Earlier this month Canadian news sources, including the CBC and the Toronto Star, reported on Dr Navindra Persaud’s success in securing unpublished data from Health Canada about the safety and […]
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Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: The magic bullet
The expression magic bullet is due to the German medical scientist Paul Ehrlich, who was seeking a cure for syphilis. He wanted to find chemical substances with specific affinity for […]
Saurabh Jha: Saving Normal
The iconoclastic psychiatrist Thomas Szasz said that mental illness was metaphorical, not real, because mental diseases lacked biological substrates. The absence of a substrate predisposes psychiatry to overdiagnosis and avoiding overdiagnosis is […]
William Cayley: Neither complementary nor conventional
I appreciate Timothy Caulfield’s exploration of the “straw men” set up in many a discussion over integrative, complementary, or alternative medicines (CAM for short). However, I think we need to […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—26 October 2015
NEJM 22 October 2015 Vol 373 Neatest knee trial 1597 “Whatever next. A patient centred, surgical RCT on a common operation with a thoughtful, patient centred editorial in the NEJM,” […]
Mosaraf Hossain on improving health outcomes in Goalpokher-I
The Islampur sub-division of the Uttar Dinajpur district of West Bengal (a state in India) is the most underperforming area of the state in terms of health and other human […]
Ajith J: How school based health services can improve child health in India
School children constitute over 25% of India’s population of 1.21 billion people. School health in India is limited to sporadic screening in public schools. Private schools, where 30 million urban […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . All gall
The Old English dictionary called the Epinal glossary, glossed the Latin word “bile”, a form of bilis, as “átr”, later spelt atter, meaning gall or bitterness. However, “atter” and “bile” […]
Richard Lehman on prescribing spironolactone
The liveliest e-mail streams I have ever encountered are the ones which are currently coming out of the Overdiagnosis Group, set up by Margaret McCartney last year. The group is […]
Alexandra Caulfield: Mental health in Africa—challenges and progress since 2008
Poor provision “We have 77 psychiatrists, most of them in Nairobi. Quite a big chunk of them are doing private practice and only for those people who can afford their […]