The National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles is a deep look into the sex lives of us brits - and has been running now for 30 years, giving us some longitudinal data about the way in which those sex lives have changed. The latest paper to be published, based on that data, looks at the frequency of sex - how often different groups are...

Looking after a young child is hard enough, but when that child has learning difficulties and displays challenging behaviour - the burden on parents can be extreme. That behaviour may prompt a visit to the doctor, and in this podcast we’re talking about how parents can be supported in that - what services are available. We’ll also be discussing...

Stroke mortality rates have been declining in almost every country, and that reduction could result from a decline in disease occurrence or a decline in case fatality, or both. Broadly - is that decline down to better treatment or better prevention. Olena Seminog, a researcher, and and Mike Rayner, professor of population health, both from the...

Helen Macdonald and Carl Heneghan are back again talking about what's happened in the world of evidence this month. (1.05) Carl rants about bacon causing cancer (7.10) Helen talks about prostate cancer, and we hear from the author of the research paper which won Research Paper Of The Year at the BMJ awards. We also cover disease definition and...

We’ve been banging the drum about transparency of payment to doctors for years - we’ve even put a moratorium on financial conflicts of interest in the authors of any of our education articles. Not because we think that all doctors who receive money from industry are being influenced to push their agenda - but because we have no way of telling when...

The NHS is about caring for people, free at the point of care, creating a safety net which catches the most vulnerable. Tech has been defined by the facebook maxim "move fast, break things" - looking to disrupt a sector, get investment and move on.  We want to be able to harness the potential utility of digital tech in the NHS - but how can those...

It's What Matters To You day - #wmty - and in this podcast Anya de Iongh, The BMJ's patient editor, and Joe Fraser, author of Joe's Diabetes who works at NHS England on personalised care, get together to discuss what personalised care actually means, how it changes the ways in which patients and health professionals interact, and how it can be...

As Syria enters its ninth year of conflict, doctors are struggling to provide health care to a badly damaged country. While dealing with medicine shortages, mass casualties and everything that comes with working in a warzone, healthcare facilities and their staff are also facing an unprecedented number of targeted and often repeated attacks....

Nicole Stott is an engineer, aquanaut and one of the 220 astronauts to have lived and worked on the International Space Station. In a confined space, under huge pressure, with no way out, it's important that teams maintain healthy dynamics, and individuals can manage their stress adequately, and in this podcast Nicole explains a little about...

WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros recently said “Since it came into force 13 years ago, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control remains one of the world’s most powerful tools for promoting public health,”. But is it? That’s what a to studies just published on bmj.com try and investigate - one of which pulls together all the data we have on...

This week on the podcast, (2.02) a listener asks, when we suggest something to stop, should we suggest an alternative instead? (8.24) Helen tells us to stop putting people on treatment for subclinical hypothyroidism, but what does that mean for people who are already receiving thyroxine? (20.55) Carl has a black box warning about z drugs, and...

Margaret Heffernan has thought a lot about whistleblowing, and why companies don't respond well to it. She wrote the "Book Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril". In this podcast she talks about how culture, and groupthink, leads to a culture where whistleblowers are ignored, and why the NHS needs to change the way it treats...

This month we have some more feedback from our listeners (2.20) Carl says it's time to start smoking cessation (or stop the reduction in funding for smoking reduction) (11.40) and marvels at how pretty Richard Doll's seminal smoking paper is. It's gloves off for infection control (22.20) Andrew George, a non-executive director of the Health...

Fertility awareness based methods of contraception are increasingly being used for pregnancy prevention. In the US, the proportion of contraceptive users who choose such methods has grown from 1% in 2008 to approximately 3% in 2014.  Relative to other methods of pregnancy prevention, however, substantial misinformation exists around fertility...

Cochrane Austria have been asking the public what they'd like to know about health. Not whether the latest drug is more efficacious, but whether glacier stone power cures hangovers. Gerald Gartlehner, director of the Cochrane Austria Centre joins us to explain what they do, and how their evidence has been received. Read more about the project...

Cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome is a relatively newly recognised condition - but, according to one study, can account for up to 6% of patients presenting to emergency departments. The causal mechanism is as yet unclear - but currently the only known way to prevent the syndrome is for the patient to stop their cannabis use. Yaniv Chocron, chief...

At EBM live recently, we ran a workshop with researchers, patients and clinicians to talk about patient rights in research - should patients be setting the full research agenda? Should they be full participants and authors? Helen Macdonald, BMJ’s UK research editor and co-host of our talk evidence podcast sat down to Paul Wicks, researcher and...

The UK has just seen it’s hottest July on record, including the highest ever temperature recorded. With climate change in the forefront of our minds, it’s timely that we have two editorials on the sustainability and health. Michael Depledge, emeritus professor of environment and human health at University of Exeter Medical School, and author of...

Burnout is a problem in healthcare - it’s a problem for individuals, those who experience it and decide to leave a career they formerly loved, but it’s also a problem for our healthcare system. Burnout is associated with an increase in medical errors, and poor quality of care. Fundamentally it’s a patient safety issue. But, unlike other patient...

In 2001, Gottfried Hirnschall joined the WHO to work on the global response to HIV/AIDs, 18 years later he just retired as the director of WHO’s department for HIV and Hepatitis. The intervening period, almost half the time we’ve been aware of the disease the fight against the infection has been characterised by scientific breakthroughs, and...

We know that exercise is good for you - the WHO recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic physical activity each week. That recommendation is built on evidence that relied on self reporting that may underestimate the amount of lower intensity exercise those people were doing, and at the...

We heard a few podcasts ago about burnout - what it is, and why it should be thought of as a systems issue. Now a project in the Netherlands is trying to investigate who it is that is particularly at risk of burnout, and hopes to test whether individually tailored coaching and counselling can help those who are experiencing the symptoms change the...

Brexit. Who knows what’s going to happen in the next few weeks, months, years - the uncertainty is high. In the face of that, you’d hope that the government was doing all it could to plan for any eventuality - let alone for a massive, country altering one like suddenly crashing out without a deal - but Martin McKee, professor of public health at...

In the UK, for just over a year, we've been paying the "Soft Drinks Industry Levy" - a tax on sugary beverages intended to reduce our consumption of free sugars. That was based on taxes that had happened in other countries, however, in the UK high sugar snacks, such as confectionery, cakes, and biscuits make a greater contribution to intakes of...

This week the Trump administration has banned the sale of flavoured vapes in the USA. The reason for that is the sudden rash of cases of pulmonary disease, including deaths, linked to vaping. The mechanism by which vaping may be causing damage to the lungs is as yet unclear, and our understanding is hampered by the heterogeneous nature of the...

This week we saw the release of the much awaited Yellowhammer documents from the government, documents which outline some of the risks involved with Britain’s sudden departure from the EU. The documents themselves outline that there are risks to the supply of medicines - but do not set out the detail of how those risks have been mitigated, and...

Around half of trials that supported new cancer drug approvals in Europe between 2014 and 2016 were judged to be at high risk of bias, in a new study. Huseyin Naci,assistant professor of health policy a the London School of Economics joins us to talk about why potential bias may mean potential exaggeration of treatment effects, and could be...

Helen talks about new research on prevention of recurrent VTE - and Carl things the evidence goes further, and we can extend prophylaxis for a year. 13.00 - CRP testing for antibiotic prescription in COPD exacerbations, should we start doing it in primary care settings - and what will that mean. We also hear from Chris Butler, one of the...

The BMJ in partnership with The Harvard Global Health Institute has launched a collection of articles exploring how to achieve effective universal health coverage (UHC). The collection highlights the importance of quality in UHC, potential finance models, how best to incentivise stakeholders, and some of the barriers to true UHC. One of those...

On the 1st of May, 2018 Scotland was the first country to try a new way of reducing alcohol consumption in its population. It introduced a minimum unit prices for alcohol. Now new research just published on BMJ.com is looking at the effect of that price increase - and measuring how well it has achieved the goal of reducing drinking in...

Talk Evidence is back, with your monthly take on the world of EBM with Duncan Jarvies and GPs Carl Heneghan (also director for the Centre of Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford) and Helen Macdonald (also The BMJ's UK research Editor). This month Carl talks about evidence that restricting your diet might improve health at a...

In quality improvement, measurement is seen as a key driver of change - how well do you know you’re doing, if you can’t actually measure it. So, when something changes in the NHS (say a new guideline) how can you tell how quickly that’s filtering down to the front line. Ben goldacre, from the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences...

Blockchain is the digital technology that underpins cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, and has been proposed as the digital panacea of our times. But Leeza Osipenko, from the London School of Economics, has thought about how it could actually be used in clinical trials, and what else would need to change in our regulatory environment to make that...

Direct-to-consumer genetic tests are sold online and in shops as a way to “find out what your DNA says". They insights into ancestry or disease risks; others claim to provide information on personality, athletic ability, and child talent. However, interpretation of genetic data is complex and context dependent, and DTC genetic tests may produce...

Statins are now the most commonly used drug in the UK and one of the most commonly used medicines in the world, but debate remains about their use for primary prevention for people without cardiovascular disease. Paula Byrne from the National University of Ireland Galway, joins us to talk about the evidence of benefit for low risk individuals,...

This week, Ray ventures into the notoriously complex field of nutrition with special guest, Professor Marion Nestle. Named by Forbes as one of the world's most powerful foodies, Marion’s stellar career spans five decades of research, teaching, advocacy work and the publication of countless prize-winning books.

A TB infection can take two forms, active and latent. Active disease is transmissible, and causes the damage to the lungs which makes TB one of the biggest killers in the world. In the latent form, the bacteria Mycobacterium tuberculosis is quiescent and can stay that way for years until it becomes active and causes those clinical signs. Testing...

There has been a lot of noise made about calorie counts on labels - the idea being it’s one of those things that might nudge people to make healthier choices. So much so that in 2018, in the USA, it became mandatory for food chains with more than 20 outlets to label the calories in their food. But the effectiveness of that is hard to gauge -...

The NHS Practitioner Health Programme - once only for doctors in London, now it’s being rolled out across the NHS to provide the largest, publicly funded, comprehensive physician health service, in the world. However, while helping the individual is essential, systemic change needs to be made to support doctors in our healthcare system. Clare...

Giving staff the confidence to speak out is important in healthcare - It's a key aspect of the WHO patient safety checklist, decreasing incidence of medical error, but it's also important to stop incidents of harassment and abuse which undermine staff and increase burnout. Creating that culture is a difficult task, but two hospitals in the...

Talk Evidence is back, with your monthly take on the world of EBM with Duncan Jarvies and GPs Carl Heneghan (also director for the Centre of Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford) and Helen Macdonald (also The BMJ's UK research Editor). This month Helen talks about the messy business of colon cancer screening - which modality is...

Reverse innovation may sound like some attempt to return to the dark ages - but it has a specific meaning, especially when it comes to med-tech. It’s about where we look for innovation - and overturning our preconceived ideas of where new ideas come from. Mark Skopec, and Matthew Harris - both from Imperial College London are two of the authors...

A UK general election has been called - polling day is on the 12th of December, and from now until then we’re going to be bringing you a weekly election-themed podcast. We want to help you make sense of the promises and pledges, claims and counter-claims, that are being made around healthcare and the NHS out on the campaign trail. This week has...

A UK general election has been called - polling day is on the 12th of December, and from now until then we’re going to be bringing you a weekly election-themed podcast. We want to help you make sense of the promises and pledges, claims and counter-claims, that are being made around healthcare and the NHS out on the campaign trail. This week...

A UK general election has been called - polling day is on the 12th of December, and from now until then we’re going to be bringing you a weekly election-themed podcast. We want to help you make sense of the promises and pledges, claims and counter-claims, that are being made around healthcare and the NHS out on the campaign trail. This week...

UK general election has been called - polling day is on the 12th of December, and from now until then we’re going to be bringing you a weekly election-themed podcast. We want to help you make sense of the promises and pledges, claims and counter-claims, that are being made around healthcare and the NHS out on the campaign trail. This week we're...

The UK general election is happening this week, and you’ve probably made your mind up which MP you’re voting for already - and maybe the NHS has influenced that decision. This year has seen an increase in the number of doctors running for parliament, and in this podcast we find out what motivates doctors to step away from clinical practice, and...

In this special edition of talk evidence, Helen Macdonald and Carl Henneghan talk about creating an evidence base from harms. We hear from a member of the pubic who experienced harm from a drug, and now advises the FDA. A former regulator who explains why reporting harms is so important. And finally, an investigative journalist who explains what...

We’re back for the December Talk Evidence, and this month we’re being very digital Firstly,(1.20) Helen tells us about arthritic fingers - should we be using prednisolone for treatment when people have painful osteoarthritis of the hand Then (13.30) Carl gets us all to check our fingers for clubbing, and we find out how useful it is as a test...

As editors, we feel like we’re spending a lot of time taking the superlatives out from articles - amazing, novel, important… But new research on BMJ.com suggests that we might not be doing that great a job, and that for some reason, papers authored by men tend to have more of them - because men put more in, or maybe a bias against woman writing in...