Carl Heneghan

I'm Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, an academic and not a resting GP, an active GP who's working in urgent care over the holiday period.

Thank you.

Just to get something.

Yeah, just to get some love out there and people think, oh, poor you.

No, it's because, actually, the NHS are the only people who email me and tweet me on a daily basis saying, well, sending me nice messages saying, can you work this weekend?

Well, I know what it's about because I've read it.

Something I can't do.

Yeah, that's very difficult for me.

I'll try.

I have to say, it is really written well, this.

And I was slightly astounded when it... You might chuckle out loud when you read it.

At the end of the introduction, it says, "...a secondary aim of the trial was to answer another mystery of the medical world, what medical microbiologists actually do."

And that's a question that I think is actually unanswerable by research.

Yeah.

I would just say to you, it is practically impossible to know what microbiologists do.

Well, it's an interesting issue, isn't it, first?

The first thing is, you just, you know, look, if it's really busy and you say it's going to be quiet or, you know, people are going to think you're a bit mad.

So the reason people say normally in the health services, and you do this, you walk up, you go up to the receptionist and say, oh, it's pretty quiet around here.

And everybody goes, oh my gosh.

Well, the phenomenon that everybody knows what's going to happen is regression to the mean.