I wish I could link to this article, which is published as a feature in BMA News, a supplement that comes with the BMJ. It’s worrying. “Professor (Erica) Frank, research chair in preventative medicine and population health at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, has spent more than 20 years examining the relationship […]
Continue Reading →Public appointments of note
for an Audit Committee and Lay Member of the General Chiropractic council.
Continue Reading →Everyone should read this
Allyson Pollack and David Price in the BMJ. How the secretary of state for health proposes to abolish the NHS in England
Continue Reading →Shared decision making
Podcast recorded at BMA House last week. I hope they have edited out my slightly bad language.
Continue Reading →What medical intuition/sixth sense really is
rapid Bayesian reasoning. at least, I think so. Very interesting talk last night by John Gillies, chair of RCGP Scotland. of which more later.
Continue Reading →“Consent rituals”, meaningful decision making, and ethics
Gerd Gigerenzer and Muir Gray’s new book is out: Better Doctors, Better Patients, Better Decisions. The message is that patients have to be involved in making decisions about their health, and I couldn’t disagree. As Gigerenzer (one of my heroes) has pointed out in Reckoning with Risk, the numbers we base our decisions on, however, […]
Continue Reading →The GMC’s response to that ATOS article
is here, which is in return a reply to a letter from Dr Cooper saying that doctors seeing people within ATOS centres aren’t really in a ‘normal’ doctor patient relationship. I cut and paste Jane O’Brien, Assistant Director, Standards & Fitness to Practise Directorate General Medical Council, 350 Euston Road, London, NW1 3JN “Edward Cooper is […]
Continue Reading →Care and Compassion
The health Ombudsman has released a report saying that not enough is being done for elderly people in the NHS. The report has been published widely in the UK press, with many opinion pieces resulting from it. It’s a report in that it consists of ten narratives based on ten complaints. To that end, I’m […]
Continue Reading →111 – where’s the evidence?
Calling 111 instead of your GP? New plans say that we will not be allowed to operate our own appointment systems but to have a call centre do it for us. Call centres work to PROTOCOLS. We in our practice work because the receptionists know people who are a bit vulnerable or chronically unwell – […]
Continue Reading →Surgery for spectators
There’s a lot of press coverage about a piece by Simon Chapman in the BMJ. He describes a charity auction where one prize was to attend a neurosurgical operation. He thinks it was wrong to do so; so do I. Yet this is the logical outcome of so many voyeristic cameras in the consulting room. […]
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