Medicine and Science from The BMJ

The UK has just seen it’s hottest July on record, including the highest ever temperature recorded. With climate change in the forefront of our minds, it’s timely that we have two editorials on the sustainability and health. Michael Depledge, emeritus professor of environment and human health at University of Exeter Medical School, and author of the editorial Time and Tide, explains how closely the...

At EBM live recently, we ran a workshop with researchers, patients and clinicians to talk about patient rights in research - should patients be setting the full research agenda? Should they be full participants and authors? Helen Macdonald, BMJ’s UK research editor and co-host of our talk evidence podcast sat down to Paul Wicks, researcher and patient, and Emma Cartwright, The BMJ's What your pati...

Cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome is a relatively newly recognised condition - but, according to one study, can account for up to 6% of patients presenting to emergency departments. The causal mechanism is as yet unclear - but currently the only known way to prevent the syndrome is for the patient to stop their cannabis use. Yaniv Chocron, chief resident at Lausanne University Hospital, Lausanne, S...

Cochrane Austria have been asking the public what they'd like to know about health. Not whether the latest drug is more efficacious, but whether glacier stone power cures hangovers. Gerald Gartlehner, director of the Cochrane Austria Centre joins us to explain what they do, and how their evidence has been received. Read more about the project (in German): https://www.medizin-transparent.at/

Fertility awareness based methods of contraception are increasingly being used for pregnancy prevention. In the US, the proportion of contraceptive users who choose such methods has grown from 1% in 2008 to approximately 3% in 2014.  Relative to other methods of pregnancy prevention, however, substantial misinformation exists around fertility awareness based methods of contraception, particularly...

This month we have some more feedback from our listeners (2.20) Carl says it's time to start smoking cessation (or stop the reduction in funding for smoking reduction) (11.40) and marvels at how pretty Richard Doll's seminal smoking paper is. It's gloves off for infection control (22.20) Andrew George, a non-executive director of the Health Research Authority joins us to talk about their consultat...

Margaret Heffernan has thought a lot about whistleblowing, and why companies don't respond well to it. She wrote the "Book Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril". In this podcast she talks about how culture, and groupthink, leads to a culture where whistleblowers are ignored, and why the NHS needs to change the way it treats people who try and call out poor care. This was record...

It's been just over two years since a fire broke out in Grenfell tower, in west London, claiming the lives of 72 residents. 223 people survived, thanks to the work of the fire brigade and health care. In this podcast we hear from Andrew Roe, assistant commissioner at London Fire Brigade, and Anu Mitra, consultant emergency physician at St Mary's hospital - they talk about the support which has bee...

This week on the podcast, (2.02) a listener asks, when we suggest something to stop, should we suggest an alternative instead? (8.24) Helen tells us to stop putting people on treatment for subclinical hypothyroidism, but what does that mean for people who are already receiving thyroxine? (20.55) Carl has a black box warning about z drugs, and wonders what the alternative for sleep are. (30.11) Fin...

WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros recently said “Since it came into force 13 years ago, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control remains one of the world’s most powerful tools for promoting public health,”. But is it? That’s what a to studies just published on bmj.com try and investigate - one of which pulls together all the data we have on smoking rates, from 1970 to 2015, and then a quasi-exper...

Nicole Stott is an engineer, aquanaut and one of the 220 astronauts to have lived and worked on the International Space Station. In a confined space, under huge pressure, with no way out, it's important that teams maintain healthy dynamics, and individuals can manage their stress adequately, and in this podcast Nicole explains a little about living on the ISS and how she coped for 91 days. Read mo...

As Syria enters its ninth year of conflict, doctors are struggling to provide health care to a badly damaged country. While dealing with medicine shortages, mass casualties and everything that comes with working in a warzone, healthcare facilities and their staff are also facing an unprecedented number of targeted and often repeated attacks. According to a new report, there were 257 recorded attac...

Hi impact, low probability events are a planners nightmare. You know that you need to think about them, but how can you prioritise which event - terrorist attack, natural disaster, disease outbreak, deserves attention - and how can you sell the risks of that, but not oversell them? Risky business is a conference where some of these kind of things can be discussed - how do we think about risk, how...

It's What Matters To You day - #wmty - and in this podcast Anya de Iongh, The BMJ's patient editor, and Joe Fraser, author of Joe's Diabetes who works at NHS England on personalised care, get together to discuss what personalised care actually means, how it changes the ways in which patients and health professionals interact, and how it can be practically done. We also hear from three people who a...

The NHS is about caring for people, free at the point of care, creating a safety net which catches the most vulnerable. Tech has been defined by the facebook maxim "move fast, break things" - looking to disrupt a sector, get investment and move on.  We want to be able to harness the potential utility of digital tech in the NHS - but how can those two cultures be reconciled, and what salutary lesso...

We’ve been banging the drum about transparency of payment to doctors for years - we’ve even put a moratorium on financial conflicts of interest in the authors of any of our education articles. Not because we think that all doctors who receive money from industry are being influenced to push their agenda - but because we have no way of telling when that’s happening… At the same time, and rightly, p...

Helen Macdonald and Carl Heneghan are back again talking about what's happened in the world of evidence this month. (1.05) Carl rants about bacon causing cancer (7.10) Helen talks about prostate cancer, and we hear from the author of the research paper which won Research Paper Of The Year at the BMJ awards. We also cover disease definition and a call to have GPs more involved in that process, (24....

Stroke mortality rates have been declining in almost every country, and that reduction could result from a decline in disease occurrence or a decline in case fatality, or both. Broadly - is that decline down to better treatment or better prevention. Olena Seminog, a researcher, and and Mike Rayner, professor of population health, both from the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the Univer...

Looking after a young child is hard enough, but when that child has learning difficulties and displays challenging behaviour - the burden on parents can be extreme. That behaviour may prompt a visit to the doctor, and in this podcast we’re talking about how parents can be supported in that - what services are available. We’ll also be discussing what is normal behaviour, and what might prompt a ref...

In the UK we have a complex relationship with gambling, the government licences the national lottery, and uses profit from that to fund our art and museum sector - horse racing is a national TV event, and we've seen a proliferation of betting shops on our high streets. At the same time, there's increasing acceptance that gambling causes problems for some people - to the extent that it's been terme...

The National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles is a deep look into the sex lives of us brits - and has been running now for 30 years, giving us some longitudinal data about the way in which those sex lives have changed. The latest paper to be published, based on that data, looks at the frequency of sex - how often different groups are having sex on a weekly basis, and has reported a drop...

Starting in the middle of April, the group “Extinction Rebellion” have organised a series of non-violent direct action protests. Most notably bringing central London to a standstill - but these events are now continuing around the country. Predictably, they have received a lot of criticism - they have also received a lot of support - amongst those arrested at the protests have been a few doctors,...

Here's a taster for our new student podcast - Sharp Scratch. We're talking about the hidden curriculum, things you need to know to function as a doctor, but are rarely formally taught. This is a taster - if you enjoy, subscribe! https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/student-bmj-podcast/id331561304 Sharp Scratch episode 1: Surviving the night shift. Why nights shifts mess with your brain, how astro...

In the UK, there's an ethnic group that is surprisingly large, but often overlooked by society, and formal healthcare services. The gypsy traveller community have poorer health outcomes because of systemic issues around access to health and education. In this podcast we're joined by Michelle Gavin and Samson Rattigan, who both work for Friend's Families and Travellers - and who have have been work...

An “author pays” publishing model is the only fair way to make biomedical research findings accessible to all, say David Sanders, professor of gastroenterology at Sheffield University, but James Ashton and worries that it can lead to bias in the evidence base towards commercially driven results - as those are the researchers who can pay for open access fees. Dave deBronkart just wants patients to...