Published 8 July 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a674
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a674

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Medicine’s living death

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

On Sunday afternoons we shuffle around IKEA’s one way system with the identikit couples. Children whine and occasionally escape to bounce on a sofa. Eventually we find the various flat packs we need for the wardrobe. Then more queuing and the spontaneous purchase of lavender aromatherapy candles. At home we pore over the instructions and find that we need, seemingly, only a small Allen key. Six angry hours later we beat the unrecognisable, pulverised plywood ball with a hammer, and decide that the only sensible option left is to burn the remains of the wardrobe in the back garden along with the aromatherapy candle. That’s the problem with instructions—it depends who writes them and who reads them.

Medicine is full of written instruction. In the early 1990s I was grateful of some evidence pointers. Cochrane and the evidence based medicine teams did a fantastic job bringing order into the entirely . . . [Full text of this article]

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Oh dear!

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