Replacing worn-out body parts with brand new, fully working artificial ones sounds like a great idea. In fact, millions of people in Britain are now walking around with artificial hips, knees, elbows, lumbar vertebrae, tendons and internal plastic eye lenses. There are even a few dozen people leading full lives with titanium mechanical hearts in their chests, helping to pump […]
If you visit Malawi, in south-east Africa, you will find a warm, sunny climate and a welcoming, friendly people who are largely based in rural town and communities north and south of Lilongwe, our capital. We love simple things in life like good nsima, which we get after farming the land and fishing in our […]
Read More… from Pioneering mobile health (mHealth) in Africa: a nurses perspective from Malawi
The Hope of Universal Health Coverage for People in Developing Countries. What would you do if you were detained in a hospital for not paying the bill? A month ago I met Sanaa, a 34-year-old leukemic patient who was brought to our ward by her relatives. Sanaa was detained in a private hospital for 14 […]
Landmines are a deadly legacy of many past and present conflicts and still kill around 15-20,000 people around the world every year and maim many more. Most casualties suffer traumatic lower limb injuries caused by the blast although facial injuries and hand amputations are also common. Last month, we held the first successful meeting of trauma surgeons from […]
My job is to help reduce the pain that comes when the body starts to wear out, both as a clinician and a scientist. In November last year, we started the first human trials in the world of a new sort of hip replacement designed for active women. In the past, hip replacements have tended […]
Take one city, 233,900 inhabitants, 3000 trained healthcare professionals and study facilitators and 235 million rows of data, and you have a ‘research ready city’. Salford, a metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, recently became the first place in the world to host a real-world study of what was, at the time, a pre-licence medicine for lung […]
The human body is host to around 1.5 kg of microbes. In fact, the number of bacterial cells in your gut far outnumber human cells. This incredible system is known collectively as the microbiome. The study of the human microbiome is a very young field – we did not have the technological breakthroughs to really study this […]
The challenge of making data and personal medical information available to individual patients and clinicians in a secure timely way is one that has been around for a long time. Failure to respond to this means that GPs are always asking, ‘what have you done to my patients?’, long after people have been discharged from […]
Millions of people suffer from asthma which is now recognised as a syndrome rather than a single disease. However, we lack the high-quality data sets to understand the ‘bigger picture’ of this common lung condition and will separate out the different mechanisms linked to distinct asthma types. Yes, we can look at NHS data and patient records, but this information […]
As someone who has watched a close relative go through the experience of receiving chemotherapy, it is not something that I would ever wish upon any human being. The hypothesis for chemotherapy is simple. Cancer cells grow faster than normal somatic cells and thus if we inject poison into the body that damages cells, the […]