“I switched over to vaping but someone told me they were just as bad as cigarettes so I went back to smoking again.” A depressing thing to hear in a […]
Columnists
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: The whole spectrum
Spectrum originally meant the same as spectre: a ghost. It was appropriated by Newton in 1671 to describe how sunlight passing through a prism “exhibited… a Spectrum of divers colours” […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Medical catachresis—ambiguity
Catachresis, the mistaken use of one term for another, can arise through confusibility, which I discussed last week, or through ambiguity. Ambiguity (Latin amb-, implying both ways, + agere to […]
Giles Maskell: Impossible errors
Hindsight bias is a real and very powerful phenomenon, and not just in radiology […]
Tom Jefferson and Peter Doshi: RIP PubMed commons
Four years ago, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched a pilot project to “leverage the social power of the internet to encourage constructive criticism and high quality discussions.” The service […]
David Oliver: A matter of trust—doctors, the NHS, patients, and the public
The public still have high levels of trust in doctors as a profession, but we must not take that trust for granted […]
Richard Smith: How medicine is destroying itself
We need to change the course of medicine from a battle that can never be won to a humane enterprise […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . Medical catachresis—confusibility
Catachresis (Greek κατάχρησις, from χρῆσθαι to use, κατά giving a sense of perversion) is the mistaken use of one term for another. When not due to sheer ignorance, it can […]
Peter Brindley: The past just ain’t what it used to be
Peter Brindley contemplates how Victorian medicine and its failings holds up a mirror to medicine now […]
Jeffrey Aronson: When I Use a Word . . . The wheel of evidence
Last week I discussed the concept of teleoanalysis, in which different types of evidence from disparate sources are analysed either simultaneously or sequentially. To be clear, the term implies not […]