Radioactive decay is inherently probabilistic. It’s not possible to point at a particular unstable atom and predict when it will decay. Further, some types of unstable atoms have more than […]
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Richard Lehman’s journal review – 28 March 2011
JAMA 23-30 Mar 2011 Vol 305 1165 In 1941, there was a rumour that the Germans were buying up large quantities of bovine adrenal glands from Argentina so as to […]
David Kerr: Deus ex machina
Forget complementary therapies, the big question is can engineering succeed where traditional medicine has failed? Anyone following the online technology bible “TechCrunch” might be persuaded by this idea. Here in […]
Research highlights – 25 March 2011
“Research highlights” is a weekly round-up of research papers appearing in the print BMJ. We start off with this week’s research questions, before providing more detail on some individual research […]
Guna Reddy-Kolanu: Cultural problems with the “bare below the elbows” policy
The NHS should, as its name suggests, be a service which caters to the health of the nation. Britain, as a nation, has a rich and deeply international history. With the […]
Cheryl Rofer: Reading Fukushima status reports
Now that things are happening less rapidly at Fukushima, I’ve been looking less frequently at the status reports. It became obvious early on that the general aftermath of the earthquake, […]
Rebecca Welfare on World TB Day: dilemmas in tuberculosis treatment
The weekly multidisciplinary committee on drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) had assembled to discuss the case of a young man who had started treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) 12 months previously. […]
Richard Smith: Working towards universal health coverage
Some one billion people have no access to health care, while each year 150 million experience financial catastrophe and 100 million are pushed into poverty because of having to pay […]
Cheryl Rofer on the nuclear reactors damaged in the Japanese earthquake
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has six reactors. It is located on Japan’s northeast coast, close to the earthquake’s epicenter. A tsunami higher than any anticipated took the plant’s […]
Andrew Burd and professionalism
In a previous posting I talked about professionalism in the context of interprofessional respect and relationships. Like many terms once you start to move away from your own concepts you […]