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Using data from more than 330,000 doctors and 12 pharmaceutical firms, it identified 58% as having received payments. It found that payments were unlikely to represent significant opportunities to educate doctors about new drugs, and that financial gain appears to be an important motive for doctors. Daniel Carlat, director of the prescription project at the non-profit group Pew Trusts, says research to date shows that doctors who have dealings with drugs reps "tend to prescribe differently". "They prescribe more drugs, more expensive drugs, more brand-name drugs, and they're less likely to follow evidence-based practice guidelines in prescribing drugs.

stilettos and a tailored expensive-looking suit. This wasn’t a case of a low-cut blouse or a thigh-revealing skirt

uniform

Digitization promises to make medical care easier and more efficient. But are screens coming between doctors and patients?

Medicine has long known about the placebo effect – the healing power of good expectations. But the nocebo effect, as its evil twin is known, may be more powerful. “It’s easier to do harm than good,” explains Watts. “And this is worrisome, because nocebo’s negative influence can be found lurking in almost every aspect of medical life and beyond.”

Everyone knows that doctors must not discriminate on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, religion or national origin when they select or treat patients: It’s an obligation they accepted when they entered the health care profession. (That doesn’t mean they have to take all comers; they can turn away patients for various other reasons.) But should patients be able to choose clinicians on the basis of such attributes? The answer is: It depends.

There is a common narrative in science of the tragic genius who suffers for a great reward, and the tale of Curie, who died from exposure to radiation as a result of her pioneering work, is one of the most famous. There is a sense of grandeur in the idea that paying heavily is a means of advancing knowledge. But in truth, you can’t control what it is that you find — whether you’ve sacrificed your health for it, or simply years of your time.

TWO of our most vital industries, health care and education, have become increasingly subjected to metrics and measurements. Of course, we need to hold professionals accountable. But the focus on numbers has gone too far. We’re hitting the targets, but missing the point.

The tattoo stretched across the man's chest. It said "Do Not Resuscitate." His signature was tattooed at the end. "We were shocked," remembers Holt. "We didn't know what to do." The tattoo, and the hospital's decision about what it required of them, has set off a conversation among doctors and medical ethicists around the country about how to express one's end-of-life wishes effectively, and how policymakers can make it easier.

The Danish Medical Association said it had considered suggesting a legal ban on the procedure for children under the age of 18, because it believed circumcision should be “an informed, personal choice” that young men make for themselves.ADVERTISINGinRead invented by Teads When parents have their sons circumcised, it robs boys of the ability to make decisions about their own bodies, and choose their cultural and religious beliefs for themselves, the organisation said.

As the doctor Mark Tonelli has argued, distinct forms of knowledge can’t be judged by the same standards: what a patient prefers on the basis of personal experience; what a doctor thinks on the basis of clinical experience; and what clinical research has discovered — each of these is valuable in its own way. While scientists concur that randomized trials are ideal for evaluating the average effects of treatments, such precision isn’t necessary when the benefits are obvious or clear from other data.

Distrusting expertise makes it easy to confuse an absence of randomized evaluations with an absence of knowledge. And this leads to the false belief that knowledge of what works in social policy, education or fighting terrorism can come only from randomized evaluations. But by that logic (as a spoof scientific article claimed), we don’t know if parachutes really work because we have no randomized controlled trials of them.

Experiments, of course, are invaluable and have, in the past, shown the consensus opinion of experts to be wrong. But those who fetishize this methodology, as the flossing example shows, can also impair progress toward the truth. A strong demand for evidence is a good thing. But nurturing a more nuanced view of expertise should be part of that demand.

Few things are harder to study than human language. The brains of living humans can only be studied indirectly, and language, unlike vision, has no analogue in the animal world. Vision scientists can study sight in monkeys using techniques like single-neuron recording. But monkeys don’t talk. However, in an article published today in Nature, a group of researchers, including myself, detail a discovery in birdsong that may help lead to a revised understanding of an important aspect of human language development. Almost five years ago, I sent a piece of fan mail to Ofer Tchernichovski, who had just published an article showing that, in just three or four generations, songbirds raised in isolation often developed songs typical of their species. He invited me to visit his lab, a cramped space stuffed with several hundred birds residing in souped-up climate-controlled refrigerators. Dina Lipkind, at the time Tchernichovski’s post-doctoral student, explained a method she had developed for teaching zebra finches two songs. (Ordinarily, a zebra finch learns only one song in its lifetime.) She had discovered that by switching the song of a tutor bird at precisely the right moment, a juvenile bird could learn a second, new song after it had mastered the first one. Thinking about bilingualism and some puzzles I had encountered in my own lab, I suggested that Lipkind’s method could be useful in casting light on the question of how a creature—any creature—learns to put linguistic elements together.

For most of the past century, drugs approved and released to market have been tested only on male patients, leading to improper dosing and unacceptable side effects for women. The important physiological differences between men and women have only recently been taken into consideration in medical research. Emergency doctor Alyson McGregor studies these differences, and in this fascinating talk she discusses the history behind how the male model became our framework for medical research and how understanding differences between men and women can lead to more effective treatments for both sexes

A victim of childhood sex abuse was allowed to end her life under Dutch euthanasia laws after doctors and psychiatrists concluded that the woman's post-traumatic stress disorder and physical health were incurable. The death of the Dutch woman in her 20s has fuelled the ongoing debate on the ethics of euthanasia in Britain, with some MPs arguing that allowing a victim of sex abuse to die is equivalent to punishing the victim.

hortly before the dreadful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, I happened to be reading part of “The Second Machine Age,” a book by two academics at M.I.T., Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, about the coming automation of many professions previously thought of as impervious to technological change, such as those of drivers, doctors, market researchers, and soldiers. With the advances being made in robotics, data analysis, and artificial intelligence, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, we are on the cusp of a third industrial revolution.