Nearly 15 years ago when I first presented the results of our systematic review on antibiotics for acute otitis media, one paediatrician snarled, “You’re making it too complicated. It’s simple: […]
Latest articles
Richard Smith: Doctors and the “three body problem”
Paul Valéry, the French poet and polymath, believed that we all have three bodies and suffer because we cannot bring them together. The best doctors, I suggest, pay attention to […]
Leslie Shanks: To err is humanitarian
I remember that day as if it were yesterday. It was in the middle of the chaos of the cholera outbreak that followed the refugee influx into Zaire in 1994 […]
David Kerr on Google Glass and big brother medicine
Recently in the UK, the General Medical Council (GMC) faced a barrage of criticism following the publication of new guidance on the use of social media by doctors. The main […]
Isobel Braithwaite: Sustainable healthcare education—what is it, and why does it matter?
Welcome to a series of blogs on sustainable healthcare that look at health, sustainability, and the interplay between the two. The blogs share ideas from experts across […]
Eva Dumann: So this is victory—treating adolescent idiopathic scoliosis
One of the great things about being a BMJ Clegg scholar is unlimited access to BMJ articles, coupled with enough free time to read about the weird and wonderful topics […]
Readers’ editor: Authors “ignoring” readers
Joginder Anand, a longstanding reader of the BMJ, wants to know how we can encourage authors to respond. In a recent email he asks: “Should the BMJ not make it […]
Martin McKee: Coalition u-turns and how the EU is leading the way on smoking legislation
Is the UK coalition government losing its touch? It has just revealed how weak it is when faced with demands from its own supporters in big business and, specifically, in […]
Yusef Azad: The changing face of injecting drug use in the UK
One of the major successes in UK HIV prevention is the low rate of HIV amongst people who inject drugs (around 1%). However, there are a number of developments that […]
Domhnall MacAuley: On being an editor
Why be a medical editor? Pippa Smart, with whom I run a course for medical editors, asked me recently if she could reproduce something I had written. As a strong […]