Existential psychotherapists help people with the existential, eternal, unsettling, and human problems of meaninglessness, isolation, and the terror of death. These are problems that are causing much suffering in Britain […]
Columnists
Billy Boland: Playing the long game
I was struck by a pang of existential angst the other day when I was out for dinner with some consultant friends. They were chatting about their impending retirement and […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . The first medical word
In an earlier blog I noted the impossibility of knowing which words came first, language having evolved thousands of years before written records, although claims have been made for the […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Powerhouses and workhorses
The mitochondrion was termed the “powerhouse of the cell” in a Scientific American article in 1957 by Philip Siekevitz, who died in 2009. I suspect that anyone with biological knowledge […]
William Cayley: Comfort always and advocacy for the vulnerable
Reading the Monday morning paper, I was greeted by stories about ongoing fights over whether or how to undo the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) and controversies over solitary confinement. Later, while driving […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Ars magna
In 1545 Girolamo Cardano, an Italian physician, mathematician, and philosopher, published a book, Ars magna, or the Rules of Algebra (picture), which included the solutions to cubic and quartic equations, […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I use a word . . . Backronyms
A backronym is not an acronym written backwards but one that is formed retrospectively. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives two definitions: 1. An acronym formed from a phrase whose […]
Neal Maskrey: What will replace QOF?
The 2004 UK GP contract contained the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF), the boldest pay for performance scheme in healthcare ever attempted anywhere in the world. Eleven years on and […]
Richard Smith: How to fill the void of evidence for everyday practice?
Some even most (depending on how you measure it) of what doctors do lacks strong evidence. Even when evidence exists it often doesn’t seem to be relevant to doctors—because their patients […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Call a spade a tool
Between 1975 and 2010, the prevalence of the word tool or tools in PubMed increased six-fold, to more than 3% of all PubMed articles. If you’re writing about a spade, […]