The reality of fewer psychiatrists is a problem that is not going to go away […]
Columnists
Richard Smith: The rotavirus story—countering the commonest cause of diarrhoea
“I’m not talking to you about Ebola or Zika virus but about a virus that everyone in this room has had and everyone of your children and probably all children […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Once and for all . . .
… NHS England has recognised that it should not fund homoeopathic remedies. First, consider the highly versatile IndoEuropean root, SM, meaning one or as one. In Latin, semel meant once […]
Rachel Clarke: Cheap, undervalued, expendable—junior doctors in 2017?
NHS trusts are still treating junior doctors as if they are expendable at a time when low morale should be a priority […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: From the US national pastime
Baseball provides many metaphors, but not many have made it to PubMed. A ballpark is a baseball ground. Figuratively, it is a noun meaning a particular area or range, or […]
Richard Smith: What is science for?
Robert Boyle, Ireland’s most famous scientist, thought that the first aim of science was to develop practical applications to make life better. Earlier in his life he wrote in ecstatic […]
Kieran Walsh: Can you crunch the numbers better than a medical calculator?
Medical risk calculators should not be a step towards cookbook medicine, but help to tease out patients’ thoughts and worries and prejudices […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Interconnectedness
As I discussed last week, the physicist Alan Sokal has pointed out that “ . . . well tested theories in the mature sciences are supported in general by a […]
Richard Smith: How to advise a friend frightened by a medical headline?
A friend is frightened by reading the headline “Chemotherapy may spread cancer and trigger more aggressive tumours, warn scientists” in the Daily Telegraph. A close friend of hers has had […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Parodies of resistential postmodernism
The IndoEuropean root WED, with its o-grade form WOD, meant to speak. Hence the Greek word for a song or lyric poem, an ode, ᾠδή, and derivatives such as odeon, […]