The first thing that strikes you is their silence. The Rohingya are quiet, placid, and polite. They endure, accept, and hope. We hear repeatedly, stories of their men taken away, […]
Latest articles
Robert Kemp and Vinay Prasad: Should we accept higher p values than 0.05 for new cancer drugs?
The current regulatory system already tolerates a tremendous amount of uncertainty regarding cancer drugs in the real world and does not need more […]
Richard Lehman’s journal reviews—6 November 2017
Richard Lehman reviews the latest research in the top medical journals […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Artificiality
Artificiality is an ambiguous concept. The Latin adjective artificialis (from ars, art, and facere, to make) was introduced by the Roman rhetorician Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (c. 35–100 AD), as a […]
Richard Smith: Coming to terms with “the second illness,” the fear of cancer
Mary Gunn, looking very well and wearing her 65 years lightly, stands in front of the audience in an Edinburgh bookshop describing how eight years ago she was diagnosed with […]
Ollie Minton et al: Learning from deaths
The media have a longstanding interest in “avoidable deaths” in hospital. Recently, a particular reporting focus was on variation in mortality at the weekend. Predictably, this caused major controversy. Most […]
Matt Morgan: Poor hospital design has an impact on staff, patients, and healthcare
Simply the presence of a good physical environment signals organisational respect and care […]
Kieran Walsh: Bad education—too much text
John Banester (1533 -1610) was an English surgeon and educator. He learned his surgery by going to war—he went on a military expedition to the continent. On his return to England […]
Joanna Erdman: The global abortion policies database—legal knowledge as a health intervention
In 2012, Savita Halappanavar died in an Irish hospital from miscarriage complications after being refused an abortion. The treating physicians believed that because the fetus still had a beating heart […]
Anna Lembke: The opioid epidemic is a symptom of our faltering healthcare system
An infusion of money to “fight the epidemic” is going to have little impact […]