A retired railwayman who lives in a care home challenged his local primary care trust’s decision to hive off community care services to a social enterprise company at the High Court in London this...
The Faculty of Public Health has called for the “complete withdrawal” of the Health and Social Care Bill after members voted overwhelmingly for their leaders to change policy.The faculty surveyed its...
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine is a coming of age compendium. The call for a new approach to medicine’s past was made in the early 1970s. It aimed to release medical history from the...
Researchers investigated whether paracetamol was as effective as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in the treatment of pain and disability related to osteoarthritis of the hip or knee. A...
bmj;344/feb09_1/e922/FIG1F1fig1The clinical virologist Professor Donald James Jeffries was at the forefront of the UK response to HIV and transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). His...
Trusts are given access to PFI bailout fund: Seven hospital trusts in England with debts that are partly caused by private finance initiative repayments are to have access to a £1.5bn (€1.8bn;...
At what age are surgeons safest? In France, according to Antoine Duclos and colleagues, it’s between 35 and 50 years old (doi:10.1136/bmj.d8041). The authors looked prospectively at thyroid...
In the face of a public outcry, one of the largest cancer charities in the US, Susan G Komen for the Cure, has reversed its decision to stop giving grants for cancer screening of low income women...
A failure to recognise that people with long term conditions are often also depressed and anxious makes for poorer outcomes and substantially increases the cost of caring for them, say the healthcare...
How true to Nature, even to their most trivial details, almost every character and every incident in the works of the great novelist whose dust has just been laid to rest, really were, is best known...
bmj;344/feb08_1/e924/FIG1F1fig1As an excellent new book makes clear, migrants are a force for good.1 This is just as well: all of us are descended from the migrants who left Africa 50 000 to 60 000...
GPs should play a part in helping to coordinate better services for older people and to tackle a currently “fragmented” and inadequate system of social care, say MPs.A critical report by the...
The light suddenly went out, but the window in the wall of the theatre let us see that the un-united femoral shaft fracture was now firmly held by an old fashioned unlocked intramedullary nail,...
Fashion changes (unless you’re a chemistry teacher). Looking at photos, we cringe at what we once wore, but marvel at how much hair we had. Medicine is faddishly fickle, with trendy diagnoses, buzz...
Objective To characterise symptoms experienced by women during the transition into natural menopause, to classify women into distinct symptom profiles or trajectories, and to relate these profiles to...
Learning pointsIncidental liver lesions on medical imaging are relatively common and the vast majority are benignFatty infiltration is increasing in prevalence and can make the detection and...
A company that is based in the United States, Life Length, is offering “telomere testing and services” from its laboratory in Spain, with the aim of “making it easy for physicians and their patients...
A recently published and much publicised paper by Shapiro and colleagues, the last in a series of four, evaluated the effects of hormone therapy on the risk of breast cancer.1 The authors of the four...
The NHS faces misguided reorganisation, creeping privatisation, cuts, increased waiting lists, and stagnant wages. Although they are eerily familiar, these are not just today’s problems, but also...
bmj;344/feb08_1/e834/FIG1F1fig1The rage for breast surgery attained manic proportions in the late 19th century in the United States and Europe. But the trend was driven by surgeons, not women, and...
