When we suddenly started back-tracking about hormone replacement therapy a few years ago, ours were not the only red faces. Women continue to complain about hot flushes and the temptation […]
Richard Lehman’s weekly review of medical journals
Medici non medici
The covers of two of this week’s journals feature works by Florentine artists who were patronised by the Medici family: Domenico Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo Buonarroti. Actually there are more artists […]
JAMA 13 Dec 2006
This observational study takes a careful look at 44 630 men diagnosed with localised prostate cancer between the ages of 65 and 80. Over 30,000 of them had radical prostatectomy […]
NEJM 14 Dec 2006
2513 Apart from the threat posed by a new strain of pandemic influenza, there’s the irksome fact of antigenic drift in existing subtypes of influenza A, which means that most […]
BMJ 16 Dec 2006
Time was when a new report about the future of medical research in the UK would have had me all agog. But here comes the Cooksey Report written by a […]
Lancet 16 Dec 2006
This week’s Lancet is a bit thin on articles of general interest but here is a superb book review by Michael Marmot about Julian Tudor Hart’s The political economy of […]
Arch Intern Med 11/25 Dec 2006
This study of alcohol intake and total mortality in men and women is written by a team of Italians, and rightly so, because the Italians know how to drink. Tempting […]
Plant of the Week: Viburnum farreri
Just a collection of straggling bare branches carrying pom-poms of pink flowers: but what a fragrance! In fact dear Reg Farrer, its discoverer, named it Viburnum fragrans, and the name […]
JAMA 6 Dec 2006
A few years ago, our local community mental health team decided on a strategy called “aggressive outreach […]
NEJM 7 Dec 2006
If you haven’t managed to open up an occluded coronary artery within 3 days of a myocardial infarction, should you go ahead and stent it anyway? Don’t bother, is the […]