Medicine and Science from The BMJ

This week saw the British Medial Association’s Annual Representatives Meeting. Deborah Cohen and Helen Morant tell us what was going on in Brighton. Also this week we have the second part of Sophie Arie’s special report on Haiti.

Later this month sees the 17th International AIDS Conference in Vienna. One of the topics that will be discussed there is harm reduction, and the political will to embrace it.In this podcast, we look at the effects of long term opiate substitution programmes in Muirhouse, Edinburgh. Local GP Roy Robertson discusses the research he conducted there. We also travel to Kiev in Ukraine, where Richard Hurley talks to NGOs and injecting drug users about local harm reduction programmes.

The new coalition government’s white paper on health – encompassing the future of the NHS - was published this week. Chris Ham, chief executive of the health policy think-tank the King’s Fund and professor of health policy and management at the University of Birmingham, and Edward Davies, editor of BMJ Careers, discuss their immediate impressions with Ashley McKimm. Also this week a paper on www.bmj.com looks at suicide, and how the method of an attempted suicide relates to a later successful attempt. Professor Bo Runeson from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden joins us on the phone to discuss his research.

This week the print BMJ has a cluster of articles on suicide – one of which talks about the efficacy of physical barriers to prevent suicide from bridges. In the podcast, we’ll hear from Kevin Hines the survivor of such an attempt, and Alys Cole-King, a psychiatrist who wants to break down the stigma of suicide. We’ll also hear from Gordon Smith, one of the authors of a study looking at a link between the time when a mother gives birth – whether it’s in the normal working week, or out of hours - and the risk of neonatal death. Finally Richard Hurley tells us about AIDS 2010, the 25 000 delegate conference in Vienna.

The new coalition government’s plans for the NHS in England put GPs firmly in the driving seat - how do their secondary care colleagues feel about that? Jacky Davis, co-chair of the NHS Consultants’ Association and a founder member of the “Keep our NHS Public” campaign, shares her views with Duncan Jarvies. Duncan also talks to Professor Julian Le Grand from the London School of Economics about how market pressures can help make health care more efficient and what GP fundholding taught us. To see all BMJ Group’s articles about the NHS white paper for England, including discussion threads, podcasts, blogs, and learning modules, visit doc2doc.bmj.com/whitepaper

In June 2010 the drug company Novo Nordisk announced that its only conventional human biphasic insulin, human Mixtard 30, would no longer be available in the UK from January 2011, a decision that affects an estimated 90,000 patients Drug and Theraputics Bulletin (DTB), one of the BMJ’s sister journals, is campaigning against that decision. DTB editor Ike Ihenacho talks about the campaign. Mabel Chew talks to the authors of a rational testing article on what to do about mildly abnormal serum amine transferase levels, what to suspect, and how to diagnose. Finally, we have a musical interlude.

In this week’s podcast we discover the link between the weather and the risk of heart attacks - Krishnan Bhaskaran tells us about his research. Also, criticism and response are crucial parts of the scientific process, but how well do authors of research papers respond to critics of their work? Peter Gøtzsche and Tony Delamothe discuss their work looking at that in the BMJ.

Jill Morrison talks about how people on long term incapacity benefit because of mental health problems could be identified by their GPs three years before they stop working. BMJ Deputy editor Trish Groves explains more about the journal’s new policy of asking authors of eligible research articles to pay a publication fee. And, finally, why does the modern eunuch remain invisible?

This week, to steal a line from the latest BMJ editor’s choice, we’ll be talking shit. The millennium development goal on sanitation is way off track; Lyla Mehta, a sociologist from the Institute of Development Studies, tells us why, and Kamal Kar, a development consultant from India, explains how his grass roots initiative changes the way people view sanitation. Also, National confidential enquiry into patient outcome and death reported on cosmetic surgery this week. Dr Alex Goodwin, anaesthetist and clinical coordinator of the report, tells us about the problems they had collecting data, and some of the implications of their findings.

In this week’s podcast we find out from Sean Tunis about the future of comparative effectiveness research in the USA, and how the new institute created to champion it will differ from the UK’s National Institute of Clinical Excellence. Also, Claudia Cooper talks about her research that could support carers in the decisions they have to make for dementia sufferers.