Helen Jaques

A 62-year-old cancer survivor was recently temporarily denied entry into the US because the treatment he had been receiving had wiped out his fingerprints. The patient, Mr S, had been taking the chemotherapy drug capecitabine for three years to prevent recurrence of his nasopharyngeal cancer following successful treatment of the disease with another chemotherapy regimen. [...]

Are smokers more likely to be obese? Is stroke more common in people with hypertension?  Are old people more likely to have diabetes than young people? The prospect of trawling through the scientific literature to get the answers to these questions isn’t terribly appealing – reams of tables and risk ratios aren’t helpful if you [...]

I thought it was finally about time I wrote a post about the fantastic Street Anatomy blog.  Billing itself as ‘obsessively covering the use of human anatomy in medicine, art and design’, the site highlights tons of interesting uses of human anatomy in everything from fashion to advertising. Although a lot of the art the [...]

The BMJ has just published an interesting paper on the factors that determine whether family agree to donate the organs of a brain dead relative. According to the meta-analysis by researchers at the University of Oxford, careful timing and having a transplant coordinator make the request are key factors in whether relatives consent to organ [...]