Nothing seems more appropriate on a Monday than to think about the after effects of alcohol. We know that drinking too much is bad for health, but many have always […]
US healthcare
William Cayley: Awkward is when they need us
“I just hate this sort of thing.” When I overheard that at a recent funeral, as we waited in line to greet the bereaved family, I thought to myself, “How sad […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—7 July 2014
NEJM 3 July 2014 Vol 371 11 I don’t envy anyone with central lumbar spinal stenosis. The odds of benefit from surgery are slight. The pain can be there all […]
Leigh Daynes: Healthcare access in the West—fact, not fiction
What do America, France, the UK, and most of the richest countries in the world all have that they should not have? The answer I’m looking for is not nuclear […]
David Kerr: Silicon is the new black
Recently the big four titans of technology (Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and Google) have, almost simultaneously, thrown their hats into the wearable sensor ring. Apparently, consumers now want to wear devices […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—30 June 2014
NEJM 26 Jun 2014 Vol 370 2478 Cryptogenic is a good word. It’s up there with “idiopathic” and “pleiotropic” and “diathesis” for covering gross ignorance with a smattering of Greek. […]
The BMJ Today: Troubling statistics—and calls for sweeping reforms
The BMJ has published some recent statistics that are more than a bit disconcerting. The first set regard corruption. Surely hard to measure, but “best estimates are that between 10% and […]
The BMJ Today: Sugar the bogeyman and slim boy fat
I stopped adding sugar to my tea when I was a teenager. Up until then (which was sometime in the mid 1970s), I had been wont to fill the cup […]
The BMJ Today: Whooping cough and getting vaccination right
California is in the grip of a whooping cough epidemic, with 800 cases reported in the first two weeks of June alone. Outbreaks like these are not uncommon in the […]
Hugh Alderwick: NHS performance—are we really getting it right?
According to the Commonwealth Fund, in the UK we’re getting it (mostly) right—or, at least, we’re getting it more right than our international counterparts. In their comparative study of health […]