As Saurabh Jha writes, “The likelihood that someone with cerebral aneurysm hit by a bat develops subarachnoid hemorrhage (near certainty) is not the same as the likelihood that someone who […]
US healthcare
Hemal Kanzaria et al: How can we reduce medical waste in US hospitals?
US hospitals annually discard millions of dollars of clean, unused medical equipment due to procedural excess or federal regulations. [1,2] Many health professional students do not recognise the magnitude of […]
The BMJ Today: Is medicine marching towards an era of greater openness?
In the latest Endgames picture quiz, a 41 year old man presents to the emergency department with a two week history of worsening shortness of breath, productive cough, intermittent fever, […]
The BMJ Today: Paying people to live healthier lives and tackling climate change
This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Fifth Assessment Report. The scientists who wrote it warn of the serious impact that climate change—unequivocally influenced by human […]
The BMJ Today: Vitamin D, probiotics, and polio
We have been longing for a final word on whether vitamin D supplements improve health. An umbrella review published today included 107 systematic literature reviews and 74 meta-analyses of observational […]
Gavin Yamey: Soldiers, academics, and an unusual health initiative
It’s not every day that you find yourself at a work meeting chatting to a soldier who led the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan and the doctor who […]
The BMJ Today: Selective decontamination revisited and healthcare reform in Massachusetts
Richard Price and co-workers published a network meta analysis evaluating the effect on mortality of selective digestive decontamination (SDD), selective oropharyngeal decontamination (SOD), and topical oropharyngeal chlorhexidine in patients in […]
The BMJ Today: Debates about alternative medicine and cancer screening
People love complementary and alternative therapies, and vote with their wallets to spend close to £5 billion a year in the UK alone on treatments such as massage, relaxation, evening […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—31 March 2014
NEJM 27 Mar 2014 Vol 370 1189 I sing the body mitotic: we are a mass of cells dividing, mutating, cannibalizing, spreading. The wonder is not that we ever die […]
The BMJ Today: Einstein’s theory of data, climate change and the “threat to human survival,” and New York facing legal challenge over e-cigs ban
“Information is not knowledge,” was Einstein’s cautionary take on the power (and limitation) of data. In healthcare, the collection of patient feedback and other data is regularly hailed as the […]