Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Lorna Speid
Your worst nightmare has come to pass. You are given a diagnosis that has left you in a state of shock. The specialist told you there is nothing else that they can do for you. “What was it that he said?” you ask yourself. “Did I hear him correctly?” you mutter to yourself. You are driving home, but you are on automatic pilot.
By Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman
Everyone experiences anxiety from time to time. But what about those people for whom anxiety is an inevitable part of their working life, such as actors and presenters? How do they cope? We asked Michael Palin, member of the legendary Monty Python team and long established as one of the nation’s most cherished broadcasters, how he copes with nerves as a performer. As it turns out, the strategies he adopts can be useful to anyone struggling with anxiety. Here’s an extract from our interview.
By Jonathan Slack
When I arrived in the USA as a professor I was surprised to find how specialized American scientists are. Most US biomedical labs just seem to work on one molecular pathway or even one molecule.
We at OUP are no strangers to the changes in publishing and all the different forms a ‘book’ can take. One of our recent medical titles has been adapted as an iPad application (or ‘app’) — Cardiac Imaging Cases: Cases in Radiology for iPad — so we asked the co-author what it’s like to practice and learn medicine in this new form.
By Siobhan Farmer and Barbara Hanratty
In case you hadn’t noticed, wellbeing is what you need. From companies promoting food supplements to lifestyle magazines, think-tanks and Government departments, wellbeing is on everyone’s agenda. Happiness, quality of life, life satisfaction – it doesn’t seem to matter that we don’t know exactly what it is – we definitely want some.
On this day in 1496, British doctor Edward Jenner administered the first smallpox vaccination to James Phipps, an eight year old boy. To mark the anniversary, we speak with Martin S. Hirsch, MD, FIDSA. Dr. Hirsch is editor-in-chief of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, professor of infectious diseases and immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.
By Hanan El Marroun
Some babies are born four weeks too early and others are born three weeks past the due date. Their timing seems random, but that is certainly not the case. Of all births, around 90% take place between 37 and 40 weeks. There are several theories about how the timing of birth is regulated, but the process is not completely understood.
By Barbara Rogoff
Doña Chona Pérez, who turns 87 this week, was born with a piece of the amniotic sac over her head like a veil, indicating a birth destiny of being a sacred midwife. This credential indicating divine selection to the profession has been recognized in the Mayan region for many years.
By Ann McNeill, Lorraine Craig, Marc C. Willemsen & Geoffrey T. Fong
In Europe, rates of smoking prevalence and premature death attributable to tobacco are still a cause for real concern. Governments in the region will point to progress such as the introduction of smokefree laws, increased taxation on cigarettes, pack warnings, and the fact they have become signatories to the World Health Organisation’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) — as has the European Union (EU) itself. But signing up to the FCTC marks another step along a journey, rather than being an end in itself. A significant gap remains between the recommended best practice and country or region-specific legislation.
By Jonathan Crowe
We’ve all been there: the car that finally became too expensive to keep on the road as more and more parts needed to be replaced, or the computer that started to run so slowly you gave up even bothering to open your web browser. These and other everyday experiences show how there’s an increased risk of things breaking as they get older. And our own bodies aren’t immune: the hair at my temples (and on other parts of my head, I fear) is on a resolute march towards greyness, and my eyesight isn’t as sharp as it once was. In short, our cells are just as susceptible to breaking down as they age as anything else.
By Richard S. Ostfeld, Ph.D
2012 could be a terrible year for Lyme disease. To understand why, we need to go back in time to the autumn of 2010. Over vast parts of the northeastern USA the oak trees that dominate many forests let loose with a bumper crop of acorns. Oaks are notorious for producing highly variable seed crops, from a trickle of one or two acorns per square meter in some years to several dozen per square meter in others. When protein- and lipid-rich acorns are superabundant, white-footed mice are able to cache large numbers and feast all winter, surviving well and breeding early and often. Consequently, their populations can reach peaks of up to 200 individuals per hectare the summer following a good acorn year. Legions of mice scampering around on the forest floor spell good news for blacklegged ticks, the vector responsible for transmitting Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections.
By Ji Young Bang, MBBS MPH
Cervical cancer is globally the second most frequently occurring malignancy in women, with 400,000 new cases and 250,000 deaths each year. Cervical screening, which aims to detect pre-malignant cervical lesions known as cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), involves sampling cervical epithelial cells via the Papanicolaou smear test or liquid-based cytology. In England, the National Health Service Cervical Screening Programme (NHSCSP) was set up in 1988 and currently all women between the ages of 25 and 64 years are eligible to undergo screening. Despite the widespread availability, are all women taking advantage of cervical screening? If not, what separates these women from those that do choose to participate in screening?
By Dr Mark McCann
Older men have been getting a bad press. Women are admitted to nursing and residential homes at a greater rate than men of the same age and health. There is an assumption that the reason for this gender difference is that older men are less willing than older women to care for their dependent partners: that for cultural or personal reasons ‘old men don’t do caring’.
By Mitch Earleywine
Cannabis became essentially illegal in the United States in 1937. Perhaps this 75 year experiment has provided enough data for some informed decisions. We’re up to over 800,000 arrests each year, with government spending billions annually on marijuana control. Yet more people have tried the plant than ever before. Several authors suggest that alternatives to prohibition might prove cheaper, send fewer people through our courts, and maintain respect for the law. It seems oddly un-American that a citizen can go to jail for owning a plant, especially here in the land of the free. But change is scary, and fear runs politics in frightening ways.
One of the hallmarks of an expert is to make what they are doing look effortless. Whether it is tossing pizza, throwing a clay pot on a wheel, or executing the perfect forehand smash, the experts make it look easy. The part that we don’t see is the hundreds of hours of practice, and the hundreds of times it has gone wrong; the shreds of dough stuck to the light bulb.
Have you ever wondered if it is really possible for others to know what you are thinking? Our brains seem to allow both “internal” points of view, and “external” ones. As individuals, we know them from the inside as we experience our thoughts, perceptions and emotions. Scientists, on the other hand, only know our brains from the outside, as they employ brain imaging, EEG, or other types of techniques.