A forum on healthcare policy and professional issues, by Glasgow-based GP and FT Weekend columnist Margaret McCartney
From the category archives:
This very insightful article from the NY Times explores the consequences of labelling a pre-school child with behaviour problems with severe mental illness. This US view is disturbing, from the ease of which anti-psychotic medication is prescribed off-license, to the pharmaceutical company who supplied promotional building bricks to use in the waiting room.
In the US, [...]
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So here’s patient choice for you. Rugby player, mid-match, asks his doctor to have a small cut made in his lip. Doctor says no. He asks again. So she makes a small injury, which means that he can be substituted and thus has repercussions on the competition: Dr Wendy Chapman, now obviously regretful of her actions now [...]
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If you are pregnant, NICE want you to given a carbon monoxide test. This test is to see if you smoke. But look at the flowchart on page 11- you are to have this test even if you say you don’t smoke, and even if you say you do.
I don’t think this is conducive to [...]
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To have a baby or not? The National Childbirth Trust, a hardworking parenting charity, have been criticised for offering advice (now withdrawn) that women may wish to delay pregnancy until the swine flu pandemic is over. Various other agencies, including the Royal College of General Practitioners and the Department of Health, were quick to respond by saying [...]
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Labour has a reputation for being painful. Personally, I like pain relief and avoiding complications, so I chose to give birth in what I thought were the safer environs of the hospital. But in hospitals, medical staff may be rather too close to hand, and this can mean a higher risk of medical intervention without, [...]
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Not content to prescribe a shopping list of buggies, cots, Moses baskets, bibs, nappies, changing mats, slings, car seats, blankets, hats, romper suits and bootees, a contender on the pregnancy to-do list is the 4D baby scan.
No, the fourth dimension is not really recordable (although my understanding of quantum physics is rather shaky) it refers instead to time, [...]
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Jamie Oliver, chef-champion of the British waistline, is taking his healthy-eating campaign to the US. We’ll see the results next year, when the six-part series is due to be broadcast. Meanwhile, in the UK, public health adverts feature small girls eating fairy cakes under the slogan: “is a premature death so tempting?” Guilt is ladled [...]
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The ritual of weekly baby weighing clinics is unlikely to end anytime soon, and so I am delighted to learn that – at last- the old World Health Organisation baby weight charts are being ditched in favour of more evidence-based ones. Previously, the charts “smoothed over” the differences in normal childrens’ weight gain in the first [...]
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Autism is not the only developmental disability that a child can be born with. It does, however, garner a lot of attention. Part of the reason is that we still don’t understand the condition as well as we would like. And we still have no way of testing for it through prenatal screening.
Recent research has, [...]
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Medical lore has created something of a cult around the measurement of children’s temperatures.
A fever seems to be something which is suspected and then recorded, swiftly followed by the administration of medicine to “bring it down”.
Some confessions. My home medical kit isn’t up to much. At one point it did contain a thermometer, which came [...]
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