Medicine and Science from The BMJ

Telehealth: Running before walking?

It seems the race to implement telehealth is on – the UK government’s response to its Whole System Demonstrator pilot has been very positive. But has it been over-hyped? We find out from Jennifer Dixon, Director of the Nuffield Trust, which has evaluated the pilot.Also, alcohol: beneficial or detrimental? Evidence shows it depends on what aspects of health you look at. Research published on bmj.com this week adds to the picture by looking at the association between alcohol consumption and the risk of developing arthritis. Alicja Wolk, professor of nutritional epidemiology at the Karolinska Institutet, explains her study.

Insanity in the dock

It has been almost exactly a year since Anders Breivik bombed government buildings in Oslo, and then carried out a mass shooting on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 people, mostly teenagers. In that time there has been much discussion about his mental state. Vivienne Nathanson and Julian Sheather from the BMA join us to discuss the moral and ethical problems that a diagnosis of insanity bring to the case.Also this week, seven articles on bmj.com look at the science behind sports product adverts. We hear from Matthew Thompson, from the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine in Oxford, who criticises the quality of the evidence submitted to the European Food Safety Authority to back these claims

Shift workers’ health and assessing risk of violence

Daniel Hackam, associate professor at Western University in Canada, explains how shift patterns can have a detrimental effect on the vascular health of workers.Also this week Seena Fazel, Wellcome Trust senior research fellow in clinical science at the University of Oxford, queries the predictive value of the risk assessment tools routinely used to predict violent behaviour

Renal patient records

A feature this week asks "Should patients be able to control their own records?". The website renalpatientview.org allows patients to do exactly that. Neil Turner, a professor of nephrology at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, explains how he and colleagues developed the resource.Also Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, authors of the "Not So Stories" column have turned their statistical scrutiny onto a recent advert by Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, the breast cancer charity. They explain how the case for mammography has been massively oversold.

Is the drug pipeline really drying up?

This week we’ll hear why Donald Light, professor of comparative health systems research at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, thinks the innovation crisis in the development of drugs is more marketing rhetoric than reality.Also this week, a research paper on bmj.com looks at how subclinical psychological distress affects mortality. Tom Russ, Alzheimer Scotland clinical research fellow at the University of Edinburgh and one of the paper's authors, explains what they found.

Fighting the food giants

Marion Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. She has written widely about food and nutrition, and is an iconoclast in the world of food politics. In this podcast she explains how economic forces have changed the food industry, and how that change is fuelling the obesity epidemic.

Ecological public health

Over the decades public health has had many incarnations. Geof Rayner and Tim Lang (Center for Food Policy) argue that public health today needs an overhaul, and to focus on our co-existence with nature and relationships with each other. They explain why, and how.Many of the issues Dr Rayner and Professor Lang are concerned about are being taken up by the People's Health Movement. Member Jonny Currie explains what he wants the movement to achieve, and others involved talk about actions they are taking.

Bad for wealth, bad for health?

In 2008 the rates of suicide in the UK began to increase. Is it a coincidence that this was also when the financial crisis hit? Ben Barr, research fellow in the department of Public Health and Policy at the University of Liverpool, explains what his study found.Those who've attempted to kill themselves once are at high risk of doing so again, but interventions to prevent this have been hard to find. Merete Nordentoft, professor at the Mental Health Centre Copenhagen, University of Copenhagen, talks us through the results of her study examining a promising candidate.

Acutely ill patients

It's increasingly obvious that acutely ill patients have received less than gold standard care. Deficiencies in training are often blamed. Paul Frost, consultant in intensive care medicine at the University Hospital of Wales, takes us through the admission of an acutely ill patient.Also this week, BRCA mutations and ionising radiation both increase the risk of developing cancer, but how do these risk factors combine? Anouk Pijpe, an epidemiologist at the Netherlands Cancer Institute, explains the results of her retrospective cohort study.

Spotting pre-eclampsia, and debating obesity

A BMJ head to head article this week asks: "Are the causes of obesity primarily environmental?" John Wilding, Head of the Department of Obesity and Endocrinology at the University of Liverpool, and Tim Frayling, professor of human genetics at the University of Exeter, argue their cases.Also this week, David Williams, a consultant obstetric physician at University College Hospital London, explains why pre-eclampsia is easily missed.