The news that certain companies have been charging over the odds for non-branded pharmaceutical products is not surprising, given activities in this market elsewhere. Last year the US rights to […]
Columnists
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Stepping stones and stumbling blocks
A stepping stone is an action that helps one to make progress towards a goal. This definition, from the COD, includes the metaphorical goal. Although the etymology of goal (according […]
Desmond O’Neill: Ageing—simply complicated
Carinthia is a fascinating corner of Austria, formally included in the new Austrian Republic in a plebiscite in 1919 and imbued with the confluence of Austrian, Slovenian, and Italian cultures. […]
Richard Smith: Depression—a description of the near indescribable
I’ve never been depressed. I’ve been down, sad, blue, but never depressed. But many family and friends, people I love, have been depressed. Some have tried to describe it to […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . MARKing and preventing medication errors
The European Medicines Agency’s definition of a medication error, published last year, is “an unintended failure in the treatment process that leads to, or has the potential to lead to, […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Errors
The village of Erice sits above the town of Trapani on top of a mountain about 750 metres above sea level in the north-west corner of Sicily (picture below). Its […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Political personification
Having deconstructed part of the Conservative Party’s 2015 manifesto in last week’s blog, I thought that I ought to extend the favour this week to the Labour Party’s 2015 manifesto. […]
Richard Smith: Returning health to the people
For the first two million years of humans there were no doctors. People were born, flourished, became sick, suffered, and then died without doctors. Probably there were healers who danced, […]
Shared appointments: Medical utopia or dystopia?
In simple supply and demand terms, there are now more people living with chronic disease than there are doctors and other professionals around to help them. So how can the […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Once it was just oil, now it’s investigators
A curious thing has happened to pipeline. The word—although originally, as happens with many words, as two separate words—is first recorded by the OED in the early days of the […]