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Science & Medicine

A plea to the president-elect Trump

By Philip M. Rosoff

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”) millions of Americans were able to buy commercial health insurance and millions more who were fortunate to live in states that elected to expand Medicaid were enrolled – sometimes for the first time in their lives – and gained access to subsidized healthcare. To be sure, the ACA was far from perfect: its haphazard implementation, the failure of the tax penalties to enforce mandated insurance purchasing amongst the young and healthy leading to skewed and potentially collapsing insurance markets, and the Supreme Court’s decision to vacate the requirement to increase the Medicaid rolls, all led to not enough people being covered and the return of inexorably rising healthcare costs.

The simple definitive guide to meditation and mindfulness

By Cassandra Gill

Life in the modern era is total chaos. From the constant outbursts of sound, to the ubiquitous bombardment of advertisements, to the racing taxi cabs, cars, and buses, to the sheer swarms of people, even a simple stroll in the city can be massively taxing on your sensory system.

Oxford Textbook of Creative Arts, Health, and Wellbeing

Can dancing help with mental illness?

By Carly Annable-Coop and Lauren Gavaghan

In 2015 the Alchemy Project delivered a pioneering ‘treatment’ for mental illness. It was modelled on contemporary dance training and was a different way of engaging with people and supporting their recovery. It was based on the work of Dance United and its proven, award-winning methodology. The premise was ambitious: that in just four weeks, participants would go from a place of no experience to a high-end artistic professional dance performance.

Fighting the stigma of HIV and AIDS

By Quique Bassat, Martin Hirsch, Landon Myer, Peter Piot, and David Wilson

To mark World AIDS Day 2016 we asked people working and researching in the field how they think views on HIV and AIDS have change over the past ten years, focusing in particular on outdated stereotypes, challenging myths, and the developing positivity towards finding a cure. In addition, we have provided a series of articles from a selection of journals on the topic of HIV – freely available to read until 1 March 2017.

Winnicott: the ‘good-enough mother’ radio broadcasts

By Robert Adès

Our appetite for books on baby care seems unquenchable. The combination of the natural curiosity and uncertainty of the expectant mother, the unknowable mind of the infant, and the expectations of society creates a void filled with all kinds of manuals and confessionals offering advice, theory, reassurance, anecdotes, schedules… and inevitably, inconsistency, disagreement, and further anxiety.

Lessons from the global response to HIV/AIDS

By Markus Haacker

Since 2001, the response to HIV/AIDS has evolved into an unprecedented global health effort, extending access to treatment to 17 million people living with HIV across the developing world, some considerable successes in HIV prevention (especially regarding mother-to-child transmission), and becoming a very significant aspect of global development assistance.

Are we responsible for our lifestyle diseases?

By Martin Marchman Andersen and Morten Ebbe Juul Nielsen

Within the last couple of decades more and more research has shown a number of diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases, to be associated with particular lifestyle characteristics such as smoking, lack of exercise, and over-eating. Confronted with such research, it is timely to raise questions about individual responsibility for getting those diseases (or the increased risk thereof), and to think closer about issues such as blame, stigma, and economic burdens.

Oxford Textbook of Medicine: Cardiovascular Disorders

Can more be said about statins?

By John Firth

Statins are drugs that are very effective in reducing the level of cholesterol in the blood. They have been shown in many trials to reduce the incidence of heart attacks and strokes. They are taken by very many people, but some argue that even more would benefit from doing so, although not everyone agrees. I am waiting to be reported to the General Medical Council.

Reflections on ‘chatbot’

By Nicholas Agar

A chatbot, or chatterbot, is computer program designed to engage in conversation through written or spoken text. It was one of the words on the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 shortlist. The idea of a chatbot originates with Alan Turing’s mid twentieth century aspiration to build a thinking computer. Turing proposed a test to determine what might count as success in this venture.

Computational Theories and their Implementation in the Brain

How does the brain work?

By Richard E. Passingham

The media is full of stories about how this or that area of the brain has been shown to be active when people are scanned while doing some task. The images are alluring and it is tempting to use them to support this or that just-so story. However, they are limited in that the majority of the studies simply tell us where in the brain things are happening. But the aim of neuroscience is to discover how the brain works.

Encyclopedia of Social Work

Donate smarter this Thanksgiving and holiday season

By Cassandra Gill

You probably know about how important it is to donate food to your local soup kitchen during the holiday season (and the rest of the year, as well!), but do you ever give much thought to what you’re donating? Do you ever give food you wouldn’t necessarily want to feed to your kids in large quantities?

British Medical Bulletin

The future of the NHS – let’s not lose sight of what is important

By Lucy Frith

There is general agreement that the NHS is currently facing unprecedented challenges. Many of these challenges face all health services: increasing demand for healthcare arising from technological developments, demographic changes, rising expectations, and the increase in chronic diseases that require long-term coordinated care. In terms of public spending, the United Kingdom has entered a period of austerity.

Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and new research: Q & A with Diana Walsh Pasulka and Jacques Vallee

By Diana Walsh Pasulka

Unidentified aerial phenomena, commonly referred to as UFOs, has been the focus of research by sociologists, scholars of religion, anthropologists, philosophers, and astronomers. The information age now offers new and innovative ways to study the phenomena, and author Diana Walsh Pasulka sat down with astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee to discuss how “big data” and information processing will influence the field of study.

The politics of caring: what this election can teach us

By Mark Lazenby

We awoke ‪the morning after the presidential election to a festering wound made raw by the long campaign and, for some, split open by the results of the election. It is a wound of fear — not just any fear, but fear of people on the other side of the political divide. Some supporters of Mrs. Clinton, for example, fear Republicans putting in a conservative Supreme Court justice.

9780198725862

Disease prevention: helping health professionals

By John Frank

A new controversy about “how to stay well” hits the media at least once a week. Recent examples include: disease prevention claims made for various “healthy foods;” proposed policies to tackle the obesity pandemic, such as sugar or soda taxes; the benefits versus risks of long-term statins in healthy persons; the value of prostate cancer screening; and the accuracy of new genetic tests to predict future disease.

Combatting antibiotic resistance

By Jessica Jackson

Antibiotic resistance continues to pose a major threat to public health. Wrong or incorrect use of antibiotics may cause bacteria to become resistant to future antibiotic treatments, leading to the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance in European hospitals and communities. European Antibiotic Awareness Day is held on the 18 November each year