During the last eight weeks, while I’ve been in Niger, I’ve often been overwhelmed by the scale of the problems people face here. It’s not just the current food crisis […]
Guest writers
Julian Sheather: Are doctors better people?
It’s an odd question I know, but bear with me. It was prompted by a book I picked up again recently, “Open Skies,” a collection of Somerset landscapes by the […]
Tony Waterston: Going against the grain in Gaza
At a time when the news coming out from Gaza is deeply depressing, it is good to report some entirely positive developments in relation to paediatric teaching. Ten years ago, […]
Jeremy Sare on NRG1
The Fly Agaric mushroom, depicted in many a book of fairytales, is a powerful hallucinogen but still perfectly legal. The reason why successive governments have not sought to ban it […]
Simon Chapman: Sick and famous
Singer Cheryl Cole may turn out to be the most famous person to get malaria in 2010, but of course she’s not the only one. And more importantly, she’s hardly […]
Beth Cherryman: A graduate tax
Business secretary Vince Cable has proposed a “graduate tax” as a solution to university funding. Graduates will be taxed according to some percentage of their income (once earning over £15,000 […]
Chris Ham on GP commissioning
In a recent speech to the BMA, Andrew Lansley argued that separating the management of care from the management of resources was a fundamental weakness, adding “examples in America of […]
Julian Sheather on sexuality and a severely brain damaged partner
Difficult cases may make bad law, but they can also be a powerful stimulus for thought. A problem may be a candle, as the French writer Paul Valéry put it, […]
John Ellershaw on end of life care
The General Medical Council’s guidance to doctors on end of life care, which came into force on 1 July, is obviously a welcome and much-needed initiative. It is interesting to […]
Ike Anya on his first Faculty of Public Health conference
I attended my first Faculty of Public Health Annual Conference at Imperial College London last week. I’m told it used to be a 2-day event with several breakout sessions, but […]