A useful short reminder piece about new treatments for age-related macular degeneration. The story is much as was told in the New England Journal last October, under the apt heading […]
Richard Lehman’s weekly review of medical journals
Ann Intern Med 17 Jul 2007 Vol 147
When penicillin was a new drug in short supply, its use in gonorrhea became the subject of heated debate; after that, decades passed before the first penicillin-resistant gonococci emerged and […]
Saying of the Week:
Man’s one method, whether he reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes against the dazzle and confusion of reality. R Louis Stevenson […]
JAMA 11 Jul 2007 Vol 298
Because it is often difficult to conduct randomised trials in children, paediatrics can sometimes remain a bastion of untested dogma, as with the vexed question of recurrent urinary tract infections […]
NEJM 12 Jul 2007 Vol 357
Carriers of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations are of course much more likely to get breast cancer, but is it also true, as sometimes stated, that their cancers are more aggressive? […]
BMJ 14 Jul 2007 Vol 335
Reading research papers is for most doctors an effort of duty rather than love, and although I have tried for nearly ten years to make it sound like fun, even […]
Lancet 14 Jul 2007 Vol 370
The purpose of palliative chemotherapy is to provide the longest period of good quality life to a patient who is likely to die from the disease – in this case […]
Arch Intern Med 9 Jul 2007
The richest woman in Elizabethan England, Bess of Hardwick, conceived the idea that unless she kept building houses, she would die. Hence the two Hardwick Halls on a hilltop in […]
Plant of the Week: Alcea rosea
As we English GPs drive down dreary town streets on warm afternoons, our hearts are suddenly lifted by the sight of tall waving mallow flowers in a wonderful variety of […]
Fungus of the Week: Agaricus augustus
July in England is not usually a good time for fungus-hunting, though the season gets under way around now in Poland, with special steam-hauled mushroom-picking trains taking the populace to […]