Contents: June 2007

Editor's choice

Frontiers

Editorials

Healthy planet
Climate change may well cause changes in our lifetimes. Sarah Walpole considers the health implications

Making neuroanatomy easy
Do you know your grey from your White matter? How about procencephalon from diencephalons? Oluseye Abimbola and Adelola Adeloye offer help in learning neuroanatomy

News

Creationism and medicine

news bites

Education

Hand hygiene and healthcare associated infections
Andrew McArdle and colleagues assess the importance of hand hygiene in controlling infections during delivery of health care

The medic's guide to prescribing:Minimising adverse drug reactions
How do you go about minimising the harmful effects of prescription drugs? Rachel Green and Simon Maxwell discuss

Doctors with a problem drug
Sam Pannick and Gordon T Plant outline the importance of reporting adverse drug reactions in medical practice

10 minute consultation:sinusitis
Neil K Chadha and Rashmi Chadha discuss how you should handle this common problem in primary care

Pub medic Artificial blood
Is it worth all the hype? Thomas Mac Mahon and J Adrian Copplestone find out

Picture quiz Trauma to neck after a fall

Laboratory medicine in primary care Monitoring renal function in hypertension
Several classes of antihypertensive drugs can cause a fall in glomerular filtration rate and a rise in serum potassium and creatinine concentrations. Una Martin and Jamie J Coleman discuss the implications

Picture quiz Disc swelling or papilloedema?

Careers

Higher training in the land down under
What does it mean to train as a higher specialist in Australia? Having worked in New South Wales, Zudin Puthucheary and Adrian Blundell give a UK perspective

Time to specialise the generalised?
How do general practitioners work on opposite sides of the world? Harnaik Johal and Pooja Goel argue that the UK can learn lessons from Australia

People

A political doctor
Jerry Cowley is a general practitioner, a lawyer, and an elected independent representative in the lower chamber of the Irish parliament. He has campaigned for improvements in health care for older people. His involvement in Irish politics started in 1997, when he campaigned nationally for an orthopaedic unit at Mayo General Hospital. He also campaigned for a national helicopter emergency medical service. Rebekka T Stiasny caught up with him

A surgeon in the House of Lords
Ian McColl is a member of the British House of Lords; emeritus professor of surgery at Guy's Hospital, in London; vice chairman of the international board of Mercy Ships; and president of Leprosy Mission International. Elizabeth H Tissingh spoke to him about life as a student, surgeon, and politician

Papers

Tonsillectomy for adults with recurrent streptococcal throat infection:randomised controlled trial
Tonsillectomy has some benefits over watchful waiting. Jocalyn Clark examines a recent paper that found the net benefit unclear and concluded that research into longer term outcomes is needed

Life

Dear blog
Jemima T Tagal reports on the blogging phenomenon within the medical community

Medical families-an inside story
Sisters-Shikha Singh and Swati Singh-explain what it means to be part of a medical family

Mapping the alternative route
Regulation of complementary practitioners to weed out the charlatans and protect the public sounds uncontroversial. But, as Michael Day reports, recent UK proposals seem to introduce more questions than answers

Creating a student medical journal
Ivana Vodopivec describes how she created a student medical journal in a small country, starting from scratch

In sickness and in health
Philip J Smith tells of his experience going through medical school with a chronic illness

Reviews

Lies with everything

Pathologically lazy

Foreign students in the UK

The clinical medic

Interpretation of chest radiographs

Eyespy