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Big Pharma | Karen Hitchcock | The Monthly | 20th May 2014

Doctor’s notebook: The drug marketing industry. “The reps all look the same: very pretty women wearing suits, great-looking guys who belong to weekend triathlon clubs, twinkling their...

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How Mistakes Can Save Lives | Ian Leslie | New Statesman | 4th June 2014

What surgeons can learn from pilots. Pilots are surrounded by rules and systems designed to contain their mistakes; their fallibility is assumed. Surgeons are trusted to be the best judges of their...

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My State Of Emergency | Eric Snoey | San Francisco | 4th June 2014

Doctor’s notebook from Highland Hospital in Oakland, California. “Patching bullet and stab wounds and dealing with drug-crazed patients is a tiny fraction of what I do. Patients everywhere suffer from...

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Why Do We Have Blood Types? | Carl Zimmer | Mosaic | 15th July 2014

Blood types were recognised by medical science in 1900. Types A and B go back at least 20 million years to a common ancestor of humans and gibbons. A few people have no blood type at all. But even now...

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Medical Research: Treat Ageing | Luigi Fontana et al | Nature | 23rd July 2014

Does getting old have to mean getting sick? Not if medicine raises its game and learns to stall the “incremental cellular damage and changes” associated with old age. This would be more efficient and...

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Science And Ethics Of Ebola Treatment | Joanna Monti-Masel | Scientia Salon |...

How to administer a very few doses of untested medicine in an epidemic. Don’t worry about side effects: “If there were ever a disease for which this is not a big deal, it is Ebola. It seems unlikely...

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The Anaesthetized Queen | Lindsey Fitzharris | Chirurgeon's Apprentice | 15th...

On the first use of anaesthetics in childbirth. A Scottish doctor called James Simpson experimented with ether in 1847 but found it too smelly and explosive. He switched to chloroform, which seemed to...

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Under The Knife | Christopher Beam | New Yorker | 22nd August 2014

A despairing patient in a Chinese hospital attacks his doctors with a knife, killing one and maiming others, then tries to kill himself. A tragedy, but one of many. “Violence against doctors in China...

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Young Blood | Jess Zimmerman | Aeon | 27th August 2014

Experiments with mouse blood at Stanford and Harvard “suggest” that something in the blood – “possibly the protein GDF11, which is also present in humans” – has the capability to reverse many of the...

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Young Adult Cancer Story | Briallen Hopper | LA Review Of Books | 16th July 2014

An adult reads The Fault In Our Stars while helping care for a friend who, like Fault’s central character, has incurable Stage 4 cancer. “This is what three-Kleenex films can do at their best, and what...

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The First Cut | Andy Greenwald | Grantland | 6th August 2014

Steven Soderbergh’s television series, The Knick, achieves “a level of visual virtuosity rarely glimpsed on the small screen”. The setting is an American hospital in 1900. Dr. John Thackery, the...

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A Diagnosis | Jenny Diski | London Review Of Books | 3rd September 2014

It’s cancer. Which, for a writer, can only mean one thing. “A f–king cancer diary? Another f–king cancer diary? I think back to cancer diaries I have read, just because they’re there. You don’t seek...

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The truth about Ebola: battle starts with accurate information | Tolu...

A discrepancy of one. Tolu Ogunlesi on the (minor) difference in numbers of Ebola deaths reported by Nigerian officials which masks the (major) problem of distrust in information from the government....

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The Conversation That Matters Most | Atul Gawande | Slate | 6th October 2014

Doctor discusses end-of-life care, and managing death. You should not overload very sick people with technical choices; you have to find out what their remaining priorities are, and work with those as...

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Diary: Ebola | Paul Farmer | London Review Of Books | 15th October 2014

“Weak health systems, not unprecedented virulence, are to blame for Ebola’s rapid spread. An Ebola diagnosis need not be a death sentence. Here’s my assertion as an infectious disease specialist: if...

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Growing Old Disgracefully | Henry Marsh | New Statesman | 23rd October 2014

Brain surgeon reviews Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, about death and medicine. “My juniors ring me at night about emergency cases. A decision is needed on whether to operate and possibly save the...

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Having An Abortion In 1959 | Diana Wiener | Buzzfeed | 23rd October 2014

Non-sensational and thought-provoking. A 74-year-old grandmother tells her story. You did it, it cost, there might be problems. “In those days, there was no health insurance. My father paid the $125...

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A Plutocratic Proposal | Alexander Masters | Mosaic | 27th October 2014

The rich should be allowed to buy places for themselves and their loved ones in clinical trials of promising new drugs. This mechanism would generate new funding for medical research, enable more...

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The Ethics Of Fighting Ebola | Peter Singer | Project Syndicate | 12th...

Can we afford placebo trials for Ebola drugs? No, and we don’t need them. “Monitor carefully the outcomes of different treatment centers now, before experimental treatments become available, and then...

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Crazymeds | Scott Alexander | Slate Star Codex | 27th November 2014

The “best psychiatric resource on the entire internet” may well be a site called Crazymeds.us, which provides “accurate and readable descriptions of the costs and benefits of every psychiatric...

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