Using traditional British medical metaphors for rarity, you could call this week’s NEJM the Hen’s Dental Journal (or indeed The Rocking Horse’s Lavatory). It had me sweating back on Nightmare […]
Latest articles
BMJ 9 Jun 2007 Vol 334
Nothing illustrates the abasement of primary care in the UK better than the saga of chronic kidney disease and the estimation of glomerular filtration rate. On the flimsiest clinical evidence […]
Lancet 9 Jun 2007 Vol 369
“Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” is a phrase the teachers of my youth liked to use (it comes from Cranmer’s Collect for Bible Sunday, in the Book of Common […]
Ann Intern Med 5 June 2007 Vol 146
Another negative trial of homocysteine-lowering therapy: this is a substudy of HOPE-2 and shows that oral supplements of folic acid, pyridoxine and cobalamin lower HCy but do not reduce venous […]
Humanist of the Week: Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
This week’s Annals contain an essay about Montaigne by Alan Wasserstein, entitled “Lessons in Medical Humanism”. Montaigne is generally credited with inventing the literary form called the “essay”, a word […]
Flying Shrinks
Medicine is both a passport and a visa, permitting access to unknown places and insights into places most will never see. […]
NEJM 31 May 2007 Vol 356
All my working life I have been ashamed at the way the NHS treats sciatica. A person – often a mother with young children, or the main family earner – […]
BMJ 2 Jun 2007 Vol 334
Well, blessed are the peacemakers, we must say of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley, even if they took their time about it. In the meantime, a lot of people in […]
Lancet 2 Jun 2007 Vol 369
The “senior” medical journals have both published major trials of vaccines against human papillomavirus in the last month, and without pausing for breath the triallists now bring out a combined […]
Arch Intern Med 28 May 2007 Vol 167
A thousand patients have now taken part in 18 studies of bone-marrow derived cells for cardiac repair. This meta-analysis shows definite evidence of a repair effect, […]