Richard Lehman’s weekly review of medical journals

The kidney is really just a sophisticated extension of the cardiovascular system, and in end-stage cardiac disease, measures of renal function provide the strongest prognostic markers (apart from B-type natriuretic […]

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When I first started writing about plants in these reviews, I concentrated on neglected treasures, until a reader complained that he could never find a single plant I described. […]

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Using traditional British medical metaphors for rarity, you could call this week’s NEJM the Hen’s Dental Journal (or indeed The Rocking Horse’s Lavatory). It had me sweating back on Nightmare […]

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Nothing illustrates the abasement of primary care in the UK better than the saga of chronic kidney disease and the estimation of glomerular filtration rate. On the flimsiest clinical evidence […]

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“Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” is a phrase the teachers of my youth liked to use (it comes from Cranmer’s Collect for Bible Sunday, in the Book of Common […]

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Another negative trial of homocysteine-lowering therapy: this is a substudy of HOPE-2 and shows that oral supplements of folic acid, pyridoxine and cobalamin lower HCy but do not reduce venous […]

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This week’s Annals contain an essay about Montaigne by Alan Wasserstein, entitled “Lessons in Medical Humanism”. Montaigne is generally credited with inventing the literary form called the “essay”, a word […]

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All my working life I have been ashamed at the way the NHS treats sciatica. A person – often a mother with young children, or the main family earner – […]

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Well, blessed are the peacemakers, we must say of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley, even if they took their time about it. In the meantime, a lot of people in […]

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The “senior” medical journals have both published major trials of vaccines against human papillomavirus in the last month, and without pausing for breath the triallists now bring out a combined […]

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