The Royal College of Psychiatrists consultation on abortion and mental health – let’s put this into perspective
Some people have expressed concern about an article published in the Daily Telegraph yesterday which…
Live blog: new mood of militancy among nurses
CMF's Head of Allied Professions, Steve Fouch (pictured below), is at the RCN Congress in Liverpool.…
Dorries and Field are not pro-life but their abortion amendments are a small step in the right direction
If you type ‘abortion’ into Google News these days you will find that most of the reports thrown…
Nan Maitland’s assisted suicide demonstrates the incremental extension that will follow any change in the law
According to the Sunday Times, an 84 year old British woman committed suicide at a Swiss facility last…
Missing midwives costs mothers’ lives
On 1 April 2011 Save the Children launched a campaign to find the missing midwives.
Save the Children’s…
Welsh teenagers to get morning-after pill over the counter – a plan that’ll backfire
I recently blogged on the fact, surprising to some, that morning-after pills don’t actually cut teen…
Pro-choice critics of the Dorries/Field amendments on abortion counselling are misrepresenting the medical facts
There has been considerable media interest in the fact that two MPs (Nadine Dorries and Frank Field)…
Putting the last first – medical mission on the front line
‘Every child should be able to access healthcare regardless of who they are and where they are born.’This…
Chinese baby girl cull backed by Britain – gender imbalance in China with British funding
Sex-selective abortions have led to severe gender imbalance in China, India and South Korea according…
‘23 week babies – the price of life’ on the BBC – a review
The recent BBC documentary ‘23 week babies – the price of life’ represented 6 months of filming…
New study shows that UK doctors consistently oppose euthanasia and assisted suicide
A new study suggests that doctors in the UK have opposed both euthanasia and assisted consistently over…
As UK Christian doctors, are we as radically different from non-Christians in our attitudes and actions as our Indian colleagues are?
I paid for my trip to India in stress and sweat. Not out there, but in the mad rush to clear my desk before departure, and in the bulging in-tray and looming deadlines on return. However the blessing I received in ten autumn days, through being involved in the EMFI national conference and in visiting […]
Current sexual health strategies are based on three false presuppositions
Can we imagine training young people how to drive without also instructing them in the laws of the road? Or teaching trainee surgeons how to remove an appendix without also training them in the proper indications for the procedure? And yet when it comes to sex, an activity which, like driving and surgery, carries high […]
Developing Health Course – Back home
Back in the office at Johnson House and life is returning to normal after a busy, sunny, exhausting, happy fortnight at Oak Hill. Laura and I are surrounded by about 800 feedback forms from all the different sessions! The participants were very positive about the course – ‘I’ve come away inspired and excited…’ ‘The standard […]
Developing Health Course 2010 – part VI
Today I want to be an obstetrician. Last week it was an ophthalmologist and then a psychiatrist after the moving talks we heard about the needs and opportunities in those fields. Yesterday we heard Jacqui Hill speak about the plight of woman in Afghanistan which UNICEF describes as ‘one of the worst places in the […]
Developing Health Course 2010 – part V
Day 8 and it’s surgery. John Rennie and Colin Binks gave such an encouraging presentation that we all now feel we could do a laparotomy! We learnt some other useful skills too, including suturing (useful or the laparotomy of course) and taking skin grafts, practised on oranges so it’s fruit salad for lunch tomorrow. The […]
Developing Health Course 2010 – part IV
Back for week two of the course, refreshed by a weekend off. A few of our international visitors enjoyed a trip round some of the sights of London – Herve from Benin was amazed to see how the British dress outside Buckingham Palace… Monday was trauma and orthopaedics day and we had a star-studded cast […]
What will it take for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) actually to prosecute someone for assisted suicide?
The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Keir Starmer, whose job it is to prosecute people who break the law, announced last Friday that he did not consider it to be in the public interest to bring a case against former GP Michael Irwin (pictured), for assisting the suicide of pancreatic cancer sufferer Ray Cutkelvin in […]
How seriously should we take the recent report from the RCOG claiming that fetuses cannot feel pain until 24 weeks gestation? Not very!
‘A fisherman once told me that fish have neither sense nor sensation, but how he knew this he could not tell me’ (Bertrand Russell) In a House of Lords debate on abortion in November 2007, Lord Clarke, commented, ‘I do not know whether fish feel pain or not, but (Bertrand) Russell’s point was that we […]
Developing Health Course 2010 – part III
Today is community health day and I’m currently in the back of the lecture theatre watching Alex Duncan’s amazing video of life in the back of beyond in Central Asia. He lived there for 6 years with his family, setting up a primary health care programme. It was hard graft but through his work, child […]
Developing Health Course 2010 – part II
Two more full days of the course – mosquitoes, worms, and other hazardous parasites yesterday and HIV and palliative care today. There is a bit of time at the end of the day to enjoy that rare event, the English summer evening, and Albert from Malawi has played his first game of croquet – ‘Give […]
Developing Health Course 2010 – part I
It’s been a wonderful couple of days at the Developing Health Course with the combination of excellent medical teaching and spiritual inspiration which makes this course unique. My brain is hurting a little after whistling through the whole of paediatrics in a day yesterday, and the whole of general medicine in an afternoon today! There […]
The case of Howard Martin shows why we should not accept any law allowing ‘compassionate killing’
Dr Howard Martin, a now retired Co Durham MP, was struck off on Friday by the General Medical Council (GMC) for giving excessive morphine doses to 18 dying patients. He has since admitted, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that he deliberately hastened the deaths of patients in his care, some without their consent, […]