Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Heidi Moawad
As a medical student, you are the future of health care. Despite the persistent negativity about the state of health care and the seemingly never-ending health care crisis, you have astutely perceived the benefits of becoming a physician.
By Huw Llewelyn
In medicine, we use two different thought processes: (1) non-transparent thought, e.g. slick, subjective decisions and (2) transparent reasoning, e.g. verbal explanations to patients, discussions during meetings, ward rounds, and letter-writing.
By Stephen E. Mawdsley
In 1980, public health researchers working in the United Republic of Cameroon detected a startling trend among children diagnosed with paralytic polio. Some of the children had become paralyzed in the limb that had only weeks before received an inoculation against a common pediatric illness.
By Barry S. Levy and Victor W. Sidel
Although there has been much progress in the United States toward social justice and improved health for racial and ethnic minorities in the 50 years since the 1963 March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, much social injustice persists in this country — with profound adverse consequences for the public’s health.
By Anne Marie Jukic, Donna Baird, Clarice Weinberg, and Allen Wilcox
Pregnancy begins with conception – an event that is practically invisible. Since we can’t measure the beginning of pregnancy, it’s hard to know how far along a woman is in her pregnancy. We guess the beginning of pregnancy either from the woman’s report of her last menstrual period or from fetal size on ultrasound, both of which have errors.
By Catherine DeAngelis
During a difficult operation on a patient, a surgeon is handed the wrong instrument by the nurse assisting him. He screams at the nurse, “You gave me the wrong thing,” and throws the instrument across the room.
By Jane Williams
Diagnosed with epilepsy more than half my lifetime ago, I can’t remember what it’s like not to know about it. Despite it being the most common serious neurological condition in the UK, there is still a surprising amount of misconceptions surrounding it.
By Bruce Miller Dementia is a collection of symptoms caused by a number of different disorders, including neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. The term dementia describes a progressive decline in memory or other cognitive functions that interferes with the ability to perform your usual daily activities (driving, shopping, balancing a checkbook, working, […]
By Desmond McNeill
Modern vaccines are among the most powerful tools available to public health. They have saved millions of lives, protected millions more against the ravages of crippling and debilitating disease, and have the capacity to save many more. But like all complex and sophisticated tools, they can be used for different purposes, in different ways, and with various consequences.
By Ephrem Fernandez, Ph.D.
What is anger? In essence, anger is a subjective feeling tied to perceived wrongdoing and a tendency to counter or redress that wrongdoing in ways that may range from resistance to retaliation. Like sadness and fear, the feeling of anger can take the form of emotion, mood, or temperament.
By George Graham and Owen Flanagan
Even before the much-heralded DSM-5 was released, Thomas Insel the Director of NIMH criticized it for lacking “scientific validity.” In his blog post entitled “Transforming Diagnosis,” Insel admitted that the symptom-based approach of DSM is as good as we can get at present and that it yields “reliability” by disciplining the use of diagnostic terminology among professionals.
By Miles Witham and Marion McMurdo
It’s a Thursday morning in February, and I have just arrived on the ward to start my ward round. Mrs Y, a lady in her 90’s with dementia, was admitted with pneumonia a few days ago. She is on the mend, rehabilitating well, and we planned to get her home tomorrow with some extra home care.
By KWM Fulford
Back in 1963 the New York Times reported enthusiastically that “….a young doctor at Columbia University’s New York State Psychiatric Institute has developed a tool that may become the psychiatrist’s thermometer and microscope and X-ray machine rolled in to one.”
By Joel Paris, MD
The reception of DSM-5 has been marked by very divergent points of view. The editors of the manual congratulated themselves for their achievement in an article for the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled “The Future Arrived.”
By Edward Shorter
We’re all suffering from DSM-5 burnout. Nobody really wants to hear anything more about it, so shrill have been the tirades against it, so fuddy-duddy the responses of the psychiatric establishment (“based on the latest science”).
By Robert Goldney
To some this heading may seem unexpected. The term ‘suicide bomber’ has entered our lexicon on the obvious basis that although the prime aim may have been the killing of others, the individual perpetrator dies. Indeed, over the last three decades the media, the general public , and sometimes the scientific community have uncritically used the words ‘suicide bomber’ to describe the deaths of those who kill others, sometimes a few, usually ten to twenty, or in the case of 9/11, about two thousand, while at the same time killing themselves.