The year that went by

The anomaly that finally went away?

When Archie Cochrane, Fred Moore and I conceived of trying to relate mortality in developed countries to measures of health service provision little did we imagine that it would set a hare running 20 years into the future. To us this was an amusing correlational study in the spirit of McKeown and Illich—those sceptics of medical prowess. That our work has been reprinted in two collections of ep...

Cutaneous Lupus - "The Pimple That Never Went Away".

A 28-year-old woman presented with an erythematous rash involving the nose, nasolabial folds, and philtrum that appeared after she had manipulated a painful vesicular lesion at the base of her nose that she believed to be a pimple. The patient received cloxacillin for presumed erysipelas and had a partial response. However, after cloxacillin therapy, worsening induration (Panel A) prompted trea...

Went the Day Well?

2012 -- That was the year that was.

Geriatric medicine has an encyclopaedic sweep, reflecting the complexity of both the ageing process and of our patient group. Keeping up with, and making sense of, the relevant scientific literature is challenging, especially as ageing has increased in prominence as a focus of research across many branches of the sciences and the humanities. This review of research published in 2012 in generali...

Where Bell Went Wrong

It is explained on a physical basis how absence of contextuality allows Bell inequalities to be violated, without bringing an implication on locality or realism. The point is that the initial values of the hidden variables of the detectors are mutually exclusive for different detector settings. Therefore they have no reason to possess a common probability distribution and hence no reason to sat...