As part of our regular series on the risks of getting common chronic diseases, we look at the risk of getting cancer. Cancer is such a common illness now that it has been estimated that more than 1 in 3 people (33 per cent) will develop cancer at some point in their lifetime, according to MacMillan […]
My heart sank when Health minister Jeremy Hunt announced that league tables for surgeons would be published back in 2014. As a consultant surgeon at one of the UK’s leading teaching hospitals, I knew that he meant well but, as I expected, the new league tables have damaged patient confidence, undermined surgeons’ morale and mislead […]
Read More… from Lies, damned lies and surgical league tables
Men and women of the future will be feeling the effects of age-related health problems later in life, according to the Office for National Statistics. Women of the future, on average, will have 64 years to enjoy unfettered good health, although men will have a little less time with the ‘best of health’ coming to an end […]
Now the hay fever season is upon us, millions of people will be coughing and sneezing and wiping their eyes. Around 25 per cent of sufferers can blame birch pollen. These beautiful trees release their pollen in March and early April, depending where you are in the UK and the weather. Grass pollen misery comes […]
In the 1940s, Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger separately identified a set of unusual behaviours in certain children, including strange and focussed obsessions and repetitive movements, but mainly characterised by a lack of social interaction or ‘aloofness’. The term ‘autism’ was coined to capture this aspect. Today, the ‘diagnostic’ term Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) covers […]
Read More… from Autism in the 21st Century – missing the girls.
#BringOutYerNulls is being used on twitter to help highlight the challenge of publishing so-called “null results” – when no effect is seen. For example, in an experiment comparing a group of men and women on a parallel parking task, a null result would indicate that males and females did not differ in their ability to […]
Opening at the Wellcome Collection, Euston, on 14th April and enlisting the help of artists, philosophers and neuroscientists, a new show looks at the idea of ‘voice’ from many different angles – sound, identity, body, psychology and culture. The exhibition’s Curator Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz comments: “The voice is one of our key identifying features; most of us use it daily and spontaneously, […]
In an age where medicine can do more than ever before to delay dying, is death sometimes now seen as failure in the medical profession? Failure to diagnose soon enough, failure to prescribe the correct treatment, failure to discover a radical new therapy? Or is death seen by some as a treatment choice? An ‘opt-out’ […]
In 2012, when we founded Hospitals Beyond Boundaries (HBB), a tiny non-profit, non-governmental organisation based in Malaysia, only few youths were interested in the idea of an organisation that goes into poor countries to build health centres sustained by local communities. Many preferred the action and adventure of emergency response to war, crisis and natural […]
How hard it is to say what we mean. “I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, I speak like a child.” So said the distinguished Nobel prize winner, Vladimir Nabokov of his ability to express himself when speaking to others. Think of the amount of ways we have of saying the […]