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Showing posts with label ageing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ageing. Show all posts

Thursday, 30 August 2018

Centenary for the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine: a conference, awards for medical writing and new associate memberships


The Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine is organising its Centenary Conference, which is to be held on 7th December at the Royal College of Physicians in London. The December 2018 FPM Centenary Conference will include a poster awards session showcasing national and international studies aimed at Transforming Health. The Conference will be eligible for 6 CPD points.



Talks by expert clinicians will provide updates on best medical practice in diagnostics and new therapies with regard to common serious clinical disorders, ranging from lung disease to cancer, stroke and cardiac disease, liver problems  and other serious clinical disease. Speakers will also discuss management of new clinical challenges, including antibiotic resistance, the impact of ageing on co-morbidity, and other important current challenges for clinical practice.

Speakers and discussants will include Professor Christopher Byrne, University of Southampton on Identifying and managing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, Professor Peter Barnes FRS, National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College, with updates on treating asthma and COPD, Professor Tom Kirkwood CBE, University of Newcastle, on ageing, health and multi-morbidity, Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed, University of Liverpool NHS Chair of Pharmacogenetics on applying personalised medicine in clinical practice. Dr Tim Nicholson, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s Medical School, on functional neurological disorders and Professor Anthony Rudd, Guy’s and St Thomas’s, National Clinical Director for Stroke with NHS England, on reducing the severity of stroke. FPM President Donald Singer FPM journal editors Bernard Cheung (Postgraduate Medical Journal) and Ken Redekop (Health Policy and Technology) will give a brief overview of the FPM and its activities.
 
The FPM is a British non-profit organisation founded in the autumn of 1919 as a merger of the Fellowship of Medicine and the Postgraduate Medical Association, with Sir William Osler as its first president. Its initial aims were the development of educational programmes in all branches of postgraduate medicine. The FPM now organises clinical and research meetings and publishes two journals. The FPM has since 1925 published the international journal, the Postgraduate Medical Journal. In 2012 the Fellowship launched a new international journal, Health Policy and Technology, published on the Fellowship’s behalf by Elsevier.
The Postgraduate Medical Journal publishes topical reviews, commentaries and original papers on themes across the medical spectrum. It provides continuing professional development for all doctors, from those in training, to their teachers, and active clinicians, by publishing papers on a wide range of topics relevant to clinical practice. Papers published in PMJ describe current practice and new developments in all branches of medicine; describe relevance and impact of translational research on clinical practice; provide background relevant to examinations; and papers on medical education and medical education research.
The FPMs peer-reviewed journal Health Policy and Technology focuses on past, present and future health policy and the role of technology in clinical and non-clinical national and international health environments. It aims to foster closer links with policy-makers, health professionals, health technology providers, patient groups and academia.
Further ways in which the FPM will mark its anniversary  include introducing a new Associate Member category for the FPM and launch of new international awards for excellence in medical writing by doctors in social media.

The new Associate Member category for the FPM will be open to doctors in established postgraduate training posts, to senior doctors in established posts and to other experts who are interested in postgraduate medicine. Authors and reviewers for the official journals of the FPM – Health Policy and Technology and the Postgraduate Medical journal will be entitled to a reduced membership fee for their first year as Associate Members. Benefits for Associate Members will include a reduction in the registration fee for attending FPM educational events and a reduced annual electronic subscription to the PMJ or HPT journal. See the FPM website for more details about how to apply to become anAssociate Member of the FPM .

The FPM will also launch international awards to recognise best social media writing on medical themes.  To be eligible, articles should be aimed at increasing understanding by the public and health professionals of important health-related issues. Articles published online since 1st January 2018 will be eligible.

Up to 5 awards of £100 each will initially be made – one for each major geographical region: the Americas, Europe, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Australia/New Zealand.  The judging panel will include health professionals from the FPM and from the Editorial Boards of HPT and the PMJ and experts in social media. Winning writers will have the opportunity to publish their award-winning article in HPT or the PMJ, depending on the theme of the article.




Saturday, 7 July 2012

Microcirculation and the 2012 UK-US international Conference

@HealthMed The MicroCirc2012 conference at Keble College Oxford, 4-6 July, was co-organized by the British Microcirculation Society and the US Microcirculatory Society

Why study the microcirculation? The microvessels - small arteries, capillaries and small venules - play a vital role in providing nutrition to and removing waste products from vital organs. Microvessels are also critical for healthy maintenance of blood pressure. 

D Singer and PhD student H Saedon at MicroCirc2012
And in a wide range of diseases, a spectrum of inflammatory factors, acting on and/or derived from the microcirculation, contribute to disease causation and severity, and provide both biomarkers and targets for prevention and treatment of serious diseases from cardiovascular syndromes to diabetes, inflammatory disease and cancer, and from early abnormalities in the fetal circulation to diseases of ageing. 

A series of delegates posts are now appearing from the MicroCirc2012 conference, from a wide range of specialists, from molecular biologists to imagers, and from 1st year PhD students to senior academics. 

See more about the microcirculation and the 2012 Conference in reflections of principal organizer Professor Chris Garland, posts from delegates and in video interviews with Professor Giovanni Mann from King's College London, and Professor Steven Segal from Columbus, Missouri, USA.

Thursday, 29 December 2011

Favourite poems on a medical theme from entries in the 2012 Hippocrates initiative poll

@HealthMed To mark the launch of the 2012 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, the organisers invited nominations of favourite poems with a medical theme. The top 5 favourites were:

Dylan Thomas – Do not go gentle into that good night
William Butler Yeats - When you are old
Dannie Abse - The Pathology of Colours
Jo Shapcott - Of mutability
Stevie Smith - Not waving but drowning


You can see examples of comments received and find links to many of the submitted favourite poems on the earlier blog on favourite poems on a medical theme.

'Medical' was to be interpreted in the broadest sense, with only one nomination to be made by any one person. Nominations were to be for poems written by a poet from anywhere in the world and in any language. The poem were to be contemporary or from any historical period.

The Hippocrates Prize of £5000 for the winning poem is one of the highest value awards in the world for an unpublished poem in English on a medical theme.

Entries for the 2012 Awards are now closed. 2012 Hippocrates Prize judges include New York poet and critic Marilyn Hacker and medical researcher Professor Rod Flower, Fellow of the Royal Society. Awards will be presented on Saturday 12th May 2012 at the 3rd International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine, to be held at the Wellcome Collection in London.

Wednesday, 28 December 2011

Stopping smoking - why and how?

@HealthMed UK No Smoking day is 14th March 2012: some helpful Q & As.

But no need to wait until then to stop ...

Why bother?
Apart from the obvious: cost, smell on clothes and breathe, and taste impairment and eventual loss of taste? Smoking is the single most preventable cause of disease and death.
For primary prevention, smokers and their advisers need to be well informed of the personally relevant risks of smoking and benefits of stopping. For younger smokers, risks include premature ageing of the skin, increased risk of impotence, risk to the developing baby in the womb, and increased risk in offspring of serious chest disorders. For older smokers, the more pressing risks are increased risk of cancer of the lung, mouth, throat, bladder and many other types of cancer; premature ageing of arteries, leading to heart attacks, strokes and other serious disorders of the heart, brain and circulation; and serious lung disorders including chronic obstructive lung disease and emphysema. And in the long-term, it is estimated that around half the smokers who do not give up smoking will die from one or more of these and other smoking-related diseases.
For non-smokers and confirmed ex-smokers the question has to be - why bother? Give up now to improve your medical and financial health.
For current smokers, the challenges are to beat the psychological, physical (nicotine), and social addiction, including resisting peer pressure. Useful ammunition to help smokers to stop smoking includes being aware that giving up tobacco can help you live longer, and that the risk of getting cancer is less with each year you stay smoke-free.

Help from friends and family
Now is a good time for smokers to be ready to think about stopping, to think about stopping and to prepare to stop. That might mean telling friends and family you are serious about stopping, and to seek whatever help may work - e.g. from pharmacist, family doctor or nurse, or other health professional, and smoking cessation support groups. The US National Institutes of Health recommend:
- 'Try not to view past attempts to quit as failures. See them as learning experiences'.
- 'Make a plan about what you will do instead of smoking at those times when you are most likely to smoke'.
- 'Satisfy your oral habits in other ways'. 
Their website provides excellent advice on other ways to help to smoking including how to plan stopping, setting a stop date, and having alternative strategies for times you associate with smoking. 

Stop smoking apps
There are now several free or low cost 'apps' which may be helpful. For example, the UK NHS mobile 'Quit smoking' app provides links for UK smokers to the NHS Stop Smoking helpline and other UK NHS Stop Smoking Servces. 'My Last Cigarette' - MLC provides a dashboard with daily changing reminders of dangers of smoking, and updating estimates of effects of stopping smoking on risk of heart disease, lung disease and other serious medical problems, money saved since stopping, life expectancy gained, and number of smoking-related deaths since the time a smoker has stopped.

Benefits of training health professionals and funding nicotine replacement treament
A controlled study in Germany reported benefits from extra training for family doctors, and further benefit when costs of anti-smoking treatment are subsidized. However, for these over 10/day cigarette smokers, although very helpful for those who succeed in stopping, outcomes were very modest: by
12 months after intervention, 1 in 30 had stopped with usual support, 1 in 10 when their family doctor had received training and been paid a €130 incentive for each patient who stopped, and 1 in 7 where patients also had costs of treatments subsidized.

Unexpectedly rapid benefits from banning smoking in public places
More recent encouragement for anti-smoking campaigns has come from evidence of the rapid time to benefit from stopping: around 1 in 5 fewer heart attacks within 1 year of stopping in countries which have moved to ban smoking in public places. That provides clear evidence to smokers that their cardiovascular risk reduces very rapidly after stopping smoking.

Avoiding temptation to smoke
A recent review of a large number of trials of ways to help people to stop smoking concluded that the evidence for success was 'strongest for interventions focusing on identifying and resolving tempting situations'.

If you are a smoker you quit, what worked for you? Please add a comment ...

© DRJ Singer

Friday, 22 July 2011

Favourite poems on a medical theme - 2012

To mark the launch of the 2012 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, the organisers invited nominations of favourite poems with a medical theme.

'Medical' were to be interpreted in the broadest sense. Anyone in the world may nominate a poem. Nominations were to be for poems written by a poet from anywhere in the world and in any language. The poem could be contemporary or from any historical period.

When  a favourite poem on a medical theme was nominated, there was the option to add a comment about why you liked the poem and the poet.

Here are some examples of comments received:
On 'Patience Strong' by UA Fanthorpe: 'Here writes a poet about a poet, and about a lesson learnt from a gentleman living with epilepsy. Ursula Fanthorpe was a champion of the underdog, this poem is an epitome of both insight and humility and offers lessons to us all'.
On 'Hospital Waiting Room' by WH Davies: 'I love this poem. It was written in the early days of the NHS and is a fascinating look at class in British society from someone who put himself outside of it.'
On "The Pathology of Colours' by Dannie Abse: 'Abse is a master at combining the every day earthy detail with the mystical. He brings the world of medicine into the world of poetry in a way that speaks to all of us'.
On 'Seven Ages of Man' by William Shakespeare: 'A cameo of the whole of life from birth to frail, unknowing 'second childishness'.'
The top 10 entries will be included in an international Anthology on Poetry and Medicine to be published in 2012 by the Hippocrates Press.   

Submissions  
      
Dannie Abse - Song for Pythagoras and  The Pathology of Colours  
Joë Bousquet
- La pupille (… the half-opening of the swallow’s nest …) La Connaissance du Soir, 1947, Gallimard
Simon Bridges - Tomorrows  
Constantine Petrou Cavafy - The death of the Emperor Tacitus
Blaise Cendrars - Le ventre de ma mère [My mother's womb]
John Donne - No man is an island
   UA Fanthorpe - Patience Strong
Thom Gunn - In time of plague
Oliver Wendell Holmes - The morning visit
 
Jane Hirshfield - What binds us 
Victor Hugo -  Les feuilles d'Automne -  Ce siècle avait deux ans! [Autumn leaves - This century was 2 years old]
John Keats - Ode to a nightingale [... where palsy shakes a few, sad, last, gray hairs...]
Philip Larkin - Ambulances
Federico Garcia Lorca - El Lagarto Viejo (The Old Lizard
Stéphane Mallarmé: Le tombeau de Charles Baudelaire
Katherine Mansfield - A day in bed
Roger McGough - Wisdom Teeth Czeslaw Milosz - So little
John Milton – On his blindness
 and  Lycidas
Merrill Moore - The noise that time makes    
Thomas Nashe - A litany in time of plague      
Pablo Neruda - Oda ala tristeza (Ode to sadness)

 
Sylvia Plath - The companionable ills
 
Anna Piutti – Current
 
Peter Porter - A Chagall postcard
Peter Reading - C
Adrienne Rich – Power
 
William Shakespeare - Seven ages of man   [As you like it 2.3.139-167] 

Jo Shapcott - Hairless and  Of mutability
Stevie Smith - Not waving but drowning
Robert Louis Stevenson - The land of counterpane
Heather Wastie - Ping pong neonatal ICU    
William Carlos Williams - The last words of my English grandmother     
William Butler Yeats - When you are old  

The Hippocrates Prize is one of the highest value awards in the world for an unpublished poem in English on a medical theme. 


2012 Awards were presented by the judges at the close of the 3rd International Symposium on Poetry and Medicine on Saturday 12th May at the Wellcome Collection Rooms.