Here’s an intriguing letter from one John Doherty, published in the BMJ yesterday: Medical titles may well reinforce a clinical hierarchy and inculcate deference in Florida, as Kennedy writes, but such constructs are culture bound. When I worked in outback Australia the patients called me “Mate,” which is what I called them. They still wanted me to be in […]
Category: The Art of Medicine
Homeopathy, Blacklisting, and the Misuse of Choice
It seems that homeopathy might at last be facing some serious opposition from within the NHS, with the prospect of its being blacklisted being considered. There’s any number of people who’ll be entirely on board with that. Homeopathy doesn’t work. Of course, a lot of medicines turn out not to work, or not to work […]
Stop What You’re Doing: This is Important.
I’d not realised it, but the latest iteration of the erstwhile Medical Innovation Bill – colloquially known as the Saatchi Bill – is up for debate in the Commons on Friday. This is it in its latest form: to all intents and purposes, though, it’s the same thing about which I’ve blogged before. In a […]
Flibanserin and Regulatory Failure
Guest Post by Adriane Fugh-Berman On August 18th, 2015, the FDA approved flibanserin (brand name Addyi), a purported aphrodisiac that can drop blood pressure so precipitously that users sometimes pass out and require medical intervention to regain consciousness. The labelling for flibanserin indicates that it is for: the treatment of premenopausal women with acquired, generalized hypoactive […]
Assisted Dying’s Conscience Claws
Aaaaaaaand so the latest attempt to get assisted dying of some sort onto the statute books in the UK has bitten the dust. I can’t say I’m surprised. Watching the debate in the Commons – I didn’t watch it all, but I did watch a fair chunk of it – it was striking just how […]
On the other hand…
… the phenomenon of apologising for the wrong thing comes alongside people taking umbrage at the wrong thing. Last week, the BMJ ran a head-to-head feature on the “question” of whether doctors should recommend homeopathy. This was the latest in a series of articles in which a question is posed, apparently strictly on the understanding that it’ll accommodate […]
Bad Surgeons and Good Faith
This is a bit of a strange post, not least because it involves citing sources – a blog post, and a whole blog -that have since been taken down from the net, for reasons that will become clear. It’s also going to involve a pair of fairly hefty quotations, largely because it’s the absence of […]
Eating Disorders and Ramadan
One of those things that’d simply never occurred to me before was highlighted a few days ago in a story on Buzzfeed: how do you reconcile Ramadan fasting with recovery from an eating disorder? Indeed: can you reconcile them at all? “Food is obviously a big part of the holy month,” Sofia says. “Usually after […]
Re-Engineering Shared Decision-Making
Guest post by Muriel R. Gillick When physician-law-professor, Jay Katz, published The Silent World of Doctor and Patient in 1984, shortly after I completed my medical residency, I felt he was speaking directly to me. He was telling me what kind of physician to be – not the old-school, paternalistic physician who told patients what treatment was best, […]
The Talking Cure Taboo
Guest post by C Blease Talking cures have never been so accessible. Since 2007 the UK government has invested £300 million launching its Improved Access to Psychological Treatments scheme. The goal is to train up to 4000 therapists in a particular branch of psychotherapy – cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). CBT is the most widely researched […]