Margaret McCartney: Why less confidence may be a good thing

Margaret McCartney: Why less confidence may be a good thing.

In any of the exams I’ve ever sat I’ve never been asked, “What don’t we know?” Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is in the news. The papers say that GPs aren’t prescribing it enough. 2 Further, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence has said that its new advice on menopause is “to help GPs and other healthcare professionals to be more confident in prescribing HRT and women more c...

Margaret McCartney: Why GPs are stressed.

7. Your patients have an average of three issues to discuss, and you’re keen to talk about the ongoing need for drugs, aims of care, and informed choices. You also have—in 10 minutes or so—to consider targets for smoking cessation, advance care planning, flu vaccinations, and polypharmacy reviews. You’re meant to discuss bowel screening, give opportunistic advice on exercise, and raise the prob...

Margaret McCartney: An economist explains why healthcare can't be treated as a market.

Kenneth Arrow died in February 2017 in California, aged 95. The most important economist you’ve probably never heard of, he was the youngest economist to win a Nobel prize and is widely lauded as “one of the most brilliant economic minds of the 20th century.” Searching for traces of how healthcare has been organised—or not—in the UK, I read his seminal 1963 paper, Uncertainty and the Welfare Ec...

Why Even Good Defenses May be Bad

Margaret McCartney: Bad language.

Whether it’s related to remnants of paternalism or to the universal rise of the public relations industry, healthcare is littered with terminology that inadvertently or otherwise misleads, by concealing or distorting crucial information. From lazy language to deliberate doublespeak, some of my most loathed examples are below. Don’t we need a clear-out of this bad language? Words that mask auste...