The devil is in the detail, so the saying goes, and the detail has been supplied by decades of peer-reviewed and published research which told us all that fat is […]
Latest articles
Partha Kar: Diversity in the NHS matters
The world we live in is in a fascinating space at the moment. Tolerance seems to be at a low ebb—whether that is due to the rhetoric fuelled by the Donald […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—10 October 2016
NEJM 6 Oct 2016 Vol 375 MI: better care counts in long term Forty years ago, it was generally safer to stay at home with a myocardial infarction. Archie Cochrane demonstrated […]
Richard Smith: Epidemiology—big problems and an identity crisis
The Germans probably have a more precise word for it, but it’s close to schadenfreude as an outsider to watch a professional group agonise over who they are, whether they […]
Bhakti Visani: Experiences of providing psychiatric care in a mother and baby unit
During my F2 year I undertook a four month psychiatry placement, based in a mother and baby unit. Before starting, psychiatry was definitely not in my top 5 list of coveted […]
Mary Higgins: Breaking bad news in maternity care
There’s one thing I really hate about my job, and that’s a particular phone call. A midwife I respect will ring and ask can I come down straight away. A […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Phlegmatic
The second of Galen’s four fluid humours of the body, φλέγμα, was associated, when in supposed excess, with a phlegmatic temperament, “not easily excited to feeling or action; stolidly calm, […]
Richard Smith: Finding meaning in life through neurosurgery
Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon, wanted badly to understand life and its meaning, and he knew that to do so he would need to understand death. So when in his 30s […]
Jeph Mathias: The human face of inequality
Long ago an MSF (Doctors Without Borders) poster transfixed one junior doctor. Me. It was black and white. Two figures, photographed from behind, dominate the foreground: a poor black child, […]
Canada’s new government: Climate change, “regulatory capture,” and “cathedral thinking”
It’s a year this month since Justin Trudeau was elected as Canada’s 23rd Prime Minister, ending a decade of conservative rule under Stephen Harper. By most accounts he has set […]