A new Chair of the BMA Council has recently been appointed as successor to Professor Philip Banfield. The first thing that struck me about him is that he bears a passing resemblance to the younger version of John Cleese, the star of the British comedy series, Fawlty Towers. Tom Dolphin (above) and John Cleese (below) In August 2024 [...]
When I did my training for general practice it included a residency in psychiatry. From time to time we would get a call from a GP requesting admission for a patient who was threatening suicide. After taking more details the consultant usually commented, ‘This patient is not mentally ill – she’s upset,’ but he admitted her anyway. Dr [...]
Recently I had some business matters to attend to in London. I then did some sightseeing with my wife in Edinburgh before moving to Germany for a few days to visit friends. Rail rip-off The fun started before we left home. Thinking it would be easier to book train tickets from London to Edinburgh directly with my sterling [...]
I could hardly believe my eyes when I read of the latest crackpot idea to try to save the NHS money. It’s mentioned in an opinion piece in The British Medical Journal (BMJ) by a part-time GP. It seems a scheme is being proposed to reduce demand for hospital appointments by dissuading GPs from making referrals. (At least [...]
In the original story by Hans Christian Andersen, the Emperor was merely deluded that he was fully dressed when he wasn’t. But what really happened was that the Emperor was suffering from a neurodevelopmental disorder that caused him to be so distracted and excitable that he rushed out of his palace to parade around stark naked in [...]
There are many reasons why someone might become depressed. Here are a few: bereavement, loss of a job, financial difficulties, and disappointment in love. It may also happen because of childhood abuse or neglect, whether remembered or suppressed. In other words, there’s always a reason for it although this may not at first be recognized. Normal human misery [...]
Luigi Mangione, the man accused of fatally shooting healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thompson in New York on 4 December 2024, apparently suffered from chronic low back pain. And according to news reports, this was due to a condition that he was probably born with, called spondylolisthesis; it was treated in 2023 with a spinal fixation operation. Spondylolisthesis means [...]
I am all for treating people fairly and being non-discriminatory, but sometimes you have to draw a line. For example, in the UK National Health Service (NHS) website, which is on the whole helpful and a useful source of information on health matters, in their efforts to try to please all the people all of the time, they [...]
IPDD is common, serious, and treatable. Definition What is IPDD? It’s an abbreviation for Invention of Psychiatric Disorders Disorder. Epidemiology This disorder is prone to afflict orthodox psychiatrists, especially those who write learned papers in scholarly journals, or scholarly papers in learned journals, or who contribute to that great work of imagination, popularly referred to as the ‘bible’ [...]
Mental illness, or rather, what is called mental illness, is a serious matter. But what is it? To find the answer, or an answer, we can turn to the 1,000-page tome published by – who else? – the American Psychiatric Association. It’s called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The last (fifth) edition was published in [...]