
As more than 50% of UK adults have had their second dose of the covid-19 vaccination, Mary Higgins reflects on the role of vaccinators […]
Julian Sheather: Covid has shown us the health impacts of our neighbourhoods—we need to build them better
Confining us to our neighbourhoods, covid-19 has woken us up to the impact of the places we live on our wellbeing. It’s midweek in Hoxton, early afternoon, and I’m here […]
Richard Smith: Hope is hazardous
None of us knows how we will respond when we are given the diagnosis of a life-limiting illness, just as young men in the First World War did not know […]
Richard Smith: A eulogy for trees and humanity
“Words strikes him as a ruse. His maize and beans and squash—all growing things alone disclose the wordless mind of God.” This doesn’t seem like a good place for a […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Pharmacological black swans 1970–2020
In his book The Black Swan (Random House, 2007), Nassim Taleb wrote “history does not crawl, it jumps”. Many important discoveries, he asserted, do not come about by careful planning; […]
Martin McKee: What did we learn from Dominic Cummings’ evidence to MPs on the covid crisis?
Cummings’ evidence portrays a system that is not fit for purpose and goes some way to explaining why the UK’s performance on covid-19 was so poor […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Words going viral
Biomedical words recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as having newly appeared during 1970–2020 have become scarcer and scarcer with the passing years (Figure 1). For 1970 I found […]
What factors have determined how well countries have done in responding to the pandemic?
The world still has a way to go with responding to the global covid-19 pandemic, but can we discern factors that have determined how well different countries have done in […]
How the community mental health framework can help community services to grow
One of the saddest things I’ve seen is patients who have been let down by a lack of service integration, who have had to tell their story multiple times and […]