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Mashup Score: 1Revolving doors: board memberships, hedge funds, and the FDA chiefs responsible for regulating industry - 3 hour(s) ago
The US Food and Drug Administration says that it takes conflicts of interest seriously. But financial entanglements with the drug industry are common among its leaders. Peter Doshi reports At his public confirmation hearing in late 2021, Robert Califf, President Biden’s nominee to lead the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), faced pointed questions about his financial relationships with industry. Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, asked, “At a time when the American people are outraged by the high cost of prescription drugs, deeply disturbed about what happened with Purdue and Oxycontin, what kind of comfort can you give to the American people when you have been so closely tied to the pharmaceutical industry yourself?” He added, “How can the American people feel comfortable you’re going to stand up to this powerful special interest?” Califf responded: “Senator Sanders, I have a history of doing that. But I’d also point out that this administration has the most stringent ethic
Source: www.bmj.comCategories: General Medicine News, General HCPsTweet
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Mashup Score: 13What do we know about covid-19’s effects on the gut? - 7 hour(s) ago
Not just a respiratory infection, covid can cause symptoms throughout the body. Gastrointestinal symptoms are common in both acute and long covid, with gut issues often persisting long after initial infection. Katharine Lang investigates Lack of appetite, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, and abdominal pain. These may not be the symptoms people expect with covid, but around 50% of people experience them after SARS-CoV-2 infection, and in some people they’re the only symptoms.1 Gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms may be the first sign of infection or may develop later and persist as part of long covid. Sheena Cruickshank, immunologist at the University of Manchester, tells The BMJ why doctors didn’t initially recognise GI symptoms as part of covid-19. “The frequency of gastric symptoms—anorexia, pain, diarrhoea, vomiting, rectal bleeding—has varied considerably from 12-61% in publications,” she says, explaining that this variance may be due to GI symptoms not being reported as linked to covid. “H
Source: www.bmj.comCategories: General Medicine News, General HCPsTweet
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Mashup Score: 8Toxic household exposures in children - 8 hour(s) ago
### What you need to know Poisoning is a leading cause of unintentional injury in children worldwide accounting for 11% of all unintentional injuries in children under 15 years old.1 Fatal poisoning rates are four times higher in low and middle income countries compared with high income countries.1 Across Europe, agents most commonly ingested include medications and household products.2 In the UK, poisoning is the third most common cause of injury related admission to hospital, equating to around 4000-5000 admissions per year (box 1).1011 Most children ingesting poisonous substances do not require hospital admission, and many can be managed at home or in the community.11 However, these decisions require adequate clinical assessment and access to appropriate information on the chemicals involved. This article offers an approach to assessing a child with suspected exposure to toxic household chemicals for those working in community settings. Box 1 ### Rise in poisoning from household exp
Source: www.bmj.comCategories: General Medicine News, General HCPsTweet
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Mashup Score: 0
Readers of The BMJ who are registered clinicians working in the UK will be well aware of the professional duty of candour and transparency over incidents that put patients at risk or harm them. It was strongly reinforced in 2015 (updated in 2022) in joint guidance by the General Medical Council (GMC) and the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC),12 as well as in updated professional codes of practice.34 This duty, which can also feature in our employment contracts, comes with a “must” and not a “should”: it applies equally to registered doctors, nurses, and midwives in management and professional leadership roles, who are expected to create a culture where staff can raise concerns without fear and can have them listened to and acted on. Aside from the professional duty of candour, some readers may be less aware of the statutory duty of candour for healthcare organisations and their executives. It’s still fairly rare to see the “duty of candour” referred …
Source: www.bmj.comCategories: General Medicine News, General Journals & SocietTweet
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Mashup Score: 15
Staffing shortages play a key role in unsafe maternity care, an analysis of 92 cases by the Maternity and Newborn Safety Investigations (MNSI) programme has found.1 The 92 pregnant women studied had been allocated to give birth in midwifery units, intended for those deemed low risk, but had to be transferred to hospital because they or their babies needed additional care. Thirty of the babies died—19 during labour and 11 during the first six days of life—and 62 babies required therapeutic cooling for potential brain injury. As well as insufficient staff numbers, difficulties in monitoring babies’ heart rate also played a role in poor care and were affected by the staff shortages, MNSI’s national learning report found. “The mismatch between demand and capacity frequently led to delays in care and/or safety-critical monitoring tasks during labour,” it noted. …
Source: www.bmj.comCategories: General Medicine News, General HCPsTweet
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Mashup Score: 8Why I . . . go mountaineering - 18 hour(s) ago
GP Adam Booth talks to Kathy Oxtoby about his experiences of climbing some of the highest mountains in the world, including Everest—twice “It feels infinite,” Adam Booth says of the view when standing at the summit of Mount Everest (also known as Chomolungma and Sagarmatha). “You see the curvature of the earth, the whole of the Himalayan chain spread out in two directions—the arid, expansive Tibet on one side and the lush green foothills of Nepal on the other. It’s an incredible experience.” Those minutes gazing out from earth’s highest mountain were “profound moments in my life,” he says. “With all the preparation and physical training, I’d been building up to those moments for years.” A part time GP at Prescott Surgery in Baschurch, Shropshire, Booth’s love of mountaineering has brought him huge fulfilment in life. “When I’m on the summit of a …
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Mashup Score: 181Deprescribing in older adults with polypharmacy - 1 day(s) ago
Polypharmacy is common in older adults and is associated with adverse drug events, cognitive and functional impairment, increased healthcare costs, and increased risk of frailty, falls, hospitalizations, and mortality. Many barriers exist to deprescribing, but increased efforts have been made to develop and implement deprescribing interventions that overcome them. This narrative review describes intervention components and summarizes findings from published randomized controlled trials that have tested deprescribing interventions in older adults with polypharmacy, as well as reports on ongoing trials, guidelines, and resources that can be used to facilitate deprescribing. Most interventions were medication reviews in primary care settings, and many contained components such as shared decision making and/or a focus on patient care priorities, training for healthcare professionals, patient facing education materials, and involvement of family members, representing great heterogeneity in
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Mashup Score: 17Scarlett McNally: Acknowledging the dangers of childbirth could be key to fixing maternity services - 1 day(s) ago
I’ll always be grateful to the doctor who delivered my first baby: a kind and skilled obstetric registrar able to analyse the situation and undertake a ventouse extraction. I knew that yoga, breathing, and exercises could help with delivery—but I also knew that things could go wrong, and I wanted the option of medical help if an emergency arose. Childbirth can be dangerous.1 Only 52% of births in England are spontaneous vaginal deliveries, 11% are instrumental births, and 34% are caesareans (most of which are emergencies).2 The Royal College of Midwives encourages all types of birth to be valued, as aiming for a physiological birth “at all costs” can sometimes be unsafe.34 I know from experience the impact that a traumatic delivery can have for mothers, babies, and families. During the paediatric orthopaedic rotation of my general training in orthopaedic surgery, I saw that learning disabilities and physical or developmental disabilities sometimes don’t become apparent …
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Mashup Score: 111Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza - 1 day(s) ago
200 days into Israel’s military bombardment and siege of Gaza, we are witnessing the onset of a man made and entirely preventable famine, say Sameer Sah and Khaled Dawas In December 2023, we led Medical Aid for Palestinians’ (https://www.map.org.uk/) and the International Rescue Committee’s first emergency medical team in Gaza. On that trip, three months into Israel’s bombardment and siege, we saw the disturbing and shocking conditions that Palestinians were forced to live in. We have seen the warning signs of the current hunger crisis for months. In December 2023, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warned that famine would occur if Israel’s assault on Gaza continued.1 In January 2024, doctors volunteering for Medical Aid for Palestinians in Gaza reported seeing signs of serious malnutrition in both children and adults.2 Then in February, the World Health Organization warned that the decline in the nutrition status of the population in Gaza was unprecedented3—people were
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Mashup Score: 97
Only two years ago when we were looking to add to our team of doctors, we had just a handful of applicants. Other practices nearby had to do several rounds of recruitment before being able to appoint. Up and down the country the story was the same: there simply weren’t enough doctors. Now we’ve moved from a situation of not enough GP applicants for advertised posts to one of intense competition for jobs. It’s not that there’s been a sudden influx of qualified GPs—in fact their number hasn’t shifted, despite an increase in both population and need.1 What has happened is that the …
Source: www.bmj.comCategories: General Medicine News, General HCPsTweet
The US Food and Drug Administration says that it takes conflicts of interest seriously. But financial entanglements with the drug industry are common among its leaders. Peter Doshi reports 🔗 https://t.co/LM9hJdDo1F https://t.co/HatkDZyvAM