One of the first things one learns in the clinical part of medical school – the time when one sees actual patients – is the difference between symptoms and signs, the latter sometimes being called clinical signs. A symptom is what the patient complains of. It might be pain, a cough, skin itching, feeling sick, etc. In other [...]
What is it like to be a mouse? It’s impossible to know, but if you’re a mouse which has had human cells implanted into its brain, one can say with a high degree of certainty that it’s not much fun. According to a recent report by the BBC, twenty-two intrepid researchers at Stanford University in America have created [...]
The UK NHS website, as you would expect, aims to offer helpful advice on a large range of medical matters for the lay public. For example, if you’re concerned about an ingrowing toenail, you can learn how to recognise and treat this condition, although I have to say the pictures they show are of rather horrible gross examples. [...]
A recent article in a journal called Nature Communications, written by twenty-eight authors (if I did not miscount) who are mainly from America, is a wonderful example of a tremendous research effort to prove the useless. The title is: ‘Rare coding variants in CHRNB3 associate with reduced daily cigarette smoking across ancestries.’ Well, fancy that. It’s a genetic [...]
When I was a medical student one of the basic skills we needed to learn was how to examine a patient. There were three stages to this process: inspection, palpation, and auscultation. This means looking at the whole patient and the part of the body of interest; feeling with one’s hand, say, the abdomen for swellings or other [...]
There is a satirical saying in regard to using animals for medical research: The rat is an animal which, when injected, produces a paper. We could say something similar about the smoking problem: Smokers trying to be non-smokers are a group of people who, when investigated, produce research papers. Such an aphorism is illustrated in a Research Report [...]
As I mention in my medical memoir, An English Doctor in Japan, sometimes the encounter with patients for no good reason may be referred to as ‘the front line’ or even as ‘the coal face’ of general practice. Worse, in discussions with colleagues during a coffee break, when asking if any interesting patients had been seen, the cynical [...]
An unusual libel case is currently making its way through the Australian courts. The plaintiff is a person who goes by the name of Roxanne Tickle. Incidentally, Tickle is a real English surname originating from the town of Tickhill in the UK county of Yorkshire. Roxanne Tickle is what some people call a transwoman. Now, in order to [...]
The highly esteemed King’s College London recently announced the ‘Largest study to understand the support needs of young people experiencing gender incongruence.’ Now, allow me a short digression. When I was a medical student an anecdote was doing the rounds to illustrate why doctors should always examine patients and not just take what they say at face value. [...]
They ought to be ashamed of themselves Dr Tom Dolphin, who bears more than a passing resemblance to John Cleese, star of Fawlty Towers and other popular British comedy shows, has recently been appointed Chair of the British Medical Association (BMA), replacing Professor Philip Banfield. In August 2024 I wrote to Professor Banfield, protesting about doctors going on strike [...]