Medicine and Science from The BMJ
Episodes
#talkaboutcomplications
14 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Renza Scibilia and Chris Aldred have diabetes, and their introduction to the idea of complications arising from the condition were terrifying. Becaus...
Ebola - Stepping up in Sierre Leone
08 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 2014, Oliver Johnson was a 28 year old British doctor, working on health policy in Sierre Leone after finishing medical school. Also working in Fr...
Signals from the NIHR
07 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
If you've been keeping up to day with The BMJ - online on in print, you might have noticed that we've got a new type of article - NIHR Signals - and t...
Nuffield 2019 - How can the NHS provide a fulfilling lifelong career
06 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
More doctors are choosing to retire early, doctors who take career breaks find it hard to return to practice, and doctors at all stages of their caree...
Diabetes Insipidus - the danger of misunderstanding diabetes
01 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Diabetes is synonymous with sugar, but diabetes insipidus, "water diabetes", can't be forgotten. Between 2009 and 2016, 4 people died in hospital in E...
Talk Evidence - Radiation, fertility, and pneumonia
27 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Helen Macdonald and Carl Heneghan are back again talking about what's happened in the world of evidence this month. They start by talking about how d...
Sorry for the interruption in service
22 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The problem we had publishing our feed has been fixed, and normal service has resumed. Thank you for subscribing to the podcast, if you have thoughts...
Safeguarding LGBT+ young people
15 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Recent years have seen political and social progress for people who identify as LGBT+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender; the “+” indicating...
Should we be screening for AF?
14 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Current evidence is sufficient to justify a national screening programme, argues Mark Lown clinical lecturer at the University of Southampton, but Pat...
Chronic Rhinosinusitis
08 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Patients who experience chronic rhinosinusitis may way for a considerable period of time before presenting, because they believe the condition to be t...
Assisted dying: should doctors help patients to die?
04 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Royal College of Physicians will survey all its members in February on this most controversial question. It says that it will move from opposition...
Goran Henriks - How an 80 year old woman called Esther shaped Swedish Healthcare
25 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Jönköping has been at the centre of the healthcare quality improvement movement for years - but how did a forested region of Sweden, situated betwee...
Talk evidence - TIAs, aging in Japan and women in medicine
23 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this EBM round-up, Carl Heneghan, Helen Macdonald and Duncan Jarvies are back to give you an update Dual vs single therapy for prevention of TIA ...
HIV - everything you wanted to know about PeP and PreP
15 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We have had two articles published recently on bmj.com, looking at drug prevention of HIV; PeP - Post-exposure Prophylaxis and PreP - Pre-exposure Pr...
HbA1c - when it might not be accurately measuring glycemic control
15 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
HbA1c concentration is used as the biomarker for long term glycaemic control, however if the lifespan of red blood cells is altered, that may lead to ...
Terence Stephenson - looking back at chairing the GMC
15 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Terence Stephenson is a consultant paediatrician who became been chair of the General Medical Council in 2015. His 4 year tenure has now come to an ...
How Coca-Cola shaped obesity science and policy in China
09 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Susan Greenhalg is a research professor of chinese society in Harvard’s department of anthropology - not a natural fit for a medical journal you ma...
Coding at Christmas
04 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
For many of you Christmas is over and, you’re back to work. Admin piled up over christmas? Feeling resentful for all those forms, and the weird code...
Women in medicine at Christmas
21 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
2018 will go down in history as a year of reckoning as the year that that some men’s behaviour came back to bite them. The continuing impact of #MeT...
Christmas Food 2018
16 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
the Christmas BMJ season is upon us - if you’re to go to our website now, you’ll see that it’s been a bumper year. In the podcast, we’re going...
Talk Evidence - Devices and facebook vaccines
12 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the second of our EBM round-ups, Carl Heneghan, Helen Macdonald and Duncan Jarvies are joined by Deborah Cohen, investigative journalist and scourg...
Making multisectoral collaboration work
07 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A new collection of articles published by The BMJ includes twelve country case studies, each an evaluation of multisectoral collaboration in action at...
Trojan Milk
05 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Infant formula manufacturers were made pariah in the 70s, because of their marketing practices - this lead to “The Code”, adopted by the WHO, whic...
The bone crushing nausea of hyperemesis
01 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Nausea and vomiting in pregnancy affects around 70% of pregnancies. It is mild for around 40% of women, moderate for 46%, and severe for 14%. By cont...
God is in Operating Room 4
27 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Healthy self confidence has an important role in surgery, but what came first - the surgeon or the ego? In this conversation, Christopher Myers, Yeme...
Carers need a voice in the NHS
22 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Until recently, The BMJ had a campaign of patient partnership - now we have a patient and public partnership campaign. The reason for that change is t...
Acceptable, tolerable, manageable - but not to patients. How drug trials report harms.
19 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
You’ll have read in a clinical trial “Most patients had an acceptable adverse-event profile.” Or that a drug “has a manageable and mostly rev...
Talk evidence - Vitamin D, Oxygen and ethics
16 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to this, trial run, of a new kind of BMJ podcast - here we’re going to be focusing on all things EBM. Duncan Jarvies, Helen Macdonald and ...
Adverse drug reactions
06 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Clinical trials for regulatory approval are designed to test efficacy, but new drugs might have adverse reactions - reactions those trials aren’t de...
HAL will see you now
05 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Machines that can learn and correct themselves already perform better than doctors at some tasks, but not all medicine is task based - but will AI doc...
How much oxygen is too much oxygen?
01 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As the accompanying editorial to this article says, "oxygen has long been a friend of the medical profession Even old friendships require reappraisal ...
How does lifestyle affect genetic risk of stroke?
30 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Cardiovascular factors are associated with risk of stroke - and those factors can be mediated by lifestyle and by genetic make up. New research publi...
Talking honestly about intensive care
26 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
On the podcast, we’ve talked a lot about the limits of medicine - where treatment doesn’t work, or potentially harms. But in that conversation, we...
Nasal symptoms of the common cold
14 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The common cold is usually mild and self limiting - but they’re very annoying, especially the runny nose and bunged up feeling that form the nasal s...
What’s it like to live with a vaginal mesh?
12 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What can we learn from the shameful story of vaginal mesh? That thousands of women have been irreversibly harmed; that implants were approved on the f...
How to taper opioids
11 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There is very little guidance on withdrawing or tapering opioids in chronic pain (not caused by cancer). People can fear pain, withdrawal symptoms, a ...
The counter intuitive effect of open label placebo
06 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Ted Kaptchuk, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical school - and leading placebo researcher, has just published an analysis on bmj.com describing t...
Vinay Prasad - there is overdiagnosis in clinical trials
03 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We want clinical trials to be thorough - but Vinay Prasad, assistant professor of medicine at Oregon Health Science University, argues that the proble...
UK children are drinking less and the importance of a publicly provided NHS
28 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Brits have a reputation as Europe’s boozers - and for good reason, with alcohol consumption higher than much of the rest of the continent. That rep...
Don’t save on transport at the cost of the NHS
24 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Last week we heard about how evidence in policy making is imperilled - but today we’re hearing about a plan to make evidence about health central to...
15 Iona Heath
18 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This week a very different kind of conversation on the Recommended Dose – one that considers the art of medicine more than the science. Iona Heath i...
Defending evidence informed policy making from ideological attack
17 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re of a scientific persuasion, watching policy debates around Brexit, or climate change, or drug prohibition are likely to cause feelings of ...
How often do hospital doctors change long term medication during an inpatient stay?
14 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
More than ½ of patients leave hospital with changes to four or more of their long-term medications - but how appropriate are those changes? New res...
Nutritional science - Is quality more important than quantity?
07 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We at The BMJ care about food, and if our listener stats are to be believed, so do you. In this podcast we’re looking at quality as an important dr...
Preventing Overdiagnosis 2018 - part 2: What opened your eyes to overdiagnosis?
31 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The concept of overdiagnosis is pretty hard to get - especially if you’ve been educated in a paradigm where medicine has the answers, and it’s onl...
Preventing overdiagnosis 2018 - Part 1
24 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This week saw the latest Preventing Overdiagnosis conference - this time in Copenhagen. The conference is a is a forum where researchers and practiti...
Have we misunderstood TB’s timeline?
23 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The number of people estimated to be latently infected with TB - that is infected with TB, which has not yet manifested symptoms - is around 2 billio...
13 Iain Chalmers
22 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This week, a very special conversation with a maverick British medico who set up a tiny research centre in Oxford and watched it grow into a global co...
The diagnosis and treatment of dyspareunia
13 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Dyspareunia is a common but poorly understood problem affecting around 7.5% of sexually active women. It is an important and neglected area of female...
Patient information is key to the therapeutic relationship
10 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sue Farrington is chair of the Patient Information Forum, a member organisation which promotes best practice in anyone who produces information for pa...
15 seconds to improve your workplace
27 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
15s30m is a social movement to reduce frustration & increase joy - the idea is to spend 15 seconds of your time now, and save someone else 30 minutes ...
Mendelian Randomisation - for the moderately intelligent
16 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Mendelian randomisation - it’s a technique that uses the chance distribution of genes in a population, combined with big data sets, to investigate c...
What does the public think of the NHS?
12 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s been quite a year for the NHS - it just turned 70, had a winter crisis like never before, got over junior doctor strikes, but then was hit by a...
10 Rita Redberg
12 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This week influential Editor-in-Chief of JAMA Internal Medicine Dr Rita Redberg joins Ray for a wide ranging conversation on all things health. A Prof...
Doctors and vets working together for antibiotic stewardship
11 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Doctors and the farming industry are often blamed for overuse of antibiotics that spurs the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance - but the prof...
James Munro cares about patients opinions.
05 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Getting feedback from people who use NHS services is essential to assessing their value - and improving their quality. Hospitals and general practi...
Prof. Wendy Burn - the changing focus of psychiatry.
29 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Wendy Burn is a consultant old age psychiatrist, and new president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Her work on dementia has given her an affini...
Your recommended dose of Ray Moynihan
28 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Ray Moynihan is a senior research assistant at Bond University, a journalist, champion of rolling back too much medicine, and host of a new series “...
Evidence in a humanitarian emergency
25 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
At evidence live this year, one of the sessions was about the work of Evidence Aid - and their attempt to bring high quality evidence to the frontline...
When an investigative journalist calls
22 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
At Evidence Live this year, the focus of the conference was on communication of evidence - both academically, and to the public. And part of that is t...
Don Berwick - you can break the rules to help patients
15 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Don Berwick, president emeritus of the Institute of Healthcare Improvement, and former Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services...
Darknet Opioids
15 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When tackling societal problems - like the opioid epidemic in the US - there are two ways of approaching it. One is to reduce demand - by organising t...
09 John Ioannidis
15 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Series two of The Recommended Dose kicks off with polymath and poet, Dr John Ioannidis. Recognised by The Atlantic as one the most influential scienti...
Ashish Jha tries to see the world as it is.
08 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a lot going on in the world at the moment - Ebola’s back, Puerto Rico is without power and the official estimations of death following the...
Nutritional science - why studying what we eat is so difficult.
08 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We at The BMJ care about food, and if our listener stats are to be believed, so do you. In this podcast we talk to a few of the authors of a new seri...
The misunderstanding of overdiagnosis
31 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In December 2017, the NEJM’s national corespondent, Lisa Rosenbaum, published an article “The Less-Is-More Crusade — Are We Overmedicalizing or ...
Biochem for kids
25 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Each time you order a test for a child, do you think the population that makes up the baseline against which the results are measured? It turns out t...
Antidepressants and weight gain
25 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Patients who are depressed and prescribed antidepressants may report weight gain, but there has been limited research into the association between the...
Think of healthcare is an ecosystem, not a machine
19 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Complexity science offers ways to change our collective mindset about healthcare systems, enabling us to improve performance that is otherwise stagnan...
New antivirals for Hepatitis C - what does the evidence prove?
12 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There’s been a lot of attention given to the new antirviral drugs which target Hepatitis C - partly because of the burden of infection of the diseas...
What forced migration can tell us about diabetes
08 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Worldwide, the rate of type II diabetes is estimated to be around 1 in 11 people - about 9%. For the Pima people of Arizona, 38% of the adult populati...
Big Metadata
04 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We’re in an era of big data - and hospitals and GPs are generating an inordinate amount of it that has potential to improve everyone’s health. But...
WHO can tackle pharma advertising
03 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The array of options available to pharmaceutical companies, to advertise their drugs, is incredibly broad - and the amount that they spend is increasi...
The complexities of depression in cancer
26 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For many people, cancer is now survivable and has become a long term condition, and depression and anxiety are more common in cancer survivors than in...
E-cigarettes - debating the evidence
23 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Smokers want to vape, it can help them quit, and it’s less harmful than smoking, say Paul Aveyard professor of behavioural medicine at the Universit...
Harry Burns - the social determinants of Scotland
20 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Harry Burns was a surgeon, who gave up his career in that discipline to become a public health doctor. Eventually that lead to him being the last Chie...
Can we regulate intellectual interests like financial ones?
13 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We talk about financial conflicts of interest a lot atThe BMJ - and have take taken the decision that our educational content should be without them. ...
Civilians under siege in Eastern Ghouta
03 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In 2016, from an estimated pre-war population of 22 million, the United Nations (UN) identified 13.5 million Syrians requiring humanitarian assistance...
Online Consultations - general practice is primed for a fight
28 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The first digital banking in the UK was launched in 1983, Skype turns 15 this year, but 2017 finally saw panic over the impact that online consultatio...
Evidence for off label prescribing - explore less, confirm more
23 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When a new drug reaches market, the race is on to find more indications for its use - exploratory trials are set up, and positive results can lead to ...
How to stop generic drug price hikes (or at least reduce them)
23 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Ravi Gupta, is a resident in internal medicine at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore - and as he said has seen the influence of sudden price hikes on his pati...
Dorling on decreasing life expectancy - ”the DOH have lost their credibility”
16 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
”An additional person died every seven minutes during the first 49 days of 2018 compared with what had been usual in the previous five years. Why? ...
Unprofessionalism - ”blaming other people, I put that at the top of the impact list”
12 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
That’s Jo Shapiro is a surgeon and manager in Brigham and Women’s hospital, she’s also director of the Center for Professionalism and Peer Su...
Should doctors prescribe acupuncture for pain?
08 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Our latest debate asks, should doctors recommend acupuncture for pain? Asbjørn Hróbjartsson from the Center for Evidence-based Medicine at Universit...
Nuffield Summit 2018 - HR in all policies, how the NHS can become a good employer
07 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In this year's Nuffield Summit round table we're asking, how can the NHS become a good employer? At the moment, there is a recruitment and retention ...
Katherine Cowan - Reaching A Priority
02 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Its now widely agreed that one of the key ways of reducing the current high level of "waste " in biomedical research is to focus it more squarely o...
Should universal distribution of high dose vitamin A to children cease?
01 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Up to $500m a year could be put to better use by stopping ineffective and potentially harmful supplementation programmes in poorer countries, argues J...
Fever in the returning traveller
20 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
International travel is increasingly common. Between 10% and 42% of travellers to any destination, and 15%-70% of travellers to tropical settings expe...
SDGs - How many lives are at stake?
17 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In a new analysis John McArthur and Krista Rasmussen, from the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution, and Gavin Yamey f...
”We don’t really know the impact of these products on our health”: Ultraprocessed food & cancer risk
15 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A study published by The BMJ today reports a possible association between intake of highly processed (“ultra-processed”) food in the diet and canc...
How does it feel, to help your patient die?
08 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sabine Netters is an oncologist in The Netherlands - where assisted dying is legal. There doctors actually administer the drugs to help their patients...
The tone of the debate around assisted dying
08 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Bobbie Farsides is professor of clinical and biomedical ethics at Brighton and Sussex Medical School. She’s been described as one of the few people ...
Torture - What declassified guidelines tell us about medical complicity
05 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The UN Convention against Torture defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflic...
We must not get to the stage of thinking that [homelessness] is normal
02 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The number of people officially recorded as sleeping on the streets of England rose from 1768 in 2010 to 4751 in autumn 2017.1 Charities estimate the ...
Public health - time for pragmatism or knowledge production?
01 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We have evidence on which to act, and inaction costs lives, argues Simon Capewell, Professor of Public Health and Policy, at the University of Liverpo...
Smoking one a day can’t hurt, can it?
25 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We know that smoking 20 cigarettes a day increases your risk of CHD and stroke - but what happens if you cut down to 1, do you have 1/20th of that ris...
Virginia Murray - the science of disaster risk reduction
24 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Virginia Murray, public health consultant in global disaster risk reduction at Public Health England, was instrumental in putting together the Sendai ...
Education round-up - January 2018
22 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The BMJ publishes a variety of education articles, to help doctors improve their practice. Often authors join us in our podcast to give tips on puttin...
They can’t hear you - how hearing loss can affect care.
19 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Many older adults have difficulty understanding speech in acute healthcare settings owing to hearing loss, but the effect on patient care is often ove...
MVA85A trial investigation - press conference.
11 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Trial MVA85A - monkey trials for a booster vaccine for BCG, developed by researchers at Oxford University, is the subject of an investigation publishe...