in the Daily Mail.
Continue Reading →Bayesian and needles in haystacks: why medicine is difficult to do well
and why protocols are not the answer to good diagnosis and risk management. Excellent BMJ editorial telling it like it is. “identifying those febrile young children with the greatest risk for serious infection at the time of clinical presentation is like looking for a needle in a haystack.” Essentially, if you have a child with […]
Continue Reading →RIP, Dr Ann McPherson
Ann was one of those GPs who make you proud to share the profession. Exceptionally clever, able and committed, she was also so very generous and kind. I was (am) grateful to her many times. Deepest sympathies to her family. Rest in peace.
Continue Reading →Invitation – free debate in London
If anyone can give idiot-proof advice as to how to upload a pdf, do let me know. Otherwise here is a cut and paste; it’s a (free!) afternoon of debate about whether or not journalists are bad for health. There may be a point, but for me the bigger issue is that scientists and their […]
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. […]
Continue Reading →No decision about me, without me
..and other fairy tales. From the Conservative party manifesto “putting patients in charge of making decisions about their care” is the choral refrain, and yet this week has seen a new Health and Social Care Bill which, bottom line, seeks to interrupt and decimate relationships between patients, GPs and hospital specialists by putting numerous other messy […]
Continue Reading →Aspirin: don’t believe the hype. It’s still not a miracle drug
From yesterdays PM, Radio 4: Professor Peter Elwood, epidemiologist at Cardiff University: “I have always held that it is for the individual himself or herself to decide whether or not he or she would take aspirin – they should be told the risks or the benefits and it should be the patients or subjects value […]
Continue Reading →Selling health to the public
for the BMJ, article here.
Continue Reading →Healthcare charities and the uselessness of GPs (again)
..and so, again and again, that GPs are in some way ‘undertrained’. We aren’t specialists – we are generalists. It’s a different job, with different skills. But it’s a myth to repeat that just because a GPs doesn’t have specialist training somehow means that the doctor is incompetent or lacking in training. GP training consists […]
Continue Reading →Peter Wilmshurst, free speech and libel
An article in TheHeart.org – Dr Wilmshurst is now being threatened with libel over a radio interview he did a year ago. I interviewed Dr Wilmshurst for the FT at around the same time. It was a shortish interview, discussing the reasons why he’d spoken out about the research he’d been involved with and the […]
Continue Reading →