WHAT distinguishes clinical medicine from biomedicine? Most physicians would probably agree that in their daily clinical work they rely not only on biomedical but also on humane qualities. Many patients express a concern that the humanistic aspects of medicine are overshadowed by mechanistic ideas, which they feel have come to dominate much of the medical community. At the same time, there is l...

The Journal of Medical Case Reports was launched in February 2007. This is an open access, online journal dedicated to the publication of high quality case reports which make a contribution to the expansion of medical knowledge [1]. It is the world's first international medical journal devoted to the publication of case reports from all areas of clinical medicine from anywhere in the world and ...

Some practical problems in the teaching of ethics to medical students are described. The definition of the objectives of the course remains the central aspect, and is more important than the specific content. The use of student projects, buzz groups, case histories and discussion points is described. There is a need for student assessment or examination at the end of the course. The teachers re...

This article deals with the problems of seeing Harvey historically, rather than as a construction seen from the viewpoint of modern medicine. It deals with his programme of work, the expectations of his audience, his intellectual training and the political and religious circumstances of seventeenth century Europe. It shows that at the time the impact of Harvey's discovery was negative on clinic...

The leading ethical position on placebo-controlled clinical trials is that whenever proven effective treatment exists for a given condition, it is unethical to test a new treatment for that condition against placebo. Invoking the principle of clinical equipoise, opponents of placebo-controlled trials in the face of proven effective treatment argue that they (1) violate the therapeutic obligatio...

This paper describes an authoritative, non-proprietary information resource that provides an efficient mechanism for embedding specialized clinical knowledge into the design of healthcare telecommunications systems. The resource marries two types of data interchange standards, a message/electronic-document standard and a terminology standard. In technical terms, it is part protocol and part dat...

In contrast to public health and the resolution to further increase the health care of the whole community in regions worldwide, current clinical medicine has its limits. Further improvement in public health - rather than individual diseases - can only be achieved by integrating new views into treatment. Some years ago, the concept of biopsychosocial medicine was integrated into patient treatme...

There is the need for further defining the term precision medicine due to lack of its authoritative or official definition. After head-to-head comparison of all existing terms and their definitions, the term precision medicine is more frequently used in basic and clinical medicine, because it may best reflect the whole profile of all relevant terms, with something new or different from others. ...